unlovelier side, grotesque, unhellenic, unglorified by art,
illustrated well enough by the description Pausanias gives us of his
visit to the cave of the Black Demeter at Phigalia. In his time the
image itself had vanished; but he tells us enough about it to enable
us to realise its general characteristics, monstrous as the special
legend with which it was connected, the black draperies, the horse's
head united to the woman's body, with the carved reptiles creeping
about it. If, with the thought of this gloomy image of our mother
the earth, in our minds, we take up one of those coins [138] which
bear the image of Kore or Demeter,* we shall better understand what
the function of sculpture really was, in elevating and refining the
religious conceptions of the Greeks. Looking on the profile, for
instance, on one of those coins of Messene, which almost certainly
represent Demeter, and noting the crisp, chaste opening of the lips,
the minutely wrought earrings, and the delicately touched ears of
corn,--this trifling object being justly regarded as, in its
aesthetic qualities, an epitome of art on a larger scale,--we shall
see how far the imagination of the Greeks had travelled from what
their Black Demeter shows us had once been possible for them, and in
making the gods of their worship the objects of a worthy
companionship in their thoughts. Certainly, the mind of the old
workman who struck that coin was, if we may trust the testimony of
his work, unclouded by impure or gloomy shadows. The thought of
Demeter is impressed here, with all the purity and proportion, the
purged and dainty intelligence of the human countenance. The mystery
of it is indeed absent, perhaps could hardly have been looked for in
so slight a thing, intended for no sacred purpose, and tossed lightly
from hand to hand. But in his firm hold on the harmonies of the
human face, the designer of this tranquil head of [139] Demeter is on
the one road to a command over the secrets of all imaginative pathos
and mystery; though, in the perfect fairness and blitheness of his
work, he might seem almost not to have known the incidents of her
terrible story.
It is probable that, at a later period than in other equally
important temples of Greece, the earlier archaic representation of
Demeter in the sanctuary of Eleusis, was replaced by a more beautiful
image in the new style, with face and hands of ivory, having
therefore, in tone and texture, some subtler likeness to women's
flesh, and the closely enveloping drapery being constructed in
daintily beaten plates of gold. Praxiteles seems to have been the
first to bring into the region of a freer artistic handling these shy
deities of the earth, shrinking still within the narrow restraints of
a hieratic, conventional treatment, long after the more genuine
Olympians had broken out of them. The school of Praxiteles, as
distinguished from that of Pheidias, is especially the school of
grace, relaxing a little the severe ethical tension of the latter, in
favour of a slightly Asiatic sinuosity and tenderness. Pausanias
tells us that he carved the two goddesses for the temple of Demeter
at Athens; and Pliny speaks of two groups of his in brass, the one
representing the stealing of Persephone, the other her later, annual
descent into Hades, conducted thither by the now pacified mother.
All alike have perished; though perhaps some [140] more or less faint
reflexion of the most important of these designs may still be traced
on many painted vases which depict the stealing of Persephone,--a
helpless, plucked flower in the arms of Aidoneus. And in this almost
traditional form, the subject was often represented, in low relief,
on tombs, some of which still remain; in one or two instances, built
up, oddly enough, in the walls of Christian churches. On the tombs
of women who had died in early life, this was a favourite subject,
some likeness of the actual lineaments of the deceased being
sometimes transferred to the features of Persephone.
Yet so far, it might seem, when we consider the interest of this
story in itself, and its importance in the Greek religion, that no
adequate expression of it had remained to us in works of art. But in
the year 1857, the discovery of the marbles, in the sacred precinct
of Demeter at Cnidus, restored to us an illustration of the myth in
its artistic phase, hardly less central than the Homeric hymn in its
poetical phase. With the help of the descriptions and plans of Mr.
