Statuary, accordingly, is the central art of Greece; other arts are related to it, accompany it, or imitate it. No other art has so well expressed the national life; no other was so cultivated or so popular. In the hundred small temples around Delphi, in which the treasures of the cities were kept, "a whole world of marble, gold, silver, brass, and bronze, twenty different bronzes, and of all tints, thousands of glorified dead in irregular groups, seated and standing, radiated the veritable subjects of the god of light."[9] When Rome, at a later day, despoiled the Greek world of its treasures, this vast city possessed a population of statues almost equal to that of its living inhabitants. At the present time, after so many centuries and such devastation, it is estimated that more than sixty thousand statues have been discovered at Rome and in its surrounding Campagna. A like harvest of sculpture has never been seen, such a prodigious abundance of flowers,--a display of flowers so perfect, a growth so natural, so continuous and varied. You have just seen the cause of it, in digging up the earth layer by layer, and in observing that all the foundations of the human soil, institutions, manners, ideas, have contributed to sustain it. [Footnote 1: Grote, _History of Greece--_Boeckh, _Political Economy of the Athenians_--Wullon, _Slavery in Antiquity._] [Footnote 2: The Frogs of Aristophanes; the Cock of Lucian.] [Footnote 3: Their proper name was wall-piercers.] [Footnote 4: Thucydides, Book I. See the divers expeditions of the Athenians between the peace of Cimon and the Peloponnesian war.] [Footnote 5: Xenophon. The Lacedemonian Republic, _passim. _] [Footnote 6: The Dialogues of Plato. The Clouds of Aristophanes.] [Footnote 7: The Lacedemonians adopted this custom about the 14th Olympiad.--Plato.] [Footnote 8: Herodotus.] [Footnote 9: Michelet.] VI.