As For Dirce Herself, She Seems To
Be But A Subaltern Character; There Is A Dog Upon His Hind Legs
Barking At The Bull, Which Is Much Admired.
This amazing groupe
was cut out of one stone, by Appollonius and Tauriscus, two
sculptors of Rhodes; and is mentioned by Pliny in the thirty-
sixth book of his Natural History.
All the precious monuments of
art, which have come down to us from antiquity, are the
productions of Greek artists. The Romans had taste enough to
admire the arts of Greece, as plainly appears by the great
collections they made of their statues and pictures, as well as
by adopting their architecture and musick: but I do not remember
to have read of any Roman who made a great figure either as a
painter or a statuary. It is not enough to say those professions
were not honourable in Rome, because painting, sculpture, and
musick, even rhetoric, physic, and philosophy were practised and
taught by slaves. The arts were always honoured and revered at
Rome, even when the professors of them happened to be slaves by
the accidents and iniquity of fortune. The business of painting
and statuary was so profitable, that in a free republic, like
that of Rome, they must have been greedily embraced by a great
number of individuals: but, in all probability, the Roman soil
produced no extraordinary genius for those arts. Like the English
of this day, they made a figure in poetry, history, and ethics;
but the excellence of painting, sculpture, architecture, and
music, they never could attain.
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