d division of the Spada Pompey has already been recorded by
the historian of the _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_. Mr. Gibbon
found it in the memorials of Flaminius Vacca; and it may be added to his
mention of it, that Pope Julius III. gave the contending owners five
hundred crowns for the statue, and presented it to Cardinal Capo di
Ferro, who had prevented the judgment of Solomon from being executed
upon the image. In a more civilised age this statue was exposed to an
actual operation: for the French, who acted the Brutus of Voltaire in
the Coliseum, resolved that their Caesar should fall at the base of that
Pompey, which was supposed to have been sprinkled with the blood of the
original dictator. The nine-foot hero was therefore removed to the arena
of the amphitheatre, and, to facilitate its transport, suffered the
temporary amputation of its right arm. The republican tragedians had to
plead that the arm was a restoration: but their accusers do not believe
that the integrity of the statue would have protected it. The love of
finding every coincidence, has discovered the true Caesarian ichor in a
stain near the right knee; but colder criticism has rejected not only
the blood, but the portrait, and assigned the globe of power rather to
the first of the emperors than to the last of the republican masters of
Rome. Winckelmann[625] is loth to allow an heroic statue of a Roman
citizen, but the Grimani Agrippa, a contemporary almost, is heroic; and
naked Roman figures were only very rare, not absolutely forbidden. The
face accords much better with the "hominem integrum et castum et
gravem,"[626] than with any of the busts of Augustus, and is too stern
for him who was beautiful, says Suetonius, at all periods of his life.
The pretended likeness to Alexander the Great cannot be discerned, but
the traits resemble the medal of Pompey.[627] The objectionable globe
may not have been an ill-applied flattery to him who found Asia Minor
the boundary, and left it the centre of the Roman empire. It seems that
Winckelmann has made a mistake in thinking that no proof of the identity
of this statue with that which received the bloody sacrifice can be
derived from the spot where it was discovered.[628] Flaminius Vacca says
_sotto una cantina_, and this cantina is known to have been in the
Vicolo de' Leutari, near the Cancellaria; a position corresponding
exactly to that of the Janus before the basilica of Pompey's theatre, to
which A