[Illustration: FIG. 5.—Bronze Portrait-statue of a Hellenistic Prince. Museo delle Terme, Rome.] Not only dead men, however, were heroized in this manner. It was not an uncommon practice in later Greece for living men, especially princes, to have their statues assimilated to types of gods and heroes, a practice which was very common in imperial Rome.[625] Thus many of the Hellenistic princes were pleased to have their statues assimilated to those of the heroic Alexander. One of the best examples of this process is furnished by the original bronze portrait statue of such a prince, which was unearthed in Rome in 1884 and is now in the Museo delle Terme there (Fig. 5).[626] It has been identified as the portrait of several kings of Macedon and elsewhere,[627] but the similarity of the head of the statue to heads portrayed on Macedonian coins is only superficial.[628] All that we can say is that this beautiful work, representing the prince in the heroic guise of a nude athlete of about thirty years, belongs to the third century B. C., the epoch following Lysippos. The sculptor, wishing to combine the ideal with the real, appears to have copied the motive directly from a bronze statue by Lysippos, which represented Alexander leaning with his left hand high on a staff.[629] The pose also recalls that of the third-century B. C. statue of Poseidon found on Melos and now in Athens.[630] The free leg, body, and head modeling correspond so nearly with the _Apoxyomenos_ (Pl. 28) that it was at first called a work of Lysippos, but its lack of repose[631] shows that it must be a continuation of the work of that sculptor by some pupil, who wished to outdo his master in both form and expression.