ANTIQUE'. As the term ancients is commonly applied to the Greeks and Romans, the word A. is used with reference to their works of art, especially their incomparable sculptures. The A. style in works of art is distinguished by critics from the romantic or mediteval, and also from the modern. The sculpture of the Greeks is characterized by freshness, originality, and ideality; and the phases it underwent have their parallels in the development of the literature and general culture of that people. In the earliest times the statues had a rigid, formal character, and looked more like the idols of bar barous nations than deities in human form; then came stern, Titan-like forms, corre sponding with the Prometheus of ../Eschylus; next the sculptures of Phidias, Polycletes, and Polygnotus—like the characters in the dramas of Sophocles—present to us humanity in its purest and noblest ideal forms. Then, as Euripides in poetry left the old domain of destiny, and derived motives and action from ordinary human passions, so statuary descended from the ideal to a closer resemblance to the forms of actual life; as we see in the works of Praxiteles and Lysippus. Afterwards, when Aristophanes introduced
comedy, forms of every-day life began to appear in sculpture: and thus a gradual transi tion was made from the art of the Greeks, which was ideal, in the true sense of the word, to that of the Romans, which was real, monumental, and portrait-like. The Romans were the realists of the ancient world; their indigenous philosophy was of a popular kind; their poetry, so far as it was national, was satire; and their works of art may be regarded as monuments and portraitures of real life, quite suitable for a nation of soldiers, lawyers, and politicians, but vastly inferior to the ideal beauty displayed in the best period of Grecian art.