(the Lizard-slayer),[86] but the copyist has evidently exaggerated
almost to caricature the elegant slimness of the young god. But on the
basis of our knowledge of the Hermes I think we can reconstruct in
imagination an exquisite statue even out of the effeminate Vatican copy.
The true Apollo would not lean all his weight upon the tree;
consequently the tilt of his hips would be less violent. His face would
be much more carefully modelled, with less of that womanish smoothness
of contour. But the copyist has noted and tried to express the lovely
brow which Praxiteles gave to all his heads. The careless grace, the
impression of youth and playful strength belong to the original, and are
highly characteristic of the artist. The motive of the statue seems to
have been a new and rather bold invention; we know of no cult of a
lizard-slaying Apollo. It is true that Apollo was the deity commonly
invoked in cases of natural plagues, such as invasions of field-mice or
locusts, but it seems more probable that Praxiteles, desiring to
represent Apollo in a new guise, deliberately chose to portray him as a
boy at play. It is clear that Praxiteles was a strongly original and
inventive genius, who was not afraid to give his own impression of
established types. He was the first who dared to portray Aphrodite
naked; out of the gross and bestial Satyr he made a delightful elf of
the woods, and he turned the vigorous athlete Apollo into a slender
stripling.
Of Scopas the Parian, the second great sculptor of the fourth century,
we have no important remains. Two mutilated heads found on the site of
the temple at Tegea, where he made his great pedimental scene of the
Calydonian boar-hunt, indicate the new note of pathos and emotion which
he introduced into the carving of the human head. We know that Scopas
was engaged on the Mausoleum and on one of the thirty-six sculptured
columns of the great temple at Ephesus, but nothing that remains from
either of those buildings can be ascribed to him with certainty. Perhaps
his most famous work was the Palatine Apollo at Rome. We may get the
best notion of his style by studying the head, not the body, of a
beautiful statue of Meleager[87] at Rome, which is considered by the
most competent archæologists to be a copy of the work of Scopas.
The third is Lysippus of Sicyon, an extraordinarily prolific artist, of
whose style we may form a very clear conception, although we have no
originals. Athletic types were his favourite work, and his favourite
technique was bronze-casting. His discovery was the added grace and
beauty which could result from decreasing the proportion of the head to
the body. Wherever we find small curly heads very lightly poised upon a
strong, vigorous body we may trace the influence of Lysippus. His most
famous statue was the young athlete scraping off the oil from his arm
with the strigil. The emperor Tiberius fell in love with this
“Apoxyomenus,” as it is called, and removed it from the front of the
baths of Agrippa to his own bed-chamber, but the people of Rome raised
such an outcry that he had to restore it. Modern critics have shown that
our “Apoxyomenus”[88] is not a faithful copy of this statue. On the
other hand, the “Agias” recently discovered at Delphi[89] is a
contemporary marble copy of a bronze by Lysippus, and gives us a very
fine example of his style. Lysippus was also the sculptor-in-ordinary to
Alexander the Great, and we may trace to Lysippean originals all the
numerous portraits of the Macedonian conqueror. Lysippus was a theorist
as well as a practical sculptor, and, like Polycleitus, produced his own
theoretical “Canon” of sculptural proportions. He was (with
[Illustration: PLATE LXXII. THE “LUDOVISI” ARES
_Anderson_]
the possible exception of the Devil) the first professed impressionist,
for Pliny records a saying of his: “Other sculptors had represented men
as they were, while he portrayed them as they appeared to be.”
We have many fine works of the fourth century of unknown authorship.
