Just as Mæcenas “plucked the ear” of the poets, and instructed them when to sing or when to refrain from singing of kings and battles, so the patron of art gave instructions to the Greek artists. It is clear enough what instructions he gave. Like Cromwell he cried “Paint me as I am, warts and all. Leave your idealism, your perfect profiles, your serene gods in the tranquillity of Olympus, and depict men with the living emotions displayed in frown and wrinkle.” That was excellent advice, no doubt, but he seems to have gone further. He seems, like the good Dr. Primrose, to have demanded value for his money by insisting upon so many portraits to the square yard of surface to be decorated. Is not this the explanation of the crowded figures in the new style of relief work, as exhibited at Rome from the Altar of Peace to the Column of Trajan? In the friezes of the Mausoleum, the fourth-century Greek sculptors had discovered the advantage of free spacing so that each figure has a value of its own. The florid taste of the millionaire Attalids of Pergamum had made a reactionary movement in the direction of crowded and tangled forms. Now these Roman friezes carry the demand a stage further. In these processions we have a compact mass of faces, each admirably and no doubt faithfully portrayed, but ruining by their very numbers the artistic success of the whole. The spectator is not to admire a composition. As in Frith’s “Derby Day” he is to pick out a face here and there and cry “That is Agrippa: that is Messalla: that is Germanicus.” In its essence such a demand is not the mark of a people with any sense of art. On the contrary it is the measure of their crudity and Philistinism. Nevertheless this new demand enabled the versatile Greek genius to win for itself fresh triumphs, especially in realistic portraiture and narrative relief-work. Part of the claim which Wickhoff and his followers make for the originality of Roman art is based upon the belief that the limitations of Greek art are not self-imposed; for example, that the Greeks did not know how to express emotion in the plastic arts, that they could not make realistic portraits, that through ignorance they never perceived the beauty of a stark corpse, that Pheidias lacked the intelligence to find a dramatic centre for the Parthenon frieze, and so forth. Such assumptions as these are easily disproved. Greeks were capable of realism (witness the Ludovisi reliefs[51]) but they preferred to idealise. In portraying giants, barbarians, or slaves they could express transient emotions, but for Greeks and gods in statuary they deliberately preferred serenity. The Greeks sought to conceal their art rather than to display it, as we have learnt from the discovery of the subtle secrets of their architecture, and it is rash to assert of any principle of craftsmanship that the Greeks did not know it. Many of the claims of Rome to originality may be refuted by this consideration.