A Roman's View of Art

Extract

The story of Mummius and the art treasures which he pillaged from Corinth, and sent back to Rome with the warning that the carriers would have to replace any that they lost with others of the same value, is a familiar joke from the history books at the expense of Roman sensibility. Perhaps less well known, and equally enlightening, is another story against the same unhappy official, which appears in Pliny (Nat. Hist. 35. 24). Mummius, according to this account, was conducting an auction of pictures from among his booty, and Attalus bid 600,000 denarii (say £21,000) for a picture of Dionysus and Ariadne by Aristides. Thereupon Mummius, ‘surprised at the price and suspecting that the picture had some good quality of which he himself was ignorant’, withdrew the work, and later dedicated it at Rome in the temple of Ceres. It is hardly unfair to Mummius if we imagine him, back in Rome, boasting to his friends how, thanks to his good judgement, he saved the masterpiece from the hands of Attalus. This famous painting comes up again, to the discredit of Rome, in the history of Polybius (39.13), who says that he saw Roman soldiers playing at draughts on it after the sack of Corinth.