OR THE RHODIAN GENIUS. S53 



ture. Some persons thouglit they could make out at its 

 foot the letters and e, from whence (as antiquaries were 

 then no less bold in their conjectures than they now are), 

 they took occasion to infer, in a somewhat forced mari- 

 ner, the name of Zenodorus ; thus attributing the work to a 

 painter of the same name as the artist who at a later period 

 cast the Colossus of Rhodes. 



The "Rhodian Genius/' however, for such was the 

 name given to the picture, did not want for commentators 

 and interpreters in Syracuse. Amateurs of the arts, and 

 especially the younger amongst them, on returning from a 

 short visit to Corinth or Athens, would have thought it 

 equivalent to renouncing all pretensions to connoisseurship 

 if they had not been provided with some new explanation. 

 Some regarded the Genius as the personification of Spiritual 

 Love, forbidding the enjoyment of sensual pleasures ; others 

 said it was the assertion of the empire of Reason over Desire : 

 the wiser among the critics were silent, and presuming some 

 high though yet undiscovered meaning, examined mean- 

 while with pleasure the simple composition of the picture. 



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 reopening of the navigation of 

 the Egean Sea, ships from Rhodes entered the port of Syra- 

 cuse, bearing a precious collection of statues, altars, cande- 

 labras, and paintings, which Dionysius's love of art had 

 caused to be brought together from different parts of Greece. 



