It was above all in plastic art that the contemporary world was enormously rich.  Not only could no public building dispense with such decorations as those above mentioned; no private house of the least pretensions was without its statues, busts, statuettes, carved reliefs, and stucco-work.  Never was statuary in marble or bronze so plentiful in every part of the empire, in public squares, or in the houses of representative people—­in reception-hall, peristyle court, garden, or colonnade.  Portrait statues in the largest towns were to be counted by hundreds, and sometimes by thousands.  Men distinguished in war, in letters, in public life, and in local benefactions were as regularly commemorated by statues or busts as they are in modern times by painted portraits.  Sometimes—­unlike the modern portraits of course—­these were paid for by the recipient of the compliment.  In the comparatively unimportant Forum of Pompeii there stood five colossal statues, between seventy and eighty life-size equestrian statues, and as many standing figures, while the public buildings surrounding this open space contained their dozen or twenty each.  As has been said already, most of the best work in sculpture—­apart from these bronze and marble portraits of contemporaries—­was reproduction of Grecian masterpieces dating from the time of Pheidias onward.  Particularly did the Roman affect the more elaborate work of the period of the later “Macedonian” kings.  Where the actual work was not exactly copied it at least supplied the main conception or motive.  It followed naturally that there would be in existence many copies of the same piece, and, in procuring these, both the public and the householder would feel relieved of any danger of betraying the wrong taste.  The workshops or studios of Greek artists turned out large numbers of a given masterpiece—­a Faun, a Venus, or a Discobolus—­at prices from L50 or so upwards.  It followed also that there were numerous imitations passed off as originals, and many a wealthy man boasted of possessing an “original” or a genuine “old master”—­a Praxiteles or a Lysippus—­when he owned but a clever reproduction.  The same remark applies, not only to the statues, but to the genre-groups and animal forms of which such fine examples can be seen in the Vatican Museum, and also to silver cups by “Mentor” or to bronzes of Corinth.  Petronius, the coarse but witty “arbiter of taste” under Nero, mocks at the vulgar nouveau riche who imagined that the Corinthian bronzes were the work of an artist named Corinthus.

[Illustration:  FIG. 117.—­WALL-PAINTING. (Woman with Tablets.)]

[Illustration:  FIG. 118.—­WALL-PAINTING FROM HERCULANEUM. (Women playing with Knuckle-Bones.)]