ABSTRACT
While, during the last century of the Republic, the contact of life gives the eloquence, the history, and the poetry of Rome a more robust and passionate quality, that is, an infinitely more vigorous character than anything that we can find in the Greek world after Alexander’s time, the plastic arts are far from showing the same originality. No doubt they display, in a general fashion, the same tendencies and tastes as literature as a whole, but they do not clothe Greek inspiration in a Roman form. One might say that they show without disguise the fundamentally Hellenistic character of the civilization which Rome and Italy share with the rest of the Mediterranean world.
