PROBLEMS IN HISTORY OF GREEK SCULPTURE 609 



one. Yet on the whole a high degree of resemblance, especially 

 between copies in marble from marble, is reassuring. It shows that 

 fairly faithful reproductions were possible and were worth while. 

 And, to conclude this matter, it does not seem necessary to regard 

 with much more distrust the copies made from marble than those 

 made from bronze. 



Another question may be introduced at this point, although logic- 

 ally it belongs rather at the end than at the beginning of the discus- 

 sion. The practice of copying Greek sculptures of the fifth, fourth, 

 and third centuries B. c., is abundantly attested for the Roman 

 imperial period. May we then assume that all Roman copies go back 

 to Greek originals of good period, or must we consider the possibility 

 that some of them represent originals created at Rome in the first 

 century B. c., or later? Certainly we must consider the possibility. 

 In a copying age there is no reason why the new should not be copied 

 as well as the old, provided the new is in demand. Such demand did 

 exist for portraits of the Roman emperors, and we accordingly find 

 actual duplicates, though hardly so often as one would expect, in 

 our stock of imperial portraits. Thus the famous head of the young 

 Augustus in the Vatican agrees in all essentials with one less well 

 known in the British Museum, and a repulsive but powerful portrait 

 of Caracalla is preserved in several substantially identical copies. 

 But there is no clear case of an ideal creation of Roman date attaining 

 to the honors of reproduction. To be sure, this statement may not 

 pass unchallenged. A few years ago numbers of statues existing in 

 two or more repetitions, such as the marble Artemis from Pompeii, 

 the bronze Apollo with the lyre from the same place, the "Venus 

 Genetrix," so-called, and the nude youth made by Stephanus, were 

 commonly regarded as works of an archaistic school, whose founder 

 was supposed to be Pasiteles, a Greek sculptor working in Rome in 

 the earlier half of the first century B. c. This hypothesis of a Pasite- 

 lean school, which has been compared to the group of the " Xaza- 

 renes" in Germany and to that of the pre-Raphaelitos in England, 

 and whose productions have been supposed to be works of consider- 

 able originality and popularity, has now been generally abandoned. 

 Yet it still has adherents in England. Thus our best English hand- 

 book of Greek sculpture 1 defends the name of Venus Genetrix. 

 regarding the statue so called in the Louvre and its replicas as copied 

 from the cult-image made by Arcesilaus for the temple of Venus 

 erected by Julius Cirsar. But as the same authority holds that "the 

 type, in its general character, dates from an earlier age," the differ- 

 ence between this view and that which regards the statues in question 

 as copied directly from a fifth-century original is not, after all. very 

 great. Similarly with regard to the athlete of Stephanus. According 

 1 E. A. Gardner, Handbook of Greek Sculpture, sect. 78. 



