"It was best so for her and for us," said Eumedes, after gazing long at
Ledscha's touchingly beautiful, still, dead face.
Then he ordered her to be buried at once and shouted to the guards:
"Everything must be over on this strip of land early to-morrow morning!
Let all who bear arms begin at once. Selene will light the men brightly
enough for the work."
The terrible order given in mercy was fulfilled, and hunger and thirst
were robbed of their numerous prey. When the new day dawned the friends
were still on deck, engaged in grave conversation. The cloudless sky now
arched in radiant light above the azure sea. White seagulls came flying
from the right across the ship, and sportive dolphins gambolled around
her keel.
The flutes of the musicians, marking time for the rowers, echoed gaily up
from the hold, and, obedient to quick words of command, the seamen were
spreading the sails.
The voyage began with a favourable wind. As Hermon looked back for the
last time, the flat, desolate tongue of land appeared like a line of gray
mist in the southeastern horizon; but over it hovered, like a gloomy
thundercloud, the flocks of vultures and ravens, whose numbers were
constantly increasing. Their greedy screaming could still be heard,
though but faintly, yet the eye could no longer distinguish anything in
the fast-vanishing abode of horror, save the hovering whirl of dark
spots--ravens and vultures, vultures and ravens.
Whatever human life had moved there yesterday, now rested from bloody
greed for booty, after victory and defeat, mortal terror, fury, and
despair.
Eumedes pointed out the quiet grave by the sea to his parents, saying:
"The King's command is fulfilled. Not even the one man who is usually
spared to carry the news remains out of the four thousand."
"I thank you," exclaimed Alexander's gray-haired comrade, shaking his
son's right hand, but Thyone laid her hand on Hermon's arm, saving:
"Where the birds are darkening the air behind us lies buried what
incensed Nemesis against you. You must leave the soil of Egypt. True,
it is said that to live in foreign lands, far from the beloved home,
darkens the existence; yet Pergamus, too, is Grecian soil, and there
I see the two noblest of stars illumine your path with their pure light
-art and love."
And his old friend's premonition was fulfilled.
.......................
The story of Arachne is ended. It closed on the Nile. Hermon's new life
began in Pergamus.
As Daphne's husband, under the same roof with the wonderfully invigorated
Myrtilus, his Uncle Archias, and faithful Bias, Hermon found in the new
home what had hovered before the blind man as the fairest goal of
existence in art, love, and friendship.
He did not long miss the gay varied life of Alexandria, because he found
a rich compensation for it, and because Pergamus, too, was a rapidly
growing city, whose artistic decoration was inferior to no other in
Greece.
Of the numerous works which Hermon completed in the service of the first
three art-loving rulers of the new Pergamenian kingdom, Philetaerus,
Eumenes, and Attalus, nothing was preserved except the head of a Gaul.
This noble masterpiece proves how faithful Hermon remained to truth,
which he had early chosen for the guiding star of his art. It is the
modest remnant of the group in which Hermon perpetuated in marble the two
Gallic brothers whom he saw before his last meeting with Ledscha, as they
offered their breasts to the fatal shafts.
One had gazed defiantly at the arrows of the conquerors; the other,
whose head has been preserved, feeling the inevitable approach of death,
anticipates, with sorrowful emotion, the end so close at hand.
Philetaerus had sent this touching work to King Ptolemy to thank him for
the severity with which he had chastised the daring of the barbarians,
who had not spared his kingdom also. The Gaul's head was again found on
Egyptian soil.
[Copied in Th. Schrieber's The Head of the Gaul in the Museum of
Ghizeh in Cairo. Leipsic, 1896. With appendix. By H. Curschmann.]
Hermon also took other subjects in Pergamus from the domain of real life,
though, in most of his work he crossed the limits which he had formerly
imposed upon himself. But one barrier, often as he rushed forward to its
outermost verge, he never dared to pass--moderation, the noblest demand,
to which his liberty-loving race subjected themselves willingly in life
as well as in art. The whole infinite, limitless world of the ideal had
opened itself to the blind man.
He made himself at home in it by remaining faithful to the rule which he
had found in the desert for his creative work, and the genuine happiness
which he enjoyed through Daphne's love and the great fame his sculptures
brought him increased the strong individuality of his power.