Foremost of all--surely one of the six greatest statues in the
world[90]--is the Demeter of Cnidos, in the British Museum, a statue so
instinct with the spirit of Greek tragedy that but for certain technical
points it ought to belong to the fifth century.[91] This is Mother
Earth, Our Lady of Sorrows, mourning with sad eyes, but not in despair,
for her daughter Persephone. The influence of Praxiteles may be traced
in her brow and lips. The workmanship of this statue, as being, with the
exception of temple reliefs, the finest Greek original in our Museum,
deserves careful study. Very beautiful also is that sculptured drum from
one of the thirty-six columns of the great temple of “Diana of the
Ephesians,” another of the treasures of our Museum.[92] It is scarcely
probable that time should have spared the one column which Scopas
himself designed, but we may trace some of his influence in the
emotional character of the faces, and much of Praxiteles in the grace of
the attitudes and the poetry of the concept. The application of relief
to a rounded surface is in itself a work of great difficulty, and we
have seen how boldly it had been attempted in the same temple by artists
of a much earlier day. This is a funeral scene such as might be
represented on an Attic tombstone. In the centre is a matronly figure,
headless, alas! fastening her mantle on her shoulder preparatory to the
journey; on her left is Hermes, very young and boyish, extending his
caduceus as if pointing downwards, but looking upwards to a point above
the woman’s head. On her right is another figure, whom from his long
wings and boyish form we should take, perhaps, for Love, were it not
that his sad eyes and heavy sword mark him out as Death--a beautiful
conception found also on the new Ludovisi relief and on some of the
Athenian lecythi. Some think that the woman is Alcestis, and it is
scarcely likely that any but a heroine, at the least, would occupy such
a place in such a building. To make both these emissaries of death so
young and charming is an idea typical of the fourth century, and
especially of Praxiteles.
In many of the bronzes of our museums we can trace very clearly the new
influence of Lysippus. A fine example is provided by the figure of a
youth[93] recently dredged up under romantic circumstances off the
island of Cythera (Cerigo), which lies at the extreme southerly point of
Laconia, This was part of a cargo of spoils from Greece looted by the
Roman general Sulla and shipwrecked off Cape Matapan. No satisfactory
guess has yet been made as to the name of the statue or the motive of
its attitude. In my opinion the upstretched arm in readiness to grasp
seems to indicate an athlete playing a game of “catch.” “The Praying
Boy,” one of the treasures of Berlin, is a singularly perfect bronze,
full of grace, probably the work of Boethos, a famous sculptor of the
early part of the third century.[94] The Ludovisi Ares[95] is a marble
copy of an original which shows unmistakable influence of Lysippus, and
the restful attitude of the handsome war-god, so free from any trace of
ferocity, is characteristic of the manner in which the fourth century
civilised and humanised all its topics. So is the Rondanini Medusa,[96]
a Gorgon’s head translated into terms of decorative beauty--it might be
a design for a door-knocker. The snakes are there, and the chilly
glance, but there is nothing terrible in the face. The lovely winged
head, which originally belonged to a full-length statue of Hypnos
(Sleep), is one of the most striking bronzes in the British Museum.[97]
It is clearly related to the period which produced that figure of Death,
“the brother of Sleep,” on the Ephesian column. This example has been
covered by exposure to the air with a beautiful green patina,
[Illustration:
_Bruckmann_
FIG. 1. THE “RONDANINI” MEDUSA
_Mansell & Co._
FIG. 2. RELIEF FROM THE MAUSOLEUM
PLATE LXXIII]
often imitated with the application of acids by modern bronze-workers.
But the Herculaneum bronzes, which had been preserved for eighteen
centuries in an airproof casing of lava, are to-day in much the same
condition as when they left the studio. Though they were made, no doubt,
in Roman times, Lysippus is again the artist whose influence is most
clearly visible, as, for example, in the vivid Pair of Wrestlers, or the
Seated Hermes.
I have already said that the old cities of Greece were mostly too
impoverished to undertake great architectural works in this period.
Ephesus, however, had her great temple of Artemis burned down by an
enterprising individual with the very modern ambition of getting his
name before the public. For fear of increasing his success I will not
repeat it here, but when Alexander the Great offered to rebuild the
temple out of his own pocket the Ephesians declined, possibly on the
ground that their temple had already advertised a malefactor and they
did not desire it to be a further advertisement for a benefactor. So
they rebuilt it themselves with such splendour that it became one of the
Seven Wonders of the world.
