Percy Gardner

“ It would puzzle many a modern artist to solve the artistic problem thus set, to produce eighteen figures of women, all young and of the same type, all standing in poses both in themselves elegant but yet suggestive of grief, and so different one from the other that there is no sameness or repetition. But artistic problems of this sort had a special attraction for Greek artists of the best period—for the artist who planned the Parthenon frieze as well as for the artists of the Mausoleum. ”

“ The two great literatures of Greece, the Epic and the Attic, belong each to a class, to an aristocracy whether of birth or of talent, and stand high above the beliefs of the common people. If we wish to ascertain what the ordinary Greek citizen, l’homme sensuel moyen, thought and felt in the presence of death, whether his own or that of friends, we must supplement the study of the poets, the orators, and the philosophers{viii} by an investigation of ritual, of burial customs, and of the lines of tombs which stretched from the gates of many Greek cities on both sides of the main roads. ”

“ In fact we may see two lines of tendency taking their rise in the mere image of the dead. The one tendency is to bring it nearer to the images of the gods; to identify the departed ancestor or friend with Hades, the ruler of the world of shades. The other tendency is to render the portrait a characteristic memorial of the life which is past. In almost all existing sculptural remains we may see something of both tendencies, and it is by no means easy to determine what features in them properly belong to the past life, and what features to the life which begins with death. ”

“ It is occupied by the grove of Persephone, represented in the sparing fashion of Greek painting by a single tree, under which sits Orpheus, his lyre in his hands. No doubt we have here the key to the picture. Orpheus is the central figure of the whole. To Polygnotus he is not merely a departed hero, but priest and hierophant. The song which he sings is the mystic song of immortality. ”

“ It would not be easy to imagine a more vigorous and lifelike image of a fallen warrior than this. Drapery and bodily forms alike are of the noblest. The face, with its square form, overhanging eyebrows, and parted lips, breathes the very spirit of military ardour. Such as every friend of Aristonautes would wish him to look when he sprang forward in his last fatal rush upon the foe, such he stands in imperishable marble. ”

“ THE WORSHIP OF THE DEAD
No Greek custom constituted a larger part of religious cultus than did the offerings to the dead. And no custom is more frequently portrayed on ancient vases. Such offerings did not begin merely with the funeral, but even earlier.
According to the beliefs of most barbarous or semi-barbarous races, the dead have needs and desires as imperious as those of the living. Indeed, the life of the next world is regarded as in the main a ghostly continuation of previous existence, a life marked by the same habits and requirements as that which men live on earth. ”

“ The snake, the pomegranate, the offerings, all have reference to the status of the dead as hero and as an associate of the nether gods. But the Athenian relief might at first sight be supposed to be an excerpt out of daily domestic life. There is no symbolism, no exaltation. Husband, wife, and slave may have met thus a hundred times in their ordinary life on earth. In this we find the influence of the ordinary spirit of grave-reliefs at Athens, which, as we shall see in a future chapter, dwells on and draws from the past daily life rather than the more ghostly life of the future. ”

“ And there is no other series of monuments which seems to take us so readily into the daily life of the Greeks and to make us feel that they were men and women of like nature with ourselves, no longer cold and classic, but full of the warm blood and the gentle affections of ordinary humanity. ”

“ A grave in Westminster Abbey is supposed to recompense the English soldier for pain and untimely death, but surely the idea of living in marble under the eyes of all his fellow-citizens might furnish at least as strong an impulse to valiant deeds as the thought of a modern cathedral with its tasteless monuments and inanimate likenesses. ”

“ At his feet is a dog scenting the quarry; on the steps of the stele is seated in an attitude of dejection a young boy, while an old man, no doubt the father of him to whom the tomb belongs, gazes earnestly into his face. ”

“ The tomb of Annia Regilla, wife of Herodes Atticus, at Athens, bears an inscription in which the prayer is set forth that for any one who disturbs the grave the earth may refuse to bear fruit and the sea refuse to bear his ships, and that he and his race may perish miserably. Blessings are heaped on all who may honour the burial-place. Our minds naturally pass to the well-known epitaph on Shakespeare’s tomb at Stratford, which may perhaps have been framed on an ancient model. ”

