After Apelles the art declined, although there were distinguished artists for several centuries.  They generally flocked to Rome, where there was the greatest luxury and extravagance, and they, pandered to vanity and a vitiated taste.  The masterpieces of the old artists brought enormous sums, as the works of the old masters do now; and they were brought to Rome by the conquerors, as the masterpieces of Italy and Spain and Flanders were brought to Paris by Napoleon.  So Rome gradually possessed the best pictures of the world, without stimulating the art or making new creations; it could appreciate genius, but creative genius expired with Grecian liberties and glories.  Rome multiplied and rewarded painters, but none of them were famous.  Pictures were as common as statues.  Even Varro, a learned writer, had a gallery of seven hundred portraits.  Pictures were placed in all the baths, theatres, temples, and palaces, as were statues.

We are forced, therefore, to believe that the Greeks carried painting to the same perfection that they did sculpture, not only from the praises of critics like Cicero and Pliny, but from the universal enthusiasm which the painters created and the enormous prices they received.  Whether Polygnotus was equal to Michael Angelo, Zeuxis to Titian, and Apelles to Raphael, we cannot tell.  Their works have perished.  What remains to us, in the mural decorations of Pompeii and the designs on vases, seem to confirm the criticisms of the ancients.  We cannot conceive how the Greek painters could have equalled the great Italian masters, since they had fewer colors, and did not make use of oil, but of gums mixed with the white of eggs, and resin and wax, which mixture we call “encaustic.”  Yet it is not the perfection of colors or of design, or mechanical aids, or exact imitations, or perspective skill, which constitute the highest excellence of the painter, but his power of creation,—­the power of giving ideal beauty and grandeur and grace, inspired by the contemplation of eternal ideas, an excellence which appears in all the masterworks of the Greeks, and such as has not been surpassed by the moderns.

But Art was not confined to architecture, sculpture, and painting alone.  It equally appears in all the literature of Greece.  The Greek poets were artists, as also the orators and historians, in the highest sense.  They were the creators of style in writing, which we do not see in the literature of the Jews or other Oriental nations, marvellous and profound as were their thoughts.  The Greeks had the power of putting things so as to make the greatest impression on the mind.  This especially appears among such poets as Sophocles and Euripides, such orators as Pericles and Demosthenes, such historians as Xenophon and Thucydides, such philosophers as Plato and Aristotle.  We see in their finished productions no repetitions, no useless expressions, no superfluity or redundancy, no careless arrangement, no words even