Now every single 'motive' of this description,--Europa with one hand
holding the bull's horn, with the other lifting her dress, the wind
puffing out her shawl like a sail, is repeated in the Pompeian wall-
pictures, which themselves are believed to be derived from
Alexandrian originals. There are more curious coincidences than
this. In the sixth idyl of Theocritus, Damoetas makes the Cyclops
say that Galatea 'will send him many a messenger.' The mere idea of
describing the monstrous cannibal Polyphemus in love, is artificial
and Alexandrian. But who were the 'messengers' of the sea-nymph
Galatea? A Pompeian picture illustrates the point, by representing a
little Love riding up to the shore on the back of a dolphin, with a
letter in his hand for Polyphemus. Greek art in Egypt suffered from
an Egyptian plague of Loves. Loves flutter through the Pompeian
pictures as they do through the poems of Moschus and Bion. They are
carried about in cages, for sale, like birds. They are caught in
bird-traps. They don the lion-skin of Heracles. They flutter about
baskets laden with roses; round rosy Loves, like the cupids of
Boucher. They are not akin to 'the grievous Love,' the mighty
wrestler who threw Daphnis a fall, in the first idyl of Theocritus.
They are 'the children that flit overhead, the little Loves, like the
young nightingales upon the budding trees,' which flit round the dead
Adonis in the fifteenth idyl. They are the birds that shun the boy
fowler, in Bion's poem, and perch uncalled (as in a bronze in the
Uffizi) on the grown man. In one or other of the sixteen Pompeian
pictures of Venus and Adonis, the Loves are breaking their bows and
arrows for grief, as in the hymn of Bion.

Enough has perhaps been said about the social and artistic taste of
Alexandria to account for the remarkable differences in manner