“ If the dead were safe in Hades they could not also live in their tombs; why then take offerings thither? If their life was the life of dreams and of shadows, why did they need food, both animal and vegetable, and abundant drink? This is sufficiently obvious to us. Yet Greek belief in all ages must have found some means of reconciling theory and cultus, and of preventing the course of speculation as to the state of the departed from interfering with the practical piety of the worship of ancestors. ”

“ The bright genius of Attic art had little sympathy with the mystic side of man’s nature. Its tendency was not towards ethical religion, but towards beauty and enjoyment and social life. Thus, in the memorials of the dead, the Athenians and those who took their tone from Attic art sought to produce a pleasing and not too vivid memorial of the dead, rather than a record of hope in the future life. ”

“ It will be observed that the sphinx of the terra-cotta has human arms. This, and her female sex, bring her into close connexion with other female monsters, who also are winged and have the arms of women, the Harpies and the Sirens. Harpy and Siren are, in fact, not clearly distinguished in art; both are human-headed birds. And both are daemons destructive to human life, since, according to the legends, the Harpies were notable for foul and ravenous habits, the Sirens for a passion for the blood of the sailors whom they drew to them by the sweetness of their singing. ”

“ The Mausoleum was a wonder of the world, not so much on account of its size and costliness as because of its ingenious architecture and noble sculpture. Though it had not the magnificence of the Taj Mahal of Agra, nor the solidity of the{242} Pyramids of Egypt, it is probably the noblest tomb ever erected for mortal man. It not only immortalized the name of Mausolus, but it is also a leading authority for the style of the second great school of Attic sculptors. Its poor remains are among the most precious possessions of the British Museum. ”

“ It seems a fair historical conjecture that the great sarcophagus is that of Abdalonymus, who seems to have been the last of the native royal race, and who records on his tomb alike his own exploits and those of his hero and protector Alexander.
The beauty of the whole sarcophagus cannot be judged from our representations, few in number and small in size. To be appreciated fully, the great monument must be seen in its place in the Museum at Constantinople: its beauty and preservation are alike overpowering. ”

“ The sculptures which adorn these curious constructions have also local elements, but in this field the art of Ionia comes in as a controlling force in the sixth century, rendering the native customs and beliefs in forms to which the student of Greek art is accustomed. It may be that our familiarity with the forms and style of the sculpture in some degree misleads us. When we know the words of a language we sometimes too hastily think that we are masters of its thought. The religion and the customs of Lycia may resemble those of Greece less closely than the monuments would lead us to think. ”

“ The early art of Greece is seldom very successful in dealing with children. Children did not, in the great age of Hellas, interest the Greeks as they do us; they were valued rather for what they would become than for what they were. Thus the representations of them are made too much in the light of the future, and boys and girls on the monuments are figured as little men and women. ”

“ Dates and schools are mixed up with the most perplexing indifference. Epigrams of Simonides and Sappho are placed next to the verses of Callimachus and Archias, of Rufinus and Paulus Silentiarius, authors who between them cover a space of more than a millennium. And, moreover, in no department of Greek letters is the rhetorical and epideictic spirit, that pest of Greece, more rampant than in the epigram. The great majority of sepulchral epigrams were written, not to duly honour the dead, but to display the literary taste and ingenuity of the poet. ”

“ It can scarcely be contended that the lion is a great work of sculpture. His size is imposing and his attitude monumental, but the head and body alike lack character and force. This is true of all the lions of Greek artists of the period, the great lion set up in memory of Chaeroneia, those which adorned the Mausoleum, and others. The fact is that the Greeks between the days of the Persian Wars and those of Alexander knew nothing of the lion, probably scarcely ever saw one, dead or alive. ”

“ A lady, seated in the same fashion as in the last two reliefs, stretches both her hands towards a matron who stands before her, and who lightly touches her face with the right hand. Behind the seated figure stands a young girl; beneath the seat is a dove feeding. Here the expression of the two principal persons, leaning one towards the other and tenderly embracing one another, has an obvious significance. It is no embrace of daily life, but one which goes before a long parting. ”

“ In ancient Greece generally, and more especially at Athens, men gave to their wives and families only such time and care as they could spare from more engrossing occupations. By nature the Athenians were intensely political. And while Athens was a ruling power, and every citizen had a part in the game of politics played on a great scale, it was to public life that their thoughts and energies were directed, and the life of the home remained very much in the background. Every scholar is familiar with the contemptuous language applied by Aristophanes and Euripides to women ”