Advertisement, you see, was in the air. The almost extreme
self-repression of the individual was passing, and in the same spirit a
wealthy ruler of Caria who in Greek eyes was a tyrant and in Persian
eyes a satrap determined to raise a tomb for himself and his wife which
should also be a wonder of the world. His name was Mausolus, and the
Mausoleum he built consisted of a columned shrine raised upon a lofty
pedestal and surmounted with a pyramidal structure of ever-narrowing
square courses of masonry, the whole crowned by a colossal portrait
statue of Mausolus and his wife Artemisia in a chariot. Considerable
remains were found by Sir Charles Newton at Halicarnassus, and are now
in the British Museum. We know that Scopas and other famous artists were
employed upon the work. The most important relic is the colossal statue
of Mausolus, which, considering its situation, is in remarkably fine
preservation.[98] Here we have perhaps for the first time in all the
history of art a realistic portrait. The face of the prince is not in
the least conventional, has, in fact, a distinctly barbarian profile,
yet preserves a dignity and worth of its own, and visibly suggests a
foreign plutocrat. The reliefs[99] which adorned the pedestal are also
distinctive and interesting. We observe, as on the Mantinean basis, that
the figures are widely spaced. Their poses are visibly contrived for
decorative effect on a system of correspondences much less subtle, and
therefore much less effective, than on the Parthenon frieze. The
designer, who may have been Scopas himself, has not shrunk from
portraying violent action in the battle of Amazons, which is his
subject. Yet there is beauty in every figure, and remarkable technical
skill.
Another famous work of decorative sculpture belonging to this period is
the colossal group of the Niobids. It was brought to Rome from somewhere
in Asia Minor, probably Cilicia, and apparently copied by several
Græco-Roman artists of very various powers. The original dates, no
doubt, from the fourth century. It seems to have formed a group of
detached statues set up on a pedestal either in the open air or in a
colonnade. The general arrangement of the figures resembles that of a
pedimental composition, for the whole group would be pyramidal, with
Niobe herself as the apex figure. Niobe’s tragedy is an example of
divine jealousy aroused by excessive human felicity and pride, for Niobe
was so proud of the beauty of her large family that she exulted over
Leto, who had but two children, Apollo and Artemis. Accordingly she and
all her brood were shot down by the painless arrows of the two gods. The
“plot” of the group is a study in psychology, typical of the fourth
century, showing how the various members of the doomed family met their
deaths. Here again the technique is wonderful; every figure is designed
in a broad architectural spirit. The actual figures, as we have them,
mostly at Florence, are of varying merit. Probably the best is the most
recently discovered, which is here illustrated.[100] But all are of
rather frigid perfection in workmanship.
[Illustration: PLATE LXXIV. STATUE OF MAUSOLUS, FROM THE MAUSOLEUM
_Mansell & Co._]
THE OTHER ARTS
Nothing has been said here about painting, because Greek painting is
essentially a matter for the professional archæologist who can study
what Pliny and others said about it and try to find some intelligent
meaning in it by reference to pottery and sculpture. Of course the
influence of Polygnotus, Parrhasios, Zeuxis, and Apelles should be
traceable even in the humble decorators of pitcher, pot, and pipkin. But
we have no relics of the original work of any of those artists, and the
ancient art critic is an obscure and uncertain guide. He seems to have
had the most ridiculous canons of art, and to have considered it the
greatest triumph of painting when birds came to peck at the grapes in a
picture. The only Greek pictures that we have are the mural frescoes and
mosaics of Pompeii, which belong properly to the Roman department, and a
few Egyptian mummy-cases painted by Greek artists. Therefore, if you
please, we will leave Greek painting to the connoisseurs, with the
remark that Apelles of the fourth century was considered the greatest of
all Greek masters.
Nor can the ordinary student of culture get much satisfaction out of
Greek music. It is rather cheering to reflect that after all they did
not know everything down in Athens, but left one or two things for us to
discover. One of them was harmony. We have heard accomplished savants
give curious and not wholly unpleasant renderings of Greek music, and
distinguished composers like Sir Hubert Parry have written very
beautiful airs which are said to be Greek. Broadly speaking, we may
divide modern reproductions of Greek music into two classes: those that
are Greek, and those that are music. It is certain that the Greeks
attached very great importance to music, far more, in fact, than we do.
