Rome in the earlier centuries was an Italic town which came under Etruscan influence as Tuscany was conquered. But from the age of foreign conquest in the first century B. C., Greek art in a debased form ruled over all else, and ran into utter degradation in the third century A. D. It was this art that the power of Rome spread around the whole Mediterranean, from Palmyra to Britain, and is the parent of most modern decoration. But in the great reconstruction of the empire under Diocletian the debased Greek taste was mostly shaken off, and Rome went back to the old Italic-Etruscan style and motives. The statues have the round heads and staring eyes of old Etruria; the taste for quaint accessories, such as lions supporting objects, came back and passed into mediæval art, and the exaggerated, lengthy forms of men and animals reappeared. Of the Christian period De Rossi’s work in the catacombs has given a firm base of facts for the third to the sixth century A. D., the actual tomb and body of Saint Cecilia being the most striking result. The later Roman and mediæval age in Italy is full of interest, but in that—as in the rest of mediæval Europe—research has been mainly on architecture and objects which are not the result of excavation. INDIA The Hindus have never been chronologists or historians, and their great Sanskrit literature tells practically nothing about the rise of Buddhism, the invasion of Alexander, or the spread of civilization in Indo-China. All before the Islamic conquest in the tenth century A. D. is in a mist of Puranic mythology. Here, then, more than in other countries, archæology has restored the history, and done so entirely within the nineteenth century. The existence of Sanskrit literature was revealed to the West by Sir William Jones at the end of the last century, and this gave scope to Oriental scholars, while antiquities only interested the collector. But serious exploration was led by Prinsep, whose decipherment of the Asoka inscriptions in 1837, which ranks with the achievements of Champollion and Rawlinson, gave the key to a mass of inscriptions. His assistant, Cunningham, excavated many sites and collected coins, being head of the Archæological Survey from 1861 to 1885. Fergusson was the historian of Indian architecture; Burgess has published the cave-temples in west and south India; Sewell in Madras and Führer in the northwest have excavated and explored, and a few native pundits have been educated to such research. The government, in financial difficulty, has withdrawn from the work, but the congress of Orientalists in 1897 resolved to establish an Indian exploration fund.