“ The richest graves yet discovered in Greece are those of the pre-historic rulers of Mycenae, spoiled by Dr. Schliemann in 1877. In these sepulchres were found treasures sufficient{13} to stock a great museum—armour and ornaments of gold, swords and arrows, drinking-cups and sceptres, every kind of object in which the wealth of semi-barbarous chiefs is commonly displayed. In the historic age the profusion is less marked, but we yet find abundant proofs of the survival of the custom of fully equipping the dead for their existence in the world of shades. ”

“ We must imagine most of the roads leading to great cities as flanked on both sides by the sculptured memorials of the dead. Those who have visited Rome and Pompeii will be familiar with this custom, which seems to us rather depressing. But we must remember that the tombs of the Greeks and Romans had not that air of uniform melancholy which tombs bear among us. The frontispiece shows a part of the great Athenian cemetery of the Cerameicus, which lay just outside the Dipylon Gate. ”

“ As the Lycian Tomb carries an echo of the style of Pheidias, so the Tomb of the Mourning Women reminds us at once of the works of the second Attic school, and of Praxiteles in particular. We should date it about B.C. 370 or 360. I can only describe in detail the scenes of the one end of it which is selected for the illustration; of the rest of the sculptured reliefs a very summary description must suffice. Never was there a work of art in which death and mourning were represented in so varied and so exquisitely subdued a fashion. ”

“ Yet when we try to explain the sculptures as memorials of Lycian ancestor-worship we soon come to difficulties. On the stelae of Sparta we find a pair, ancestor and ancestress, or the ancestor alone. On Attic tombs we do not find more than a family group. But here, on the monument of Xanthus, there are five detached seated figures, three men and two women. What kind of a group of ancestors will these form, and why are they separate? In the little seated lady of the north side one is tempted, on the analogy of mediaeval paintings, to see the dedicator of the whole tomb. ”

“ We can indeed venture to say that in the Athenian reliefs as they reach us, the setting is full of allusions to the life of the past, while all that suggests Hades is conspicuously absent. At the same time, while this is the clear result of artistic analysis, it is quite impossible to say that the hopes and longings of survivors may not have sometimes found in the mere grouping of a family scene some earnest of re-united family life under other conditions than those of earth. ”

“ XIII is a noble figure of an athletic ephebus. He stands solidly on flat feet, naked but for a chlamys which he holds with the right hand, while the left grasps strigil and oil-flask, the necessaries of the life of the athlete. ”

“ A priestess of Zeus, at Argos [276] , seems to have found a tomb in the sacred precinct of the god; whence her epitaph runs: ‘The divine ruler, to whom it was my honour to minister when alive, took my blameless life and gave me this favour among the dead. Hence I have not a tomb underground, but dwell in the place of the blest, in the golden home of the gods.’ Here there seems to be a play upon the place of burial, as involving a parallel exaltation of the spirit. ”

“ An elderly man reclines on a couch, beside which is a table spread with fruits, and a slave pouring wine. A serpent twined round the table has clearly a sepulchral reference. The wife of the hero is seated at his feet: both turn with surprise and delight to the left of the relief, where the young Dionysus, bearing a thyrsus, and supporting his reeling body on the shoulder of a young satyr, advances towards the couch. ”

“ The son, a dignified youth, wrapped in his himation ‘like an image of modesty’ as Aristophanes puts it, stretches out one hand to receive the gift. On the Lycian Harpy Tomb, a youth presents in similar fashion to a seated male figure a dove held by the wings; and this bird, as the smallest and least expensive of animal offerings, was a very usual gift to the dead. Lysanias is almost beyond doubt the person in whose honour the tomb was set up, and his mother’s gift can scarcely have failed to convey to the mind of a Greek spectator some sepulchral significance. ”

“ As we approach the middle of the fifth century, the art of the sculptor in Greece is taking constantly a higher and a wider range. Great temples are rising on all sides, especially at Athens, and offering to great artists noble opportunities of distinction to be won either by designing the great cultus-statues of the gods, or by fitly adorning the outsides of their temples. ”