From these sources we are able to collect a body of epigrams which in a way cover the field of ancient art and literature. Sometimes they preserve fragments of direct criticism, verbal or real. We have epigrams on fashions in prose style, on conventional graces of rhetoric, on the final disappearance of ancient music in the sixth century.[13] Of art-criticism in the modern sense there is but little. The striking epigram of Parrhasius, on the perfection attainable in painting,[14] is almost a solitary instance. Pictures and statues are generally praised for their actual or imagined realism. Silly stories like those of the birds pecking at the grapes of Zeuxis, or the calf who went up to suck the bronze cow of Myron, represent the general level of the critical faculty. Even Aristotle, it must be remembered, who represents the most finished Greek criticism, places the pleasure given by works of art in the recognition by the spectator of things which he has already seen. "The reason why people enjoy seeing pictures is that the spectators learn and infer what each object is; /this/, they say, /is so and so/; while if one has not seen the thing before, the pleasure is produced not by the imitation,"--or by the art, for he uses the two terms convertibly--"but by the execution, the colour, or some such cause."[15] And Plato (though on this subject one can never be quite sure that Plato is serious) talks of the graphic art as three times removed from realities, being only employed to make copies of semblances of the external objects which are themselves the copies or shadows of the ideal truth of things.[16] So far does Greek thought seem to be from the conception of an ideal art which is nearer truth than nature is, which nature itself indeed tries with perpetual striving, and ever incomplete success, to copy, which, as Aristotle does in one often quoted passage admit with regard to poetry, has a higher truth and a deeper seriousness than that of actual things. But this must not be pressed too far. The critical faculty, even where fully present, may be overpowered by the rhetorical impulse; and of all forms of poetry the epigram has the greatest right to be fanciful. "This is the Satyr of Diodorus; if you touch it, it will awake; the silver is asleep,"[17]--obviously this play of fancy has nothing to do with serious criticism. And of a really serious feeling about art there is sufficient evidence, as in the pathos of the sculptured Ariadne, happy in sleeping and being stone, and even more strongly in the lines on the picture of the Faun, which have the very tone and spirit of the /Ode on a Grecian Urn/.[18]