
AN ANTIQUE MARBLE BUST. 419 
At Rome I believe with Heeren that it was much the same during the Re- 
public, and private galleries were unknown. After the taking of Corinth,* how- 
ever, a passion seems to have sprung up in Italy for possessing works of art, the 
generals and governors of provinces vieing with each other in having them. 
Verres plundered in Sicily and Achaia; yet, with one exception (if it be one), 
it was statues which had graced some temple, or had been the pride of a city, 
that he was charged with having carried off.+ And with his rapacity Cicero + 
contrasts the conduct of Marcellus and Mummius, who, with the whole spoils of 
Syracuse and Corinth at their command, had appropriated not a picture or statue, 
but given all to their country. But Verres soon had many followers; and by 
the time of Juvenalj we find that ancestral busts, but still of men who had 
filled some curule office, were objects of ambition with the degenerate nobles 
having the jus imaginum, the more opulent devoting a room in their houses 
to their reception, or using them to ornament their gardens.|| Yet the possession 
of works of art long survived as a matter of municipal pride in cities, casting 
private galleries, we may believe, into the shade. And thus it happens, that long 
after the Roman arms had swept the land, we find a town in France purchasing a 
statue of Mercury from a Greek artist at no less a sum than £320,000 (forty mil- 
lions of sisterces), as Sir James Stephen relates. And the same spirit lingers in 
_ Rome and Florence to the present day. 
The conclusion to which this little digression leads us is, that among the 
Romans as among the Greeks, statues of private persons were unknown; and 
such statues as did exist were rarely private property till near the age of Augus- 
tus, which is the period, as it will appear, that interests us. 
To return to the bust ;—its resemblance to the young Augustus was remarked 
to me very soon by several friends. I discovered, however, on comparing it with 
casts of his daughter, that it was not the profligate Julia; and much in the 
' same way I satisfied myself that it was not Livia, of whom there is a beautiful 
portrait in the Dactyliotheca Smithiana.** But in my search I came upon a 
certain amount of evidence for its being his sister Octavia, the grandniece of 
Julius Czesar, whose affecting history is too well known to require more than a 
passing allusion here. She was, as many may remember, the mother of the young 
Marcellus,—Virgil’s friend too,—married young to the faithless Antony, yet 
did it “‘never taint her love,”—and who, through her whole life, toiled for her 
brother and her country, without one thought of self, till, as Shakspeare {+ tells 
us, “each heart in Rome did love and pity her.’ In all the three English dramas 
* Smirn’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, p. 908 ; and Miitrer, pp. 124-5. 
+ Cicero in Verrem, II. I., 19 and 23; Herren, p. 288. 
¢ Ibid. II. I, 21. § Juvenat, Satire VIII., 1-19. 
|| Smarrx’s Dictionary, voce ** Pinacotheca ;” and Apam’s Antiquities, p. 460. 
{ Lectures on French History, I., 21. ** Vol. 1., 62. 
tt} Antony and Cleopatra, Act III., Scene 3. 