It was the foremost instrument of ancient education, and philosophers
from Pythagoras to Plato insisted very seriously upon its moral and
spiritual efficacy. The Greeks divided music into three principal modes,
according to the key employed. The Dorian
Mode was the lowest in pitch. It was the music of the seven- or
eight-stringed cithara used in martial songs and dances. The Spartans
were so conservative in matters of music, as in all else, that when the
famous Timotheus of Miletus appeared in their city with his new
twelve-stringed harp the Ephors ordered the strings to be broken. The
Phrygian Mode was based on the major scale with a flat seventh (G to G),
and the Lydian on the major with a sharp fourth (F to F). The Lydian was
the music of the “soft, complaining flute,” and its high-pitched sounds
were condemned by the austere critics of the mainland as too sensuous
and emotional. Wind music was, as we have seen on the monuments,
originally regarded as a barbarian monstrosity, but a fourth-century
dinner-party would scarcely have been complete without at least one turn
on the double pipe by a pretty _aulētris_. A sort of double pipe is
still used by Greek shepherd-boys, and in the modern example which I
have seen one pipe was used as a “drone,” as in the bagpipes. This
instrument is probably a humble survivor of the “syrinx” played by
Arcadian shepherds in antiquity and by the modern impresario of Punch
and Judy shows--in fact, the Pan-pipes. The superior instrument played
by the _aulētris_ would be really a double clarinet. The flute, as we
have it, was not known in antiquity.
The Greek potter never made any legitimate advance beyond the
Red-figured Style of the fifth century. In the early part of the fourth
century there is no appreciable change of style; the technique is a
little more perfect, the aim is a little less vigorous. The series of
Panathenaic amphoræ[101] (those large jars painted with figures of
Athena and athletic subjects intended for prizes at the Panathenaic
games) continues unbroken, and their design changes little because they
have to correspond with a conventional type. The custom was that they
should have their figures in black, and accordingly the painter obeyed
the custom by leaving parts of his vase in the natural red of the burnt
clay, and treating those parts as
[Illustration: PLATE LXXV. A NIOBID
_Anderson_]
panels on which he painted his figures in black.[102] One change we
notice: vases are no longer signed by the artist. We conclude from this
that pottery is no longer assigned to known masters like Hieron and
Douris for decoration, but more mechanically produced in large numbers
by humble craftsmen in factories. This would correspond with the
increased professionalism which characterises this period in all
departments of life. Towards the end of the century--that is, in the
days of Alexander--it appears that vases were more frequently made in
metal; not that we have any metal vases surviving, but the earthenware
takes forms which can only be explained as imitation of metal. Thus the
surface is often raised in relief, and vases are apparently cast in
moulds.
Coins and gems[103] exhibit increased technical mastery. It must not be
forgotten that coin types, being generally of religious significance,
are apt to be very slow in responding to the artistic fashions of the
day. This is especially the case with Athenian coinage. The Athena type
with owl and olive-branch on the reverse is always of a conventional and
somewhat archaic character. Elsewhere the coins and gems of the fourth
century reach their highest point of perfection, and that is a point
which has never been surpassed. As usual, Syracuse is in the forefront
for beauty of design, and her new series of tyrants, Dionysius I. and
II., revive the glorious types of Gelo and Hiero and improve them. The
decadrachms of this period representing the head of the nymph Arethusa
surrounded with dolphins and bearing on the reverse a four-horse chariot
at full gallop are regarded by numismatists as the most beautiful coins
in existence. The best of these bear the signature of their engraver,
Euænetus. A gold coinage began here about the time of the repulse of the
Athenian Armada. Corinthian coins with the flying Pegasus on the obverse
and a head of Athena in a Corinthian helmet on the reverse also attain
the summit of their beauty in this century. But even out-of-the-way
places like Panticapæum, the corn depot of Southern Russia, and the
little island of Tenedos, which to the historian _est in conspectu_ and
little more, employed engravers of consummate art. Just before the
beginning of the century three cities of the island of Rhodes united to
form one republic, which rapidly rose to wealth by way of commerce and
good government. It produced a gold coinage of great excellence, the
figure of the sun-god Helios on the obverse and a rose (Rhodes) as a
punning emblem on the reverse. It is only with Alexander the Great and
his successors that the portraiture of mortal rulers begins to appear on
Greek coinage. It is then rapidly developed, and some of the barbarian
monarchs of the East are portrayed by Greek artists with great vigour
and realism.
