d by the swarm of the
Roman populace, with the emperor and his court, and the College of the
Vestal Virgins, and, for chief actors, the hapless wretches who are
"butchered to make a Roman holiday." Another picture that greatly
increased Gerome's reputation, was his "Death of Julius Caesar," though
it must be confessed there was a touch of the stage in the arrangement
of the scene, and in the action of the body of senators and
conspirators leaving the hall with brandished swords and as if singing
in chorus, that was absent from the pictures of the amphitheatre.
There was also less material for the curiosity of the lovers of
archaeology; no such striking point, for instance, as the reproduction
of the gladiators' helmets and armor recently discovered in
Herculaneum; but the body of the dead Caesar lying "even at the base of
Pompey's statue" with his face muffled in his toga, was a masterly
performance; some critic, moved by the grandeur of the lines, said it
was not a mere piece of foreshortening, it was "a perspective." Gerome
made a life-size painting of the Caesar in this picture. It is in the
Corcoran Gallery at Washington.

Gerome painted several other pictures from classic subjects, but none
of them had the interest for the general public of those we have
described. In 1854 he exhibited a huge canvas, called "The Age of
Augustus," a picture suggested, perhaps, by the "Hemicycle" of his
master Delaroche, on which he himself had painted. It represented
heroes, poets, sages, of the Augustan age, grouped about the cradle of
the infant Christ; it procured for Gerome the red ribbon of the Legion
of Honor, and is now, as the artist himself jestingly says, "the
'greatest' picture in the Museum of Amiens." In the same year Gerome
went to Egypt for the first time; since then he has more than once
visited it, but it is doubtful if he could renew the pleasure of his
youthful experience. "I set out," he says, "with my friends, I the
fifth, all of us lightly furnished with money, but full of youthful
enthusiasm. Life was then easy in Egypt; we lived at a very moderate
rate; we hired a boat and lived four months upon the Nile, hunting,
painting, fishing by turns, from Damietta to Philae. We returned to
Cairo and remained there four months longer in a house in the older
part of the town, belonging to Soleman Pasha. As Frenchmen, he treated
us with cordial hospitality. Happy period of youth, of freedom from
care! Hope and the futur