Page:The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Volume 1, 1854.djvu/261

On the Classical Authorities for Ancient Art. 251 ploded statements and crippled truths. I am therefore the less surprised at Clarac retaining, in his Musee de Sculture, the old designation without so much as an allusion to the insuperable objections by which it has been met. " II porte autour du cou une corde qui le fait reconnoitre pour un gladiateur" (Clarac I. c). " He wears a white neckcloth, which shews he is a clergyman," would be about equivalent logic, though anything but equivalent English. What Clarac calls a " corde" is of course the Keltic torques. In the Museo Campana is to be seen a gold torques (compare Liv. xliv. 14. " Torques aureus") which was found in the South of France. Similar but less costly specimens have been shewn to me in the Louvre, unless my memory plays me a trick. I feel however that I am fighting with a shadow in contesting the old designation, dear, it may be, to admirers of Childe Harold, but destitute of any weightier claim to our homage. I start with the fact of the statue being a dying Gaul, and then I am irresistibly driven to the conclusion, that it formed one of the works to which Pliny refers. I am myself very strongly of opinion, that it must have formed the corner figure of a pedi- mental group. I should add that it cannot be properly under- stood without comparing it with the so-called Arria and Paetus group, the real subject of which is a Gaul putting an end to self and wife. The actual battle more especially alluded to by Pliny is probably that in which Attalus routed the Gauls b. c. 239. But when we remember I fancy I owe the remark to Welcker, but I cannot quote chapter and verse how rarely the record of his- torical battles was entrusted to the keeping of sculpture, which always preferred a kind of reflective, anticipatory allusion from kindred mythical sources, I think it may be doubted whether the artists did not rather select an earlier engagement (b. c. 279), that at Delphi, which Propertius saw portrayed on one of the valvce of the temple of Apollo on the Palatine ; an engagement, this, with which tradition had connected so many supernatural events (see Pausanias), that it might easily be as the mythical shadow, cast before by the coming event of History proper. But, waiving the discussion of this and many other points so pregnant with interest that I am loathe to give them the go-bye, I must content myself with observing, that, whether the conjecture as to the connection between Antigonus and the statue of the dying Gaul be correct or not, the identity of the artist of the school