If farther illustration of this be wanting, it may be found in the circumstance that, while the Greeks preferred the rather high forehead, and invented the ideal one, the Romans, on the contrary, preferred a little forehead and united eyebrows. Ovid assures us that the women of his time painted their eyebrows in such a manner, that they might appear to form only one.
In the work so often referred to, I have shown that the intensity of functions is as the length of their organs, and the permanence of functions as the breadth of their organs. No truth can be better illustrated than this is, in the organization and the faculties of the Greeks and Romans. With the higher and larger head of the Greeks was united an intensity of genius, which no other people has yet rivalled; and with the broader head of the Romans, a perseverance, equally obstinate and unfeeling, which has been similarly unrivalled.
A good illustration of the vaunted Roman virtue is recorded in Porcia, the daughter of Cato, the wife of Brutus, who plunged a toilet-knife into her thigh, and kept it eight days in the wound, without complaining, to prove to her husband that her courage and her discretion rendered her worthy of entering into the conspiracy, which he meditated; and who also destroyed herself by swallowing burning coals, when she heard of his defeat. Obstinacy and insensibility were great sources of the crimes either perpetrated, or, by their lying historians, pretended to be perpetrated, under the name of Roman virtue.
It would be out of place, here, to enter farther into the character and expression of the face. Those whom these remarks dispose to do so, may refer to the physiognomical work, which I have been so often compelled to allude to.[43] To those who are satisfied, neither with the vague, though tasteful inspirations of Lavater, nor with the empyrical or unreasoned manifestations of Gall and Spurzheim, but who desire the assignment of a reason for every description of physiognomical character or expression, that work may afford some satisfaction.
That the Greeks, either intuitively or reasonedly, distinguished the three species of beauty as to the figure, has been already seen. The heads of Diana, Venus, and Minerva, respectively present beauty of the locomotive, vital, and mental systems.