Thus terminated, 480 years from the building of Rome, the only native school of art in Italy; and that here sculpture had been cultivated with no ordinary ardour, is attested by the fact of the Romans having carried off from Volsinum alone no fewer than two thousand statues. Even for some time after the subjugation of the Etruscan republics, sculpture was practised; but it soon lost all national character. The Roman dominion embracing the circuit of Italy, the Tuscan freeman and the Greek colonist became alike its vassal; but their common masters fostered not the arts as native ornaments--as moral causes in their empire: they possessed merely sufficient knowledge to value the fruits of genius as the harvest of conquest. The same spirit actuated their subsequent conduct, when their victorious armies came in successive contact with the richer treasures of Sicily, and of Greece herself. Marcellus plundered Syracuse of her marble population, as a proof that he had subdued her living inhabitants; and, from a still more sordid motive, in which ignorance and avarice are disgustingly blended, Mummius first began the work of devastation in Greece. A picture of Bacchus, which the Corinthians, on account of its super-excellence, were anxious to regain from the soldiers, who were using it as a table, is said first to have excited his cupidity. From the vast sum offered, the Roman general conceived the picture contained gold, which he might perhaps discover when more at leisure; accordingly he delivered it to a common messenger, with this sage menace, that he was to carry it safely to Rome, under pain of being obliged to paint one equally good! Such was the state of early republican taste, quite in keeping with the national arts, sufficiently characterised by Tibullus, when he says: 'In paltry temple stood the wooden god.' Or by the opposition of Cato to the introduction of Greek statuary, on the plea, that its divine forms would expose to ridicule the rude fashioning of the Roman deities.