The Same Methods

Extract

There is nothing to answer in Rizzo's amusing pamphlet, whatever its value as a document of taste. I will therefore limit myself to correcting the errors of fact which it contains, or at least those of them that have any bearing on the matters at issue, and to remarking that the points of my original argument in the last number of this Journal, in so far as they are mentioned at all, remain unshaken after the thirty-five-page torrent of sound and fury has passed.

I did not, of course, object to the use of plaster casts in Prassitele, but of plaster restorations; and not irrelevantly, since the improvements on Greek art in Saggi Preliminari are of a piece with them, as is the specimen of Latin verse in the latest pamphlet. Evidently false quantities matter no more than false noses.

The statement attributed to me in Saggi Preliminari that a certain class of Syracusan coin first appeared in 485 B.C. is repeated here. But where is this statement? What I said was that the earliest of the class was about 500, the latest about 485. Comment is unnecessary on the method, already familiar, that will now take one of the earliest coins (die-linked with one which I actually described as the earliest), place it beside a coin of 478 B.C., and ask if it is conceivable that only seven years separate the two. It is the same method that silently omits one of the two coins which I said were falsely described in Saggi Preliminari, and instead illustrates the other (about which I said there might exist a slight doubt) twice.