22 IVORY AND THE ELEPHANT 



height, 26 in.; the comparative shortness indicating a 

 sHght flexion of the dead body. As restored, the inlays 

 on the side are placed as follows: a lion head, a bust, a 

 winged head, a bust, and lastly a lion head; at the corners 

 are figure groups. The rather spindly legs are made 

 up of many pieces, incrusted with bone inlays. Another, 

 but inferior example, is in the Papa Giulio Museo in Orvieto. 



In one of his scathing denunciations of the venality and 

 rapacity of the infamous Caius Verres, for a time praetor of 

 Sicily, the great orator Cicero, in 70 B. C, recounts how this 

 shameless Roman functionary wrenched off the rich ivory 

 and gold adornment of the Temple of Minerva in Syracuse. 

 The ivory carvings here were of the very highest artistic 

 excellence and famed for their surpassing beauty throughout 

 the Greek world ; one of the most notable offered an awe-in- 

 spiring representation of the Gorgon's head with its writhing 

 serpents. All these splendid carvings, and also the massive 

 gold bosses, elaborately chased, adorning the temple doors, 

 works of art in which the workmanship was even more 

 precious than the metal, were ruthlessly stripped off and 

 borne away to Rome by Verres as though the spoils of war. 

 Indeed, as Cicero says, even a conquering enemy with any 

 claim to civilization would not have wrought such wanton 

 havoc, only possible for barbarians.* 



The very large size of the pieces of ivory which must have 

 been required by the Greeks in the production of their co- 

 lossal gold and ivory statues, some of which were forty feet 

 or more in height, the face, hands, and feet being of ivory, 

 and even the large size of some of the consular and other 

 diptychs that have come down to us, have raised the ques- 

 tion, how did the ancients secure pieces of ivory of sufficient 

 size.f^ In our day, with the processes now in use, this would 

 not be possible. Hence it has been conjectured that they 



*M. Tullii Ciceronis, "In Verrem Lib. IV; De Signis"; Oratio nona, cap. 56. 



