The idea of the clas­si­cal period—the time of ancient Greece and Rome—as an ele­gant­ly uni­fied col­lec­tion of supe­ri­or aes­thet­ic and philo­soph­i­cal cul­tur­al traits has its own his­to­ry, one that comes in large part from the era of the Neo­clas­si­cal. The redis­cov­ery of antiq­ui­ty took some time to reach the pitch it would dur­ing the 18th cen­tu­ry, when ref­er­ences to Greek and Latin rhetoric, archi­tec­ture, and sculp­ture were inescapable. But from the Renais­sance onward, the clas­si­cal achieved the sta­tus of cul­tur­al dog­ma. One tenet of clas­si­cal ide­al­ism is the idea that Roman and Greek stat­u­ary embod­ied an ide­al of pure whiteness—a mis­con­cep­tion mod­ern sculp­tors per­pet­u­at­ed for hun­dreds of years by mak­ing busts and stat­ues in pol­ished white mar­ble. But the truth is that both Greek stat­ues and their Roman counterparts—as you’ll learn in the Vox video above—were orig­i­nal­ly bright­ly paint­ed in riotous col­or. This includes the 1st cen­tu­ry A.D. Augus­tus of Pri­ma Por­ta, the famous fig­ure of the Emper­or stand­ing tri­umphant­ly with one hand raised. Rather than left as blank white mar­ble, the stat­ue would have …