ransferred from their native country to adorn, the temples
and palaces of Egypt and Syria. We find, from Plutarch, that when
Aratus was exerting himself to gain for the Achaean league the powerful
alliance of Ptolemy Euergetes, he found no means so effectual in
conciliating the good-will of the monarch, as the procuring for him
some of the master-pieces of Pamphilus[7] and Melanthius, the most
renowned of the famous school of Sicyon; and the knowledge of the high
estimation in which the arts were held, under the Egyptian kings,
gives an additional value to the accounts given by Tatius of these
treasures of a past age, his notices of which are the latest, in
point of time, which have come down to us from an eyewitness. We have
already quoted the author's vivid description of the painting of
Europa at Sidon--we shall now subjoin, as a pendant to the former
notice, his remarks on a pair of pictures at Pelusium:--

[7] Pamphilus was a Macedonian by birth, and a pupil of
Eupompus, the founder of the school of Sicyon; to the
presidency of which he succeeded. His pupils paid each a
talent a year for instruction; and Melanthius, and even
Apelles himself, for a time, were among the number.--Pliny,
_Hist. Nat_. xxxv. 36. The great talent of Melanthius, like
that of his master Pamphilus, lay in composition and grouping;
and so highly were his pictures esteemed, that Pliny, in
another passage, says, that the wealth of a city would hardly
purchase one.

"In this temple (of Jupiter Casius) were two famous works of
Evanthes, illustrative of the legends of Andromeda and
Prometheus, which the painter had probably selected as a pair,
from the similarity of the Subjects--the principal figure in
each being bound to a rock and exposed to the attack of a
terrific animal; in one case a denizen of the air, in the
other a monster of the sea; and the deliverers of both being
Argives, and of kindred blood to each other, Hercules and
Perseus--the former of whom encountered, on foot, the savage
bird sent by Jove, while the latter mounted on borrowed wings
into the air, to assail the monster which issued from the sea
at the command of Neptune. In the picture of Andromeda, the
virgin was laid in a hollow of the rock, not fashioned by art,
but rough like a natural cavity; and which, if viewed only
with regard to the beauty of that which it containe