OR, THE RHODIAN GENIUS. 405 



Still, however, the question remained unsolved. The picture 

 had been copied with various additions and sent to Greece, but not 

 the least light had been thrown on its origin ; when at length, at 

 the season of the early rising of the Pleiades, and soon after the re- 

 opening of the navigation of the Egean Sea, ships from Rhodes 

 entered the port of Syracuse, bearing a precious collection of statues, 

 altars, candelabras, and paintings, which Dionysius's love of art 

 had caused to be brought together from different parts of Greece. 

 Among the paintings was one which was immediately recognized as 

 the companion or pendent of the Rhodian Genius : the dimensions 

 were the same, and the coloring similar, but in a better state of 

 preservation. The Genius was still the central figure, but the but- 

 terfly was no longer on his shoulder ; his head was drooping, and 

 his torch extinguished and inverted. The youths and maidens 

 pressing around him had met and embraced; their glance, no longer 

 subdued or sad, announced, on the contrary, emancipation from re- 

 straint, and the fulfilment of long-cherished desires. 



The Syracusan antiquaries were already seeking to modify the 

 explanations they had previously proposed, so as to adapt them to 

 the newly-arrived picture, when Dionysius commanded the latter to 

 be carried to the house of Epicharmus, a philosopher of the Pytha- 

 gorean school, who dwelt in a remote part of Syracuse called Tyche. 

 Epicharmus rarely presented himself at the court of Dionysius ; for 

 although the latter was fond of calling around him the most distin- 

 guished men from all the Greek colonial cities, yet the philosopher 

 found that the proximity of princes takes even from men of the 

 greatest intellectual power part of their spirit and their freedom. 

 He devoted himself unceasingly to the study of natural things, 

 their forces or powers, the origin of animals and plants, and the 

 harmonious laws in accordance with which the heavenly bodies, as. 

 well as the grains of hail and the flakes of snow, assume their dis- 

 tinctive forms. Oppressed with age, and -unable to proceed far 

 without assistance, he caused himself to be conducted daily to the 

 Poecile, and thence to the entrance of the port, where, as he said, his 

 eyes received the image of the boundless and the infinite which his 

 epirit ever strove in vain to apprehend. He lived, honored alike 



