In the discipline of classical archaeology different terms such as “realism”, “verism” or “naturalism” have been coined - like in art history - for describing a physics-based approach of art to its subjects and have been filled with various sets of meanings. This volume aims at revealing the complexity of this discussion or at least part of it and present it to the wider public without masking its inconsistency. For this purpose, papers by renowned scholars have been combined with texts produced by students in several university courses. The book contains a foreword by the editors and eleven chapters on the topics of the discovery of reality, of mimesis, types of realism, and the quest for reality, of Greek portraits from Classicism to Hellenism, images of elderly women in Greek and Roman antiquity, statues of Greek athletes, the ugliness of the Greek philosopher en in Greek funeral reliefs, the iconography of the Greek population in comedy, Hellenistic genre figures s Socrates, Chrysippus, and Diogenes, Roman portraits, representations of craftsm such as fishermen, peasants or herdsmen, and grotesque pictures of dwarfs, beggars, and slaves.