As has already been stated, early Roman sculpture, if such it can be called, was entirely the work of Etruscan artists, employed by the wealth of Rome to afford the citizens that display of pomp in their worship of the gods and the triumphs of their warriors which their ambition demanded. All important works were made of colossal size. Some of the early Roman (quasi Etruscan) statues spoken of by the historians are a bronze colossus of Jupiter, an Etruscan bronze colossus of Apollo, eighty feet high, in the Palatine Library of the temple of Augustus. A portrait statue of an orator in the toga, and a chimæra, both of bronze, are in the Florence Museum. Sculpture, from the love of it as a means of expressing the beautiful in the ideal form of the deities or the heroic and the pathetic of humanity, never existed as a growth of Roman civilization. The inclination of the Roman mind was toward social, municipal, and imperial system and ordering; in this direction the Romans were inventors and improvers upon that which they borrowed from the Greeks. But in art they began by hiring, and they ended by debasing the work of the hired. They took away the bronze statues of Greece as trophies of conquest, covered them with gold, and set them up in the palaces and public places of Rome. They subsidized the sculptors of Greece, who under Roman influence had fallen away from their high traditions; they did nothing for the sake of art, but simply manufactured, as it were, copies and imitations of Greek statues for their own use. Happily we have to be grateful for the fact, though we can not honor the motive. Had it not been for this bestowal of their wealth in the gratification of their taste for luxury and display, many of the renowned statues of ancient Greek art would have been known only by the vague mention of them by Pausanias and Pliny, or the early Christian writers of the Church, or the poetic allusions of the Greek anthologists and the Latin epigrammatists. The Column of Trajan was the great work of Apollodorus, the favorite architect of the emperor, dedicated A. D. 114. It is 10½ feet in diameter and 127 feet high, made of thirty-four blocks of white marble, twenty-three being in the shaft, nine in the base, which is finely sculptured, and two in the capital and _torus_. The reliefs at the base are smaller than those toward the top, being two feet high, increasing to nearly four as they approach the summit; this was, of course, to enable the more distant subjects to be seen equally well with the others, a singular illustration of the intensely practical turn of Roman art in its application. There are about 2,500 figures, not counting horses, representing the battles and sieges of the Dacian war. The column of M. Aurelius Antoninus, erected A. D. 174, is similar in height, but the sculptures, although in higher relief, are not so good. They represent the conquest of the Marcomans.