Newton's book,* we can form, as one always wishes to do in such
cases, a clear idea of the place where these marbles--three statues
of the best style of Greek sculpture, now in the British Museum--were
found. Occupying a ledge of rock, looking towards the sea, at the
base of a [141] cliff of upheaved limestone, of singular steepness
and regularity of surface, the spot presents indications of volcanic
disturbance, as if a chasm in the earth had opened here. It was this
character, suggesting the belief in an actual connexion with the
interior of the earth (local tradition claiming it as the scene of
the stealing of Persephone), which probably gave rise, as in other
cases where the landscape presented some peculiar feature in harmony
with the story, to the dedication upon it of a house and an image of
Demeter, with whom were associated Kore and "the gods with Demeter"--
hoi theoi para Damatri+--Aidoneus, and the mystical or Chthonian
Dionysus. The house seems to have been a small chapel only, of
simple construction, and designed for private use, the site itself
having been private property, consecrated by a particular family, for
their own religious uses, although other persons, servants or
dependents of the founders, may also have frequented it. The
architecture seems to have been insignificant, but the sculpture
costly and exquisite, belonging, if contemporary with the erection of
the building, to a great period of Greek art, of which also it is
judged to possess intrinsic marks--about the year 350 before Christ,
the probable date of the dedication of the little temple. The
artists by whom these works were produced were, therefore, either the
contemporaries of Praxiteles, whose Venus was for many centuries the
glory of [142] Cnidus, or belonged to the generation immediately
succeeding him. The temple itself was probably thrown down by a
renewal of the volcanic disturbances; the statues however remaining,
and the ministers and worshippers still continuing to make shift for
their sacred business in the place, now doubly venerable, but with
its temple unrestored, down to the second or third century of the
Christian era, its frequenters being now perhaps mere chance comers,
the family of the original donors having become extinct, or having
deserted it. Into this later arrangement, clearly divined by Mr.
Newton, through those faint indications which mean much for true
experts, the extant remains, as they were found upon the spot, permit
us to enter. It is one of the graves of that old religion, but with
much still fresh in it. We see it with its provincial superstitions,
and its curious magic rites, but also with its means of really solemn
impressions, in the culminating forms of Greek art; the two faces of
the Greek religion confronting each other here, and the whole having
that rare peculiarity of a kind of personal stamp upon it, the place
having been designed to meet the fancies of one particular soul, or
at least of one family. It is always difficult to bring the every-
day aspect of Greek religion home to us; but even the slighter
details of this little sanctuary help us to do this; and knowing so
little, as we do, of the greater mysteries of [143] Demeter, this
glance into an actual religious place dedicated to her, and with the
air of her worship still about it, is doubly interesting. The little
votive figures of the goddesses, in baked earth, were still lying
stored in the small treasury intended for such objects, or scattered
about the feet of the images, together with lamps in great number, a
lighted lamp being a favourite offering, in memory of the torches
with which Demeter sought Persephone, or from some sense of inherent
darkness in these gods of the earth; those torches in the hands of
Demeter being indeed originally the artificial warmth and brightness
of lamp and fire, on winter nights. The dirae or spells,--katadesmoi+-
-binding or devoting certain persons to the infernal gods, inscribed
on thin rolls of lead, with holes, sometimes, for hanging them up
about those quiet statues, still lay, just as they were left,
anywhere within the sacred precinct, illustrating at once the
gloomier side of the Greek religion in general, and of Demeter and
Persephone especially, in their character of avenging deities, and as
relics of ancient magic, reproduced so strangely at other times and
places, reminding us of the permanence of certain odd ways of human
thought. A woman binds with her spell the person who seduces her
husband away from her and her children; another, the person who has
accused her of preparing poison for her husband; another devotes one
who has not restored a borrowed [144] garment, or has stolen a
bracelet, or certain drinking-horns; and, from some instances, we
might infer that this was a favourite place of worship for the poor
and ignorant. In this living picture, we find still lingering on, at
the foot of the beautiful Greek marbles, that phase of religious
temper which a cynical mind might think a truer link of its unity and
permanence than any higher aesthetic instincts--a phase of it, which
the art of sculpture, humanising and refining man's conceptions of
the unseen, tended constantly to do away. For the higher side of the
Greek religion, thus humanised and refined by art, and elevated by it
to the sense of beauty, is here also.
