When this picture was bought by one of the Museum's most generous donors, George W. Elkins, in 1903, it was one of the most expensive works of art ever sold. A taste for this type of "Victorians in Toga" painting did not last into the next generation, however, and by the 1920s Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema's reputation, and market, had plummeted. But those things that had so pleased Elkins as well as Henry Marquand, who had commissioned this painting for his New York recital room, are now again a little more within our reach. The story told in the painting is a wonder of simplicity, just as the execution is a marvel in the rendering of materials and textures. In a marble palace far above the sea a handsome man, crowned with laurels, reads from a long scroll to a rapt if varied audience. As depicted by Alma-Tadema himself, a completely guileless and genuine storyteller and craftsman, such a far-off time does not seem so very inaccessible, and such seemingly noble people do not seem so very different from us. Joseph J. Rishel, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 199.