Another great development of Augustan sculpture is the free use of naturalistic floral designs. Etruscan and Roman art was always realistic, and never tolerated conventions when they could be eliminated. Roman architecture and art both abandoned at once the Greek use of formal conventional mouldings. The Ara Pacis and other monuments of the Augustan age first give us the beautiful rendering of purely realistic wreaths of flowers and fruit, which are the hall-marks of Roman altars and friezes. The Imperial art of Rome as it begins under Augustus is profoundly indebted to Greek art for almost all its types and its technical procedure. Doubtless the greater number of his artists and architects were Greeks. But they were working in the midst of a new culture and a new environment, and thus they unconsciously absorbed new traditions and new ideas, just as their predecessors had done in Pergamon and Alexandria. In Greece itself no further advance was possible. Artistic production was purely commercial, and all the sources of inspiration were closed. In Rome, where alone could be found a career for a creative artist, he had gradually to submit to the _genius loci_. The artificers of the empire must have long remained Greeks, and all Roman art bears the stamp of Hellenic origin, but at the same time Greek art is changed along the lines of pictorial illusion and pure realism in portraiture. It loses all touch with Greek idealism and serves to express Roman narrative history. Its gods, its myths, and its outlook are changed. It becomes Roman, just as Gothic art became national in each country which it invaded. We are left then with only one further question to discuss. What are the permanent elements of Hellenism in Roman art, and, after Roman art, in the art of the Renaissance and of modern times? What is the true character of Greek sculpture, and what has it bequeathed to all civilizations which have followed it? The question is a large one which cannot be easily solved in a few phrases. Greek sculpture is not to be hastily identified with what we call classicism in art and contrasted with romanticism and realism. Greek art is classic, if we mean by that term academic, only for a brief period of its decadence. During the fourth century and the Hellenistic age it displays all the phenomena of romantic and realistic art. In fact Greek art as a whole comprises every form of artistic expression, and exhibits wellnigh the whole of the possibilities that lie between the caveman and the aesthete. We do not, however, confuse the work of Donatello or of Rodin or of modern impressionists with Greek sculpture, and this clarity of distinction demands some examination. How can we distinguish Greek work from that of every other civilization?