There were three ideal forms, as we saw, gradually shaping themselves
in the development of the story of Demeter, waiting only for complete
realisation at the hands of the sculptor; and now, with these forms
in our minds, let us place ourselves in thought before the three
images which once probably occupied the three niches or ambries in
the face of that singular cliff at Cnidus, one of them being then
wrought on a larger scale. Of the three figures, one probably
represents Persephone, as the goddess of the dead; the second,
Demeter enthroned; the third is probably a portrait-statue of a
priestess of Demeter, but may perhaps, even so, represent Demeter
herself, Demeter Achaea, Ceres Deserta, the mater dolorosa of the
Greeks, a type not as yet [145] recognised in any other work of
ancient art. Certainly, it seems hard not to believe that this work
is in some way connected with the legend of the place to which it
belonged, and the main subject of which it realises so completely;
and, at least, it shows how the higher Greek sculpture would have
worked out this motive. If Demeter at all, it is Demeter the
seeker,--Dêô+--as she was called in the mysteries, in some pause of
her restless wandering over the world in search of the lost child,
and become at last an abstract type of the wanderer. The Homeric
hymn, as we saw, had its sculptural motives, the great gestures of
Demeter, who was ever the stately goddess, as she followed the
daughters of Celeus, or sat by the well-side, or went out and in,
through the halls of the palace, expressed in monumental words. With
the sentiment of that monumental Homeric presence this statue is
penetrated, uniting a certain solemnity of attitude and bearing, to a
profound piteousness, an unrivalled pathos of expression. There is
something of the pity of Michelangelo's mater dolorosa, in the wasted
form and marred countenance, yet with the light breaking faintly over
it from the eyes, which, contrary to the usual practice in ancient
sculpture, are represented as looking upwards. It is the aged woman
who has escaped from pirates, who has but just escaped being sold as
a slave, calling on the young for pity. The sorrows of her long
wanderings seem to have passed into the marble; [146] and in this
too, it meets the demands which the reader of the Homeric hymn, with
its command over the resources of human pathos, makes upon the
sculptor. The tall figure, in proportion above the ordinary height,
is veiled, and clad to the feet in the longer tunic, its numerous
folds hanging in heavy parallel lines, opposing the lines of the
peplus, or cloak, which cross it diagonally over the breast,
enwrapping the upper portion of the body somewhat closely. It is the
very type of the wandering woman, going grandly, indeed, as Homer
describes her, yet so human in her anguish, that we seem to recognise
some far descended shadow of her, in the homely figure of the roughly
clad French peasant woman, who, in one of Corot's pictures, is
hasting along under a sad light, as the day goes out behind the
little hill. We have watched the growth of the merely personal
sentiment in the story; and we may notice that, if this figure be
indeed Demeter, then the conception of her has become wholly
humanised; no trace of the primitive cosmical import of the myth, no
colour or scent of the mystical earth, remains about it.
The seated figure, much mutilated, and worn by long exposure, yet
possessing, according to the best critics, marks of the school of
Praxiteles, is almost undoubtedly the image of Demeter enthroned.
Three times in the Homeric hymn she is represented as sitting, once
by the fountain at the wayside, again in the house of Celeus, and
[147] again in the newly finished temple of Eleusis; but always in
sorrow; seated on the petra agelastos,+ which, as Ovid told us, the
people of Attica still called the stone of sorrow. Here she is
represented in her later state of reconciliation, enthroned as the
glorified mother of all things. The delicate plaiting of the tunic
about the throat, the formal curling of the hair, and a certain
weight of over-thoughtfulness in the brows, recall the manner of
Leonardo da Vinci, a master, one of whose characteristics is a very
sensitive expression of the sentiment of maternity. It reminds one
especially of a work by one of his scholars, the Virgin of the
Balances, in the Louvre, a picture which has been thought to
represent, under a veil, the blessing of universal nature, and in
which the sleepy-looking heads, with a peculiar grace and refinement
of somewhat advanced life in them, have just this half-weary posture.