The fruits of his tireless industry, the much-admired god of light,
Phoebus Apollo, slaying the dragons of darkness, as well as his
bewitching Arachne, gazing proudly at the fabric with which she
thinks she has surpassed the skill of the goddess, were overtaken by
destruction. In this statue Bias recognised his countrywoman Ledscha,
and often gazed long at it with devout ecstasy. Even Hermon's works of
colossal size vanished from the earth: the Battle of the Amazons and the
relief containing numerous figures: the Sea Gods, which the Regent
Eumenes ordered for the Temple of Poseidon in Pergamus.
The works of his grandson and grandson's pupils, however, are preserved
on the great altar of victory in Pergamus.
The power and energy natural to Hermon, the skill he had acquired in
Rhodes, everything in the changeful life of Alexandria which had induced
him to consecrate his art to reality, and to that alone, and whatever he
had, finally, in quiet seclusion, recognised as right and in harmony with
the Greek nature and his own, blend in those works of his successor,
which a gracious dispensation of Providence permits us still to admire
at the present day, and which we call in its entirety, the art of
Pergamus.
The city was a second beloved home to him, as well as to his wife and
Myrtilus. The rulers of the country took the old Alexandrian Archias
into their confidence and knew how to honour him by many a distinction.
He understood how to value the happiness of his only daughter, the
beautiful development of his grandchildren, and the high place that
Hermon and Myrtilus, whom he loved as if they were his own sons, attained
among the artists of their time. Yet he struggled vainly against the
longing for his dear old home. Therefore Hermon deemed it one of the
best days of his life when his turn came to make Daphne's father a happy
man.
King Ptolemy Philadelphus had sent laurel to the artist who had fallen
under suspicion in Egypt, and his messenger invited him and Myrtilus, and
with them also the exiled merchant, to return to his presence. In
gratitude for the pleasure which Hermon's creation afforded him and his
wife, the cause that kept the fugitive Archias from his home should be
forgiven and forgotten.
The gray-haired son of the capital returned with the Bithynian Gras to
his beloved Alexandria, as if his lost youth was again restored. There
he found unchanged the busy, active life, the Macedonian Council, the
bath, the marketplace, the bewitching conversation, the biting wit, the
exquisite feasts of the eyes--in short, everything for which his heart
had longed even amid the happiness and love of his dear ones in Pergamus.
For two years he endeavoured to enjoy everything as before; but when the
works of the Pergamenian artists, obtained by Ptolemy, had been exhibited
in the royal palaces, he returned home with a troubled mind. Like the
rest of the world, he thought that the reliefs of Myrtilus, representing
scenes of rural life, were wonderful.
The Capture of Proserpina, a life-size marble group by his son-in-law
Hermon, seemed to him no less perfect; but it exerted a peculiar in
fluence upon his paternal heart, for, in the Demeter, he recognised
Daphne, in the Proserpina her oldest daughter Erigone, who bore the name
of Hermon's mother and resembled her in womanly charm. How lovely this
budding girl, who was his grand-daughter, seemed to the grandfather! How
graceful, in spite of the womanly dignity peculiar to her, was the
mother, encircling her imperilled child with her protecting arm!
No work of sculpture had ever produced such an effect upon the old patron
of art.
Gras heard him, in his bedroom, murmur the names "Daphne" and "Erigone,"
and therefore it did not surprise him when, the next morning, he received
the command to prepare everything for the return to Pergamus. It pleased
the Bithynian, for he cared more for Daphne, Hermon, and their children
than all the pleasures of the capital.
A few weeks later Archias found himself again in Pergamus with his
family, and he never left it, though he reached extreme old age, and was
even permitted to gaze in wondering admiration at the first attempts of
the oldest son of Hermon and Daphne, and to hear them praised by others.
This grandson of the Alexandrian Archias afterward became the master who
taught the generation of artists who created the Pergamenian works, in
examining which the question forced itself upon the narrator of this
story: How do these sculptures possess the qualities which distinguish
them so strongly from the other statues of later Hellenic antiquity?
Did the great weaver Imagination err when she blended them, through the
mighty wrestler Hermon, with a tendency of Alexandrian science and art,
which we see appearing again among us children of a period so much later?
Science, which is now once more pursuing similar paths, ought and will
follow them further, but Hermon's words remain applicable to the present
clay: "We will remain loyal servants of the truth; yet it alone does not
hold the key to the holy of holies of art. To him for whom Apollo, the
pure among the gods, and the Muses, friends of beauty, do not open it at
the same time with truth, its gates will remain closed, no matter how
strongly and persistently he shakes them."
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