Having searched art books in vain for an explanation of the history of the Venus of Milo and its tragic fate, we will here briefly recapitulate what the simple facts of the statue, its workmanship, its sad and mutilated condition and also its place of discovery, can teach us. The statue shows a few scratches which indicate that it may have been dragged along the ground, but the marble bears innumerable indentations which can scarcely be explained otherwise than as due to blows with heavy sticks or clubs. The story of M. Ferry recapitulated in the foregoing chapter does not suffice. Some mutilations may be due to a rough handling in transportation, but the scratches are few and the cudgel marks are many. Apparently the statue has stood an attack of a mob of infuriated enemies who hated the goddess and regarded her as a devil--as the patron deity of the worst of sins. She must have endured a terrible persecution at the hands of implacable enemies, and these enemies can only have been Christians. It is obvious that the statue has been hidden, and we need not doubt that it was concealed by pagan worshipers who wanted to preserve the effigy of the goddess. The marks of brutal treatment visible all over the body of the statue indicate that the fair goddess had been most furiously belabored as if in corporeal chastisement with rods and any weapons that happened to be at hand. The arms are broken and we must assume that the statue was upset and thrown from its pedestal. Probably the goddess fell on her right shoulder which is crushed, while the left arm exhibits a smooth fracture as if it had been broken by the concussion of the fall. If the arms are not the fragments enumerated by Count Marcellus and now preserved in the Louvre, they must have been lost; possibly they were smashed to small fragments. Can we assume that the provincial population of a small island could have produced the greatest piece of art of antiquity? Could a few farmers have engaged a sculptor who must have been the equal of Phidias and Scopas? If the statue had represented the tutelary goddess of the island, would not some Greek author have alluded to its existence; would not Pausanias have mentioned the fact? The idea that the statue was of indigenous workmanship is a mere assumption and by no means probable. But whence can the statue have come, and how did it find its way to this little island in the Ægean Sea? This question is not unanswerable; we need only consider the history of the island and its political connections. The island of Milo was too small a place to have a temple that could afford a statue of such extraordinary value, and we must assume that it was carried thither on a ship. Athens is the only place that we can think of which might have been its original home.