Naturally, these early Roman collectors rarely bought their articles of virtu. When they could not obtain by pillage they had ready to hand a speedy and coercive means of gratifying their artistic craving. Sulla placed on the proscription list the names of all possessors of artistic objects who were so unwise as to refuse to give them up to him. Mark Antony did the same to Verres. The latter paid with his life his refusal to offer the despotic Triumvir some famous vases of Corinthian bronze which he sorely longed to have in his collection. It was, we repeat, in Sulla’s time that the passion for collecting arose among the Romans, not only guided by an artistic sense of discrimination, but with all the peculiar characteristics that seem to attend the development of this passion. Sulla’s collection--to which the spoils of the temple of Apollo in Delphi and of the temples of Jupiter in Elis and Æsculapius in Epidaurus, considered the richest emporium of art in Greece, had contributed--must have been magnificent and without an equal--except, perhaps, that of Verres, Sulla’s pupil, who surpassed his master in the art of plundering, and sacked Sicily of all the island possessed of art. CHAPTER II COLLECTOMANIA IN ROME Collectomania develops--Rampant parvenuism in Rome--Extravagant prices paid for art and curio--Faking arrives--Good and foolish collectors as seen by writers and satirists of the time --Art dealing--The _septæ_, shops and auction rooms. Such was the earliest type of the real collector of art in Rome, a first phase in a city where the passion for art was, generally speaking, rarely genuine. This phase led first to the acquisition of what might be styled something between ambition and love of display. Then the trade in objects of art eventually appeared, and as a logical consequence, imitation and fraudulent art finally had their scope. Fictitious masterpieces of painting and sculpture, often signed, as in modern times, with the forged names of noted artists, were already on the market before Cicero’s time. “_Odi falsas inscriptiones statuarum alienarum_” (I hate the forged inscriptions on statues not one’s own), remarks Cicero, who although somewhat of a collector himself never missed a chance to ridicule the pretentious amateur lost in hysterical ecstasy before imitations supposed to be original works, or of fanning the art lover’s pseudo-enthusiasm for the work of Polycletus, which was extremely fashionable at one time among art collectors.