We see here, then, the Here of the world below, the Stygian Juno, the
chief of those Elysian matrons who come crowding, in the poem of
Claudian, to the marriage toilet of Proserpine, the goddess of the
fertility of the earth and of all creatures, but still of fertility
as arisen out of death;* and therefore she is not without a certain
pensiveness, having seen the seed fall into the ground and die, many
times. Persephone is returned to her, and the hair [148] spreads,
like a rich harvest, over her shoulders; but she is still veiled, and
knows that the seed must fall into the ground again, and Persephone
descend again from her.
The statues of the supposed priestess, and of the enthroned Demeter,
are of more than the size of life; the figure of Persephone is but
seventeen inches high, a daintily handled toy of Parian marble, the
miniature copy perhaps of a much larger work, which might well be
reproduced on a magnified scale. The conception of Demeter is
throughout chiefly human, and even domestic, though never without a
hieratic interest, because she is not a goddess only, but also a
priestess. In contrast, Persephone is wholly unearthly, the close
companion, and even the confused double, of Hecate, the goddess of
midnight terrors,--Despoena,--the final mistress of all that lives;
and as sorrow is the characteristic sentiment of Demeter, so awe of
Persephone. She is compact of sleep, and death, and flowers, but of
narcotic flowers especially,--a revenant, who in the garden of
Aidoneus has eaten of the pomegranate, and bears always the secret of
decay in her, of return to the grave, in the mystery of those
swallowed seeds; sometimes, in later work, holding in her hand the
key of the great prison-house, but which unlocks all secrets also;
(there, finally, or through oracles revealed in dreams;) sometimes,
like Demeter, the poppy, emblem of sleep and death by its [149]
narcotic juices, of life and resurrection by its innumerable seeds,
of the dreams, therefore, that may intervene between falling asleep
and waking. Treated as it is in the Homeric hymn, and still more in
this statue, the image of Persephone may be regarded as the result of
many efforts to lift the old Chthonian gloom, still lingering on in
heavier souls, concerning the grave, to connect it with impressions
of dignity and beauty, and a certain sweetness even; it is meant to
make men in love, or at least at peace, with death. The Persephone
of Praxiteles' school, then, is Aphrodite-Persephone, Venus-Libitina.
Her shadowy eyes have gazed upon the fainter colouring of the under-
world, and the tranquillity, born of it, has "passed into her face";
for the Greek Hades is, after all, but a quiet, twilight place, not
very different from that House of Fame where Dante places the great
souls of the classical world; Aidoneus himself being conceived, in
the highest Greek sculpture, as but a gentler Zeus, the great
innkeeper; so that when a certain Greek sculptor had failed in his
portraiture of Zeus, because it had too little hilarity, too little,
in the eyes and brow, of the open and cheerful sky, he only changed
its title, and the thing passed excellently, with its heavy locks and
shadowy eyebrows, for the god of the dead. The image of Persephone,
then, as it is here composed, with the tall, tower-like head-dress,
from which the veil depends--the corn-basket, [150] originally
carried thus by the Greek women, balanced on the head--giving the
figure unusual length, has the air of a body bound about with grave-
clothes; while the archaic hands and feet, and a certain stiffness in
the folds of the drapery, give it something of a hieratic character,
and to the modern observer may suggest a sort of kinship with the
more chastened kind of Gothic work. But quite of the school of
Praxiteles is the general character of the composition; the graceful
waving of the hair, the fine shadows of the little face, of the eyes
and lips especially, like the shadows of a flower--a flower risen
noiselessly from its dwelling in the dust--though still with that
fulness or heaviness in the brow, as of sleepy people, which, in the
delicate gradations of Greek sculpture, distinguish the infernal
deities from their Olympian kindred. The object placed in the hand
may be, perhaps, a stiff, archaic flower, but is probably the partly
consumed pomegranate--one morsel gone; the most usual emblem of
Persephone being this mystical fruit, which, because of the multitude
of its seeds, was to the Romans a symbol of fecundity, and was sold
at the doors of the temple of Ceres, that the women might offer it
there, and bear numerous children; and so, to the middle age, became
a symbol of the fruitful earth itself; and then of that other seed
sown in the dark under-world; and at last of that whole hidden
region, so thickly sown, which Dante visited, Michelino painting him,
[151] in the Duomo of Florence, with this fruit in his hand, and
Botticelli putting it into the childish hands of Him, who, if men "go
down into hell, is there also."
