383 Dr DONALDSON, ON THE STATUE OF SOLON 



a work of art to the age to which we have assigned it. This objection may be a good one ; 



and the only conclusion then must be, that we do not know whom it was intended to represent." 



This is perhaps the most marvellous piece of criticism to be met with in any language. 



(1) Because Finati calls it a statue of Aristidcs the Just, this is a ground for considering 

 it the statue of some person of that name, which tliere is no inscription or other evidence to 

 show. 



(2) Then since it must be the statue of an Aristides, and as we have a genuine bust of 

 the rhetorician, the slightest amount of resemblance will suffice to identify the two ; or rather, 

 a resemblance is asserted without the least foundation in fact. Those who will compare the 

 two faces will see that they are as unlike as possible. J^^lius Aristides was partly bald, and 

 had an aquiline nose. This statue has a straight nose, and no appearance of baldness. 



(3) The writer is so careless that he cannot inquire when .lElius Aristides was born, and 

 when Herculaneum was destroyed. As the latter event happened in a.d. 79) and as Aristides 

 was not born on the earliest calculation till a.d. 117, it is rather unlikely that an elaborate 

 statue 6^ feet high, representing the rhetorician who was so popular in the following century, 

 would have been preserved among the ruins of that Campanian country-town. 



(4) The valid objection to which he adverts, and the naive admission which follows, 

 would have induced most writers to abstain from such a questionable illustration of their 

 subject. But surely this was the more incumbent on the writer in a popular work, in which 

 every error was likely to be stereotyped in the most literal sense and diffused throughout the 

 widest possible circle of readers. 



Thus far the task which I have undertaken is singularly easy. It does not require much 

 consideration to see that the opinion maintained by Finati, and first started, I believe, by the 

 Marchese Venuti, that this celebrated statue represents Aristides the son of Lysimachus, is 

 an arbitrary and unfounded conjecture ; or to expose the extreme absurdity of the supposition 

 that a grand portrait statue of J^llius Aristides adorned the theatre at Herculaneum some 

 40 years before his birth. The identification of this statue, however, is a much morfe difficult 

 undertaking, and has become a very interesting one, not only on account of the rare beauty 

 of the statue as a work of art, but also because it may be made a striking illustration of the 

 oratorical and political warfare between ^Eschines and Demosthenes. 



The first beginning of a rational and scholarlike examination of this statue was made by 

 E. Gerhard in his and Panofka's volume, entitled Neapels Antike Bildwerke (Band. i. p. 105, 

 Stuttg. u. Tiibing. 1828). He showed that the identification of the statue with Aristides was 

 very insufficiently established, or rather that it was a mere assumption ; that this statue, which, 

 with that of Homer, and one erroneously assigned to Poplicola, probably adorned the theatre 

 of Herculaneum {Bildwerke, p. 101), was less strongly marked in the features of the counte- 

 nance than in the execution of the figure and drapery, and that its identification with any 

 known portrait was therefore more difficult ; but that the costume and the truncated scrinium 

 rendered it likely that the person represented was an orator or some literary man. As for 

 Aristides the Just, he would have been portrayed in heroic costume, or, like the so-called 

 Phocion of the Vatican, in a military mantle and sword-belt (Visconti, Mus. Pio-Clement. 

 II. 43). 



