Read Ebook: Sculptured tombs of Hellas by Gardner Percy
Font size: Background color: Text color: Add to tbrJar First Page Next PageEbook has 96 lines and 19684 words, and 2 pagesiry as to the name of the dead person, then goes on to narrate the history of her life, and ends with an appeal to Persephone, and a kindly greeting to survivors:-- O Maid of many names, Queen ruling wide, Her by the hand to pious places guide. On all who, passing, greet the soul below With kindly word, may God some good bestow. I propose, however, to give in this place renderings of a few of these literary epitaphs, selecting such as belong to an earlier period, and such as have some interest in their matter, and not merely in their style. In some cases I give a version of my own; in other cases I use the elegant translations which Dr. James Williams, of Lincoln College, has kindly placed at my disposal. We find not rarely on Greek tombs of all periods colloquies between the dead and wayfarers. The following is a literary version by Leonidas of such a dialogue, carried on in a style of stately courtesy:-- The following bears the name of Sappho:-- The dust of Timas: ere her bridal she Saw the dark chamber of Persephone. Their lovely hair her playmates offered here, Cut off to honour her who was so dear. Saon the son of Dicon here doth lie In holy sleep: the good can never die. Dear earth, receive Amyntichus to rest, Mindful of all his labour spent on thee; Thee with the boughs of Bacchus oft he dressed, And in thee planted oft the olive-tree, Filled thee with Deo's grain, and trenches led To make thee rich in herbs and autumn fruits. Lie thou then lightly on his hoary head, And busk his tomb with springtide's tender shoots. Shepherds, who tend upon yon mountain steep Your herds of goats and flocks of fleecy sheep, A little gift Clitagoras to-day For sake of Queen Persephone doth pray; I would that sheep should bleat, and from a rock A shepherd pipe soft music to his flock; And let one hind cull fresh young meadow-bloom In early spring, and crown therewith my tomb; Another take and milk a mother ewe And with the stream this funeral stone bedew; The dead are reached by kindly acts of men, And e'en the dead can make return again. This is a pastoral picture well worthy of Theocritus; the last two lines show how persistently there lingered among the Greek peasants that notion of the exchange of services between dead and living of which I have spoken above. Sometimes not only human beings but also favourite animals had their tombs and epitaphs. Especially, we are told, was this the case at Agrigentum in Sicily, a city which paid dearly for its luxury and effeminacy at the time of the Carthaginian invasion of the end of the fifth century. The following, by Meleager, was for a hare:-- A long-eared hare was I and swift of feet, When Phaenium stole me from my mother's breast. She gave me young spring flowers to be my meat, And in her bosom oft I lay caressed. True mother she! but death soon came to me, Good living made me fat and overfed. Here lie I 'neath her chamber floor, that she In dreams may see my tomb beside her bed. We are here clearly in the region of elegant trifles: and being there we may give a few more specimens of the poetic art which, like the acanthus, gave an elegant finish to the tomb. The following is Meleager's lament over Heliodora:-- The next epitaph, by Philip of Thessalonica, is quite Hellenistic in character:-- Architeles the Sculptor, where was laid His son, with mournful hand the tombstone made. Not cut with iron tool the lines appear; The stone was furrowed by the frequent tear. O stone! lie lightly, that the dead may know A hand indeed paternal set thee so. I cite only the end of another epitaph, by Heracleitus, which is said to have adorned the tomb of a lady named Aretemias. It is so neat and compressed that I have in vain tried to render it in an English heroic distich:--'Twin sons I bare: one I left to my husband as a stay of old age; one I take with me as a memorial of my husband.' We may add a couple more epitaphs which clearly belong to the epideictic or rhetorical class, but which please by the neatness of their form. One by Damagetes professes to record the last words of a lady named Theano, of Phocaea, in Asia Minor. Phocaeans! hear the moan Theano made, As night received her with eternal shade. 'How sad my lot! Afar some unknown sea In thy swift ship, my husband, beareth thee. Fate stands beside my bed. Ