Praxiteles, or the bronze heifer of Myron, was the practising-ground
for every tried or untried poet, seeking new praise for some clever
conceit or neater turn of language than had yet been invented.
Especially was this so with the trifling art of the decadence and its
perpetual round of childish Loves: Love ploughing, Love holding a fish
and a flower as symbols of his sovereignty over sea and land, Love
asleep on a pepper-castor, Love blowing a torch, Love grasping or
breaking the thunderbolt, Love with a helmet, a shield, a quiver, a
trident, a club, a drum.[12] Enough of this class of epigrams are
extant to be perfectly wearisome, were it not that, like the engraved
gems from which their subjects are principally taken, they are all,
however trite in subject or commonplace in workmanship, wrought in the
same beautiful material, in that language which is to all other
languages as a gem to an ordinary pebble.

From these sources we are able to collect a body of epigrams which in
a way cover the field of ancient art and literature. Sometimes they
preserve fragments of direct criticism, verbal or real. We have
epigrams on fashions in prose style, on conventional graces of
rhetoric, on the final disappearance of ancient music in the sixth
century.[13] Of art-criticism in the modern sense there is but little.
The striking epigram of Parrhasius, on the perfection attainable in
painting,[14] is almost a solitary instance. Pictures and statues are
generally praised for their actual or imagined realism. Silly stories
like those of the birds pecking at the grapes of Zeuxis, or the calf
who went up to suck the bronze cow of Myron, represent the general
level of the critical faculty. Even Aristotle, it must be remembered,
who represents the most finished Greek criticism, places the pleasure
given by works of art in the recognition by the spectator of things
which he has already seen. "The reason why people enjoy seeing