After the preliminary conflicts between the successors of Alexander for the partition of the empire a number of new states arose, which are known to us usually as the kingdoms of the Diadochi or Successors. Of these the three most important were Macedonia, Syria, and Egypt, under the rule of Antigonids, Seleucids, and Ptolemies respectively. Of smaller importance, but quite independent and self-sustaining, were Bithynia, Pergamon, and the island republic of Rhodes, the latter being the only one which maintained its Hellenic democratic institutions. The attitude of these states towards art differs remarkably. Macedonia remained always a military monarchy in a condition of almost constant frontier war, and was wholly uninterested in artistic developments. Syria seems from the first to have fallen under Semitic and oriental influences, which destroyed its appreciation of the purer forms of Greek art. Bithynia, Pontos, and Cappadocia were barbarian rather than Greek. As a result, we find that the old artistic traditions are maintained prominently in three only of the new states: Pergamon, the home of the very Hellenic race of the Attalids; Rhodes, whose pure Hellenic descent was untouched; and Alexandria, which became practically a Greek town in the midst of an older Egyptian civilization. The kingdom of Pergamon included the area of the old Ionian cities, and inherited, therefore, an artistic tradition as old as its own existence. It is no matter for surprise that its art-loving monarchs should have founded a great library and a great school of sculpture in open rivalry with the richer resources of Ptolemaic Alexandria. The art of Pergamon is well known to us from the magnificent groups and figures of the Gallic dedications of Attalos I after his victories about 240 B.C., and from the marvellous frieze of the altar excavated _in situ_ by the Germans, which belongs to the period of Eumenes II and the early second century. But before we come to these later developments of Pergamene art, it is important that we should discover the earliest tendencies and predilections of the Pergamene court in the first half of the third century. We are told[2] that the most remarkable work of Kephisodotos, the son of Praxiteles, was his ‘symplegma’ at Pergamon--probably an erotic group--which was noteworthy for its extraordinarily naturalistic rendering of the pressure of the fingers into the flesh. Such erotic groups of nymphs and satyrs or hermaphrodites exist in our museums, and are ultimately derived from this type of statue. Actual discoveries at Pergamon support this conception of early third-century Pergamene art. The well-known Hermaphrodite in Constantinople (Fig. 1) and a beautiful girl’s head in Berlin[3] show the extreme delicacy in the rendering of flesh and the fondness for a sensual body treatment which we might expect from an Ionian version of the schools of Scopas and Praxiteles. The existence