Lastly, architecture exhibits similar tendencies towards technical
facility and a less austere spirit in the use of ornament. To this
period belong the new temple at Ephesus and the Mausoleum already
mentioned, and the kindred sepulchral monument from Lycia known as the
Nereid Monument, from the graceful figures of sea-nymphs set between the
columns on the tall basis of the shrine. In Athens we have the new stone
theatre of Dionysus, the new stadium for athletic contests, the little
choragic monument of Lysicrates, and the new walls to the Peiræus
constructed by Conon with Persian help. The luxurious Corinthian order
is now more popular than the staid Doric. The invention of this
beautiful type, with its curling acanthus leaves embowering the original
volutes of the Ionic capital, is attributed to the Athenian sculptor
Callimachus, a versatile artist of Periclean days.[104] It was the
discovery of a new drill for stone-cutting which made it possible. A
legendary explanation of its origin was naturally provided. Callimachus
had been struck with the beauty of a column on which a woman had placed
a basket of flowers in memory of the maiden whose tomb it marked, and a
live acanthus had sprung from the cracked stone below the basket. The
earliest appearance of the Corinthian capital is, so far as we know, to
be found in the
[Illustration: PLATE LXXVI. ATHLETES BOXING. FROM A PANATHENAIC
AMPHORA]
temple at Bassæ. It became increasingly popular, especially in Roman
times. Owing to its slenderer shaft, Vitruvius compares the Corinthian
order to a young girl, while he likens the Ionic to a matron and the
Doric to a man.
In the terra-cotta statuettes which have been found in such large
numbers at Tanagra and elsewhere we have some of the most delightful as
well as the most characteristic examples of fourth-century art.[105]
They are generally found in tombs, and seem to have been made for the
purpose. They seldom represent deities, though we have several examples
of Eros, and perhaps Aphrodite. Far the commonest subject is a young
girl draped in a mantle. Indeed, the maker of such ware is called in
Greek Koroplastes--“Girl-modeller.” Domestic scenes are common, girls
talking, dancers, animals, and so forth. Some are jointed, and many of
them were obviously designed as toys. Sometimes they were glazed, but
far more often the colours were applied directly to the clay after it
came from the mould. The colours have therefore in many cases entirely
disappeared. Apart from their singular grace and charm, they give us
extremely interesting examples of Greek costume. The British Museum has
a very fine collection, which well deserves study. A few of them appear
to be modelled from famous statues of the period.
LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY
This is, as we have noticed, an age of Prose. Poetry is for the time
being almost extinct, partly, perhaps, because the Athenian theatre was
already so well supplied with material by the great masters of the
previous generation, and partly because public recitation was no longer
the sole means of publication for literature. It is true that Agathon, a
member of the literary circle which included Socrates and Plato, was
esteemed almost on a level with the three great tragedians, but all his
work has been allowed to perish. The fourth century is the era of the
“Middle Comedy,” a stage of transition in which political references
were being abandoned and the delineation of manners and social life was
taking its place. But no great names attach to this stage, and no relics
survive. The New Comedy of manners, in which the great master was
Menander, begins towards the end of the fourth century and fills the
first half of the third.
Prose would naturally fall into three categories--History, including
political and economic writings, Oratory, and Philosophy.
The fifth century had produced the two great historians Herodotus and
Thucydides, both of whom treated their subject from a lofty standpoint
with a distinctly ethical purpose. The typical historian of the fourth
century has a much more restricted outlook. Instead of seeking to point
a moral or to illustrate the larger aspects of life, he is contented
with investigating and narrating the facts of the past for their own
sake or for any purpose to which the reader may care to put them. Such
were Ephorus and Theopompus, whose work, though lost to us, formed the
base upon which such writers as Plutarch built their narratives.
Undoubtedly, however, these historians often had causes of their own to
serve. The constitutional history of Greece, which was originally
compiled by various writers of this period, is full of contradictions
which distinctly point to theories constructed under the influence of
interested motives and in accordance with certain political tendencies.
The venerable figures of Solon and Lycurgus, many biographical details
concerning Miltiades and Themistocles, have been composed by persons
whose motives seldom included any disinterested love of truth. On the
other hand, fourth-century historians now approach their work with much
more distinct ideas as to the rules of evidence. Xenophon I have already
described as one of the characteristic figures of the day. He always
betrays a strong tendency in favour of Sparta, and especially his friend
King Agesilaus.