Of epigrams on individual works of art it is not necessary to say much. Their numbers must have been enormous. The painted halls and colonnades, common in all Greek towns, had their stories told in verse below; there was hardly a statue or picture of any note that was not the subject of a short poem. A collected series of works of art had its corresponding series of epigrams. The Anthology includes, among other lists, a description of nineteen subjects carved in relief on the pedestals of the columns in a temple at Cyzicus, and another of seventy-three bronze statues which stood in the great hall of a gymnasium at Constantinople.[11] Any celebrated work like the Niobe of Praxiteles, or the bronze heifer of Myron, was the practising-ground for every tried or untried poet, seeking new praise for some clever conceit or neater turn of language than had yet been invented. Especially was this so with the trifling art of the decadence and its perpetual round of childish Loves: Love ploughing, Love holding a fish and a flower as symbols of his sovereignty over sea and land, Love asleep on a pepper-castor, Love blowing a torch, Love grasping or breaking the thunderbolt, Love with a helmet, a shield, a quiver, a trident, a club, a drum.[12] Enough of this class of epigrams are extant to be perfectly wearisome, were it not that, like the engraved gems from which their subjects are principally taken, they are all, however trite in subject or commonplace in workmanship, wrought in the same beautiful material, in that language which is to all other languages as a gem to an ordinary pebble.