Rhodes had unquestionable right to give her name to a school of sculpture, both from the great antiquity of the origin of the culture of the arts in the island, and from the number, more than one hundred, of colossal statues in bronze. The Rhodian school is also distinguished by those remarkable examples of sculpture in marble of large groups of figures—the Toro Farnese and the Laocoon. In these works there is the same feeling for display of artistic accomplishment that has been noticed as characteristic of the Macedonian age, with that effort at the pathetic, especially in the Laocoon, which belongs to the finer style of the later Athenian school as displayed in the works of Scopas and Praxiteles, in the Niobe figures and others. At Pergamus, another school allied in style to that of Ephesus arose, of which the chief sculptor was Pyromachus, who, according to Pliny, flourished in the 120th Olympiad, B. C. 300-298. A statue of Æsculapius by Pyromachus was a work of some note in the splendid temple at Pergamus, and is to be seen on the coins of that city. It is also conjectured that the well-known Dying Gladiator is a copy of a bronze by Pyromachus. The vigorous naturalistic style of these statues, surpassing anything of preceding schools in the effort at expression, may be taken as characteristic of the school of Pergamus, then completely under Roman influence, and destined to become more so. But all question as to the nature of the sculptures was set at rest by the discovery of many large works in high relief by the German expedition at Pergamus in 1875. These are now in the Museum at Berlin. They are of almost colossal proportions, representing, as Pliny described, the wars of Attalus and the Battles with the Giants. The nude figure is especially marked by the effort to display artistic ability as well as great energy in the action. In these points there is observable a connection with the well-known and very striking example of sculpture of this order—the Fighting Gladiator, or more properly the Warrior of Agasias, who, as is certain from the inscription on his work, was an Ephesian. The equally renowned statue of the Apollo Belvedere, finely conceived and admirably modeled as it undoubtedly is, bears the stamp of artistic display which removes it from the style of the great classic works of sculpture. The history of Roman sculpture is soon told. If it have any real roots, they are to be traced in the ancient Etruscan; for all that was really characteristic in it as art is associated with that style, in that intense naturalism which became developed so strikingly in the production of portrait statues and busts, and in those great monumental works in bas-relief which are marked by the same strong feeling for descriptive representation of the most direct and realistic kind, upon their triumphal columns and arches.