Pheidian in character, already belongs to the age of transition and was presumably tolerated on the Acropolis because the poet was the friend of the family of Pericles. The great tragic poets, who contributed so much to the glory of fifth-century Athens, were not honoured with public statues till nearly one hundred years after the death of Euripides; no effort was apparently made to fix the features of any of the brilliant group of sophists that gathered round Pericles; and we have had to dismiss as 'ideal,' and as belonging to the statue of a goddess, the charming head with archaic coiffure that so long did duty as Aspasia. As for sculptors and painters, the cultured Athenians held them beneath contempt.

More gracious to her great men was the old Ionia beyond the seas. Here Anaxagoras, who had brought philosophy to Athens and had been banished for his pains, was decreed a statue even in his own native city of Clazomenæ. Herodotus was honoured in a similar manner at Halicarnassus; and Ionian prototypes probably inspired the noble 'Alcæus and Sappho ' reproduced on a vase-picture of the early fifth century at Munich.

Something was needed to make Athens reconsider the values of life, and that something was the crash of the Peloponnesian war, which put a period to military conquest, and set the feet of Athens on the way of civic as opposed to imperial life. The political change had its spiritual counterpart. It was the victory over the Persians that had bestowed upon Athens her political sovereignty and raised her, first among the nations of the West, to the rank of an imperial power; but it was the irretrievable disaster to her fleet at the Hellespont in 405 B.C. that made her an eternally potent factor in the life of the spirit. As the mind of fifth-century Athens had taken bodily form in the figures of her soldiers and statesmen, so now poets and philosophers, literary men and even the merely learned, were honoured with portraits almost as numerous as those of the makers of empire in a past generation. The most significant of these in their bearings upon art were the portraits of the philosophers. The fourth century was the age, not of philosophy only, which had already produced some of its greatest men, but of philosophy as an honourable profession. All the schools that derived

from Socrates prospered, and were even basking in the smiles of the great; tyrants received and honoured Plato; Philip called for a philosopher to educate his only son; Athens erected a statue to Socrates as a token of repentance; and, wherever a school flourished, portraits of its founder and of its successive leaders were required, even among those sects whose lives and tenets were the most severe. The philosophic schools exerted upon the life of Greece from the fourth century onwards an influence comparable to that of the religious Orders upon the life of Western Europe in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; and in Greece, as in medieval Italy, artists were called upon to fix for posterity the features of those to whom men turned for spiritual guidance.

Philosophy, which is perhaps the greatest gift of Hellas to the world, gave an unprecedented stimulus to portraiture, and through portraiture to art generally. This point, which writers upon ancient art seem to have missed, is well illustrated by the Praxitelean Hermes 'with his physical perfection and his plenitude of intellect, with the features of an artist and the brow of a thinker,' a conception for which fifth-century Athens offers no parallel. The British Museum group of philosophers' portraits is of great interest, though neither Socrateswhose effigy is one of the commonest extant-nor Plato, nor again Aristotle is represented. But in the Epicurus (No. 1843) and Metrodorus (No. 1845) we have good instances of the portrait of a disciple assimilated to that of the master, much as at a later date the portraits of courtiers are influenced by the features of the king. Thus we may, I think, detect an attempt to introduce into the handsome countenance of Plato traits that recall the fat and snub-nosed features of Socrates; the likeness of Theophrastus to Aristotle in the former's one authentic bust at the Villa Albani is undeniable; the kinship between Antisthenes and Diogenes is equally clear; and examples from other schools might be given.

Of the Cynic Antisthenes we have a grand head in the Hall of Inscriptions (No. 1838)—an altogether fresher work than either of the inscribed herms in the Vatican. The original of all these copies must have had much in common with the Hellenistic head of the blind Homer,' and may have been a product of the same school.

On another bracket, not far from the Antisthenes, we have what is probably the best extant portrait of the Stoic Chrysippus (No. 1846). As a psychological study, this little bent and withered old man of squalid exterior and piercing eyes is a tour de force; the head gains immensely when we combine it mentally with the body now recognised in a seated statue of the Louvre long known as Posidonius. The original, which stood in the Athenian Ceramicus, is mentioned by ancient writers, who dwell on the philosopher's poor physique; in the statue the drapery is allowed to disclose the thin and aged chest, with the wrinkled skin loosely covering the sunken bony structure. The Greek sculptor is here boldly attacking a problem which Houdon shirked when he draped in ample folds the fleshless body of the aged Voltaire (see plate 1).

In the Bronze Room we have a good example of the seated full-length figure of a philosopher (No. 841) clad in the single cloak which was the conventional garment of wisdom even in the case of Plato, whose personal fastidiousness was the constant butt of the comedians. The charming bronze-one of the best in the collectionhas been tentatively identified on the label as a portrait of Aristippus of Cyrene. We must admit that the tranquil rhythm of the composition, the reposeful attitude and the serene expression, would well suit a presentment of the philosopher of happiness whom Horace loved; but, without more evidence in support of the hypothesis than is at present forthcoming, it seems more prudent to leave the statuette unnamed. The seated portrait-statue as expressive of philosophic calm and meditation enjoyed the greatest vogue in the Hellenistic and Roman periods and finally passed into Christian art, the famous bronze effigy of St Peter in the Vatican basilica being one of the latest but also one of the most splendid variations of the theme.*

Next in interest to the philosophers come the poets, of whose portraits the British Museum possesses signal examples. A beautiful bearded head in the Hall of

I find it impossible to accept Signor Venturi's attribution of this statue to Arnolfo del Cambio ('Storia dell'Arte Italiana,' IV, p. 113 fr.). However, Venturi himself admits 'imitation of the antique.'