If therefore we were compelled, as Urlichs supposed, to assign the taking of Telmessus by Pericles to so late a date as the 102nd Olympiad (B.C. 372), we should be obliged to give up its assignment to that king. But there is no conclusive reason for the date fixed by Urlichs. There is therefore no improbability that our monument may be a memorial of Pericles of Xanthus. In any case it has an important place among the remains of antiquity, because it stands in the line of descent, a line marked by many lacunae, which connects the mural reliefs of Assyria, with their fulness of historic detail, and the magnificent monuments of imperial Rome. The Nereid Monument and that of Gyeulbashi, as well as some of the sarcophagi from Sidon, with which I shall deal in the fifteenth chapter, naturally strike the student as being set in a key somewhat different from that of ordinary Greek sculpture. The mythological scenes portrayed on them find ready parallels in Greece, but the more historic scenes carry our minds to the wall-sculptures of Assyria or the reliefs of Roman columns, such as those of Trajan and Aurelius, rather than to other Greek works. The reason of this is probably that the art of these Asiatic monuments is influenced by that of Ionia, which is to us, unfortunately, but little known. The Ionian tendency was towards history, that of the Dorians towards religion. The great Greek painters, following Ionian precedent, celebrated in their works many historic battles. Bularchus in very early times is said to have portrayed, for a Lydian king, a victory of the Magnesians: Panaenus painted at Athens the battle of Marathon, Androcydes of Cyzicus painted for the Thebans a picture of their victory at Plataea, and Euphranor depicted the battle of Mantineia. But in Greece sculpture took a different and more ideal line, and translated the battles of the present into mythic combats of the past, in which Centaurs and Amazons rather than fellow-Greeks represented the vanquished party. The sculpture of the Nereid monument is dominated by a more realistic and historic spirit. The sculpture at Gyeulbashi is on the border-line, so that we find it hard to decide whether the scene of the siege there portrayed is Ilium or Lycia, and whether the battles are being fought on the windy plain of Troy or the southern coast of Asia Minor. The sculpture of the Mausoleum is of the purely Greek and ideal character. But the greatest of the Sidonian sarcophagi returns, as we shall see, in the age of Alexander the Great, to a more realistic level.