There is an attractiveness in these goddesses of the earth, akin to
the influence of cool places, quiet houses, subdued light,
tranquillising voices. What is there in this phase of ancient
religion for us, at the present day? The myth of Demeter and
Persephone, then, illustrates the power of the Greek religion as a
religion of pure ideas--of conceptions, which having no link on
historical fact, yet, because they arose naturally out of the spirit
of man, and embodied, in adequate symbols, his deepest thoughts
concerning the conditions of his physical and spiritual life,
maintained their hold through many changes, and are still not without
a solemnising power even for the modern mind, which has once admitted
them as recognised and habitual inhabitants; and, abiding thus for
the elevation and purifying of our sentiments, long after the earlier
and simpler races of their worshippers have passed away, they may be
a pledge to us of the place in our culture, at once legitimate and
possible, of the associations, the conceptions, the imagery, of Greek
religious poetry in general, of the poetry of all religions.
NOTES
117. +Transliteration: kalykôpis. Liddell and Scott definition:
"Like a flower-bud, blushing, roseate."
118. +Transliteration: charis. Liddell and Scott definition:
"favour, grace ... loveliness."
118. +Transliteration: theai semnai. Translation: "august
goddesses."
124. *The great Greek myths are, in truth, like abstract forces,
which ally themselves to various conditions.
129. +Transliteration: korê arrêtos. Translation: "Korê the
mysterious, the horrible." Another meaning of arrêtos, as Pater
points out, is "unsaid, not to be spoken."
136. *With this may be connected another passage of Ovid--
Metamorphoses, v. 391-408.
138. *On these small objects the mother and daughter are hard to
distinguish, the latter being recognisable only by a greater delicacy
in the features and the more evident stamp of youth.
140. *A History of Discoveries at Halicarnassus, Cnidus, and
Branchidae.
141. +Transliteration: hoi theoi para Damatri. Pater's translation:
"the gods with Demeter."
143. +Transliteration: katadesmoi. Liddell and Scott definition: "a
tie or band: a magic knot, love-knot."
145. +Transliteration: Dêô. Liddell and Scott definition: the verb
dêô means "I shall find," while the proper noun refers to Demeter.
147. +Transliteration: petra agelastos. Translation: "sullen rock."
147. *Pallere ligustra, / Exspirare rosas, decrescere lilia vidi.
HIPPOLYTUS VEILED: A STUDY FROM EURIPIDES
[152] CENTURIES of zealous archaeology notwithstanding, many phases
of the so varied Greek genius are recorded for the modern student in
a kind of shorthand only, or not at all. Even for Pausanias,
visiting Greece before its direct part in affairs was quite played
out, much had perished or grown dim--of its art, of the truth of its
outward history, above all of its religion as a credible or
practicable thing. And yet Pausanias visits Greece under
conditions as favourable for observation as those under which later
travellers, Addison or Eustace, proceed to Italy. For him the
impress of life in those old Greek cities is not less vivid and
entire than that of medieval Italy to ourselves; at Siena, for
instance, with its ancient palaces still in occupation, its public
edifices as serviceable as if the old republic had but just now
vacated them, the tradition of their primitive worship still unbroken
in its churches. Had the opportunities in which Pausanias was [153]
fortunate been ours, how many haunts of the antique Greek life
unnoticed by him we should have peeped into, minutely systematic in
our painstaking! how many a view would broaden out where he notes
hardly anything at all on his map of Greece!