He, In Fact, Requires This From The
Spectator Who Would Feel All His Pathos, As We Realized In Sitting Down
And Looking A Little Upward At Him.
In his room and in the succession of the rooms filled with his immortal
bronze and marble companions I was as if with ghosts of people I had
known in some anterior life.
They were so familiar that I felt no need
to go about asking their names, even if the archaeologists had in
several cases given them new names. I should have known certain of them
by traits which remain in the memory long after names have dropped out
of it. Julius Caesar, with his long Celtic upper-lip, still looked like
the finer sort of Irish-American politician; Tiberius again surprised me
with the sort of racial sanity and beauty surviving in his atrocious
personality from his mother's blood; but the too Ne_-_ronian head of
Nero, which seems to have been studied from the wild young miscreant
when trying to look the part, had an unremembered effect of chubby
idiocy. A thing that freshly struck me in the busts of those
imperialities, which of course must have been done in their lifetimes,
was not merely that the subjects were mostly so ugly and evil but that
the artists were apparently safe in showing them so. The men might not
have minded that, but how had the sculptors managed to portray the women
as they did and live? Perhaps they did not live, or live long; they are
a forgotten tribe, and no one can say what became of any given artist
after executing the bust of an empress; his own execution may have
immediately followed.
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