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1 62 ROMAN DAYS.
Clarac used, when in his essay on the work of art he
"wished to give the reader a first representation of the
statue, which the public had not yet seen ;" but he took
care not to venture upon the question of the inscription?
a nice question to those concerned, and one they wished
to give up to oblivion. Still farther : before De Clarac
published his essay, he consulted with Mr. de Marcellus;
nay, the latter affirms that De Clarac’s whole work is based
upon written accounts that Mr. de Marcellus had given
him ; and we must from this draw the conclusion that De
Marcellus had not the smallest objection to urge against
the faithfulness of Debay’s drawing, which he had pre-
viously seen. In the year 1839, M^"* ^^ Marcellus first
entered upon the question of the inscription ; but only to
announce that he did not remember whether he received,
on Melos, the stone with the artist’s name, and that he
did not know whether this stone was found in Jorgos’s
garden or not.
Yet another proof that an inscription was on the
pedestal! Charles Lenormand in the year 1829 visited
Melos and had a conversation with consular agent Brest
from which he drew the conclusion that the superintend-
ents of the Louvre museum had destroyed an inscrip-
tion " which would oppose the conjecture that they had
succeeded in acquiring a masterpiece from the epoch of
the highest development of Greek art."
Strange it is, however that Dumont d’Urville, in his
description of the statue, published in the Annalcs Mari-
iimes of 1 821, does not say a word of an inscription on the
pedestal, while on the contrary he mentions two others :
one, over the entrance to the niche, the other, on one of
the Hermes’ found in the niche. Must we interpret his
silence as a sacrifice brought to the purpose of the au-
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