Even had Alexander been spared, and had returned to Greece to continue a long life of usefulness to his people, instead of having been cut off in his prime at Babylon, although he might have done much more for art than he did, still he could not have accomplished for it what had been attained by Pericles. This may be argued from his birth, schooling and the stronger trend of his mind, which led in very different directions. The Macedonian had not certainly the traditions of art culture in his veins, as was the case with the more polished Athenian, and being fonder of the dazzlement of pomp and show, natural to a leader who from infancy had been almost continuously associated with the accoutrements and regalia of armies, it is not likely that whatever he might have accomplished for art more than that which he actually did, would have manifested that purity of ideal, as well as refinement of execution which so marked and dignified the work of Pericles. As there is always some time which must elapse before the tide, having reached its flood, turns once more to slowly ebb, so was there a time to be expressed in a few years when the plastic arts of Greece, reaching their highest development in the age of Pericles, remained stationary, before ebbing away to so-called Roman degeneracy, and the mixed influence of various comparatively uncultured nationalities. The Alexandrian epoch marks the beginning of this turning-point. The decadence took almost as many successive generations to the time when Corinth was sacked by the Romans in 146 B.C., and the Italian soldiers cast their dice upon the pictures of Aristides, as it had taken to advance in the earlier ages of Greece, to the time when the chryselephantine statues of Zeus and Athene, by Phidias, were the recognized perfect standards of godlike majesty and beauty, and the Doryphorus of Polycletus was accepted as the criterion of human grace and proportion.