Britannia on Roman coins of the second century A.D.
The history of art in the Roman period is the history of the interplay of two opposite tendencies. On the one hand there is the Roman taste for realism and accurate representation, combining with the Italian love of naturalism; on the other, the fostering of the Greek tradition of idealism in art both by the Greek artists who worked at Rome and by the Greek enthusiasts among their Roman employers. After the culmination of Roman historical art under the Flavians and Trajan, the second century, as is well known, was marked by a great reaction in favour of things Hellenic, and it is with one small part of the Greek revival under Hadrian and the Antonines, when Greek art blossomed afresh for the last time during the history of the ancient world, that I propose to deal in this paper.