Again, the period of this decline extends through nearly two hundred years, from the dismemberment of the Macedonian empire, to the final reduction of Greece into a Roman province. This space of time, in regard to the eras of Sculpture, has been variously and too minutely divided. Each favorable turn of circumstances enabling the art to recover a little, has been exalted into an epoch. Into these details it needs not to enter. From the death of Praxiteles, or at least in the school of his own and the pupils of Lysippus, as Cephissodotus, son of the former, Tauriscus, Eubolas, Pamphilus, Polyceutas, Agasias, and others, it does not appear that original works of magnitude or beauty were produced. After this the labours of artists seem to have been confined to copies of the works of the older masters, and chiefly to making repetitions in marble of the ancient bronzes. To this period belong many of the antique marbles now remaining. Pliny, indeed, though not with strict correctness, considers that Sculpture lay dormant during one hundred and twenty years, from the 120th to the 150th Olympiad. The Achæan league, and the expiring efforts of Greece under the last of her heroes, Aratus and Philopæmen, inspired a degree of vigour into her intellectual exertions. Of these warriors, contemporary statues are noticed by Pausanius; and the latter is reported to have excelled in painting. But the Ætolian war broke for ever the ties of country, and the sacredness of national glory. Temples were therein first desecrated,--statues and paintings defaced in Greece, and by the hands of Greeks. If, during the same era, we direct our attention to the successors of Alexander in Egypt and Asia, we find letters cultivated in preference to art; or, where Sculpture is patronised, as at the courts of the Ptolemies and the Seleucidæ, the cultivation of a taste between Grecian and barbarian only hastened the progress of corruption. One bright interval yet arose in the parent seats of refinement, upon the declaration, by the Romans, of freedom to the states of Greece. Sculpture, for more than thirty years of apparent liberty at least, and of real repose, was exercised with considerable success by the masters, Antheus, Callistratus, Polycles Apollodorus, Pasiteles, and others, possessing considerable merit, though far below the genius of ancient times. This was the struggling gleam of the expiring taper--the farewell sweet of a sun about to set forever. The independence of Greece endured only by sufferance; the Achæan league was dissolved, and Corinth and its capitol levelled with the dust, to the sound of Roman trumpets--the knell of freedom and of the arts in Greece. CHAPTER V.