who is presently to be lifted
to something like his antique level. 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.

[Illustration: 42 MARCUS AURELIUS WITH OUT-STRETCHED ARM]

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 Neronian 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. But what is certain is that those ladies are no
lovelier in their looks than they were in their lives; to be sure, in
their rank they had not so great need of personal charm as women of the
lower class. The most touching face as well as the most dignified and
beautiful face among them is that of the seated figure which used to be
known as that of Agrippina but which, known now as that of a Roman
matron, does not relieve the imperial average of plainness. The rest
could rival the average American society woman only in the prevailing
modernity of their expression; imperial Rome was very modern, as we all
know, and nothing in our own time could be more up to date than the
lives and looks of its smart people.

The general impression of the other marbles of the Capitoli