12 
House & Garden 
Prince of Collectors 
of Yesterday. 
Tullus’ Sale 
I suppose there 
have been collectors 
ever since things 
were discovered to 
be collectable. Even- 
object of human cre¬ 
ation seems eventu¬ 
ally to fall within 
the collecting class; 
Father Time saying 
when. C. Plinii Cae- 
ciUi Secundi Epistii- 
larum sounds some- 
what formidable 
when looked upon by 
a foe to the classics, 
but this morning it 
yielded this morsel 
from the XVIIIth 
of the VUIth 
a letter from 
to his good 
friend Rufinus: 
“You have now all 
the town gossip; 
nothing but talk of 
Tullus. We look 
forward to the auc¬ 
tion sale of his effects. He was so great a 
collector that the very day he purchased a vast 
garden he was able to adorn it completely with 
antique statues drawn from his stores of art 
treasures.” Ancient Domitius Tullus! would 
that we knew how your sale came out. Did 
you turn in your tomb that some Eros from 
Praxiteles’ own hand, some Amor chiselled by 
Letter 
Book, 
Pliny 
Auction sale at Clinton 
Hall, New York. By Leon 
y Escoscura. Metropolitan 
great Pheidias him¬ 
self fetched a hun¬ 
dredth of its value 
only? Or did you 
rush off to Dis and 
to Proserpina with 
the gleeful tale of 
how friend Pliny, 
who thought to get 
something for noth¬ 
ing, was forced up 
to a prince’s ransom 
by Lucanus in the 
matter of that little 
sardonyx gem, en¬ 
graved by Pyrgote- 
les, finer, the auc- 
t i o n e e r declared, 
than the Perseus by 
Dioscurides ? How 
human it is to wish 
to know! 
Nero as a Collector 
Those old Romans 
were great collectors. 
Even when the cre¬ 
ative spirit had de- 
The Antiquary. From a generated they were 
painting by Edwin White, appreciators of the 
an American, 1817-1877 fine things which the 
Greeks had pro¬ 
duced. Petronius, that Arbiter elegantarium 
of Nero's court, amassed thousands of remark¬ 
able art treasures that even the Emperor 
longed to possess. Coming under Nero’s dis¬ 
pleasure, and dying under the Emperor’s or¬ 
ders, he disdained to' imitate the servility of 
those who, under like penalty, made Nero their 
heir and, as Suetonius tells us, filled their wills 
The ancients collected with no less fervor than do collectors today, as 
ivitness an Etruscan Vase Seller, by Jean Louis Hamon (1821-1874) 
Dutch artists have always shown an inclination to use antiquities 
in their paintings, as in this by Alexander Hugo Babsker-Korff 
