When Greece fell, there were but three superior artists, Lysippus the sculptor, Apelles the painter, and Pyrgoteles the gem-engraver. The first introduced a new style of art, which foretokened the age already begun. He made his figures larger than life, and the huge instead of the beautiful followed evermore, till the empire of force had in turn perished. A hundred colossi of the sun arose in the single island of Rhodes, the most famous of which, by Chares of Lindus, was completed B.C. 280. The imposing group of Dirce and the Bull, executed by artists born at Tralles, is another expression of that time. But the most significant symbol of the Augustan age and its spirit is that famous work made by three Rhodian sculptors, the Laocoon. It was probably executed about the time of Titus, as Pliny first saw it in the palace of that emperor, and referred to it as a novelty. In that group, violent action and intense suffering are shown in the same instant simultaneously; we pity the younger son, tremblingly hope for the elder, and despair of all three as that horrid shriek rings from the distorted mouth of the father, maddened by agony into a forgetfulness of his own offspring writhing with him in serpent-folds, and fatally crushed by the meshes of a living net. What the transcendent statue by Phidias was to the majestic Jupiter of Homer, the sculptured Laocoon was to the description by Virgil, but in a very inferior degree. From the time the haughty dwellers on mount Capitoline had been obliged to adopt old Etruscan statues to perpetuate their own historical events, the Romans never excelled in noble art. It was a characteristic fact, that Clodius, after the banishment of Cicero, on the ruins of his palace dedicated to Liberty a statue which in its primary use had represented a Bœotian courtesan. To the end, that rough race never possessed the enlightened eyes, purged of their blinding film, like those of Diomed, to discern the fine texture of celestial forms, or to admire their charms.