- ture. Some persons thought they could make out at its
foot the letters [GREEK: z] and [GREEK: s], from whence (as antiquaries were then no less bold in their conjectures than they now are), they took occasion to infer, in a somewhat forced manner, the name of Zenodorus; thus attributing the work to a painter of the same name as the artist who at a later period cast the Colossus of Rhodes.
The "Rhodian Genius," however,—for such was the name given to the picture,—did not want for commentators and interpreters in Syracuse. Amateurs of the arts, and especially the younger amongst them, on returning from a short visit to Corinth or Athens, would have thought it equivalent to renouncing all pretensions to connoisseurship if they had not been provided with some new explanation. Some regarded the Genius as the personification of Spiritual Love, forbidding the enjoyment of sensual pleasures; others said it was the assertion of the empire of Reason over Desire: the wiser among the critics were silent, and presuming some high though yet undiscovered meaning, examined meanwhile with pleasure the simple composition of the picture.
Still, however, the question remained unsolved. The picture had been copied with various additions and sent to Greece, but not the least light had been thrown on its origin; when at length, at the season of the early rising of the Pleiades, and soon after the reopening of the navigation of the Egean Sea, ships from Rhodes entered the port of Syracuse, bearing a precious collection of statues, altars, candelabras, and paintings, which Dionysius's love of art had caused to be brought together from different parts of Greece.
