easiest medium of artistic expression, literature commonly develops earlier than the graphic or plastic arts. We must therefore be prepared for the shock of finding that Homer belongs to the same period as a very ugly and inartistic decorative style on the vases and most rudimentary and primitive forms of statuary. The pages of Homer do not really lead us to expect anything else. Sculpture is scarcely mentioned in Homer. There is only one temple statue, and that is the statue of Athena at Troy, of which we are told that the Trojan women used to lay a richly embroidered robe upon its knees. We are probably, then, to conceive a rude seated figure of wood or stone such as we find at the earliest stages of Greek sculpture. Their roughness and rudeness might be mitigated by coverings of embroidery. At Branchidæ, near Miletus, a whole series of such figures was discovered, dedicated with writing of about 550 B.C.; but we can easily believe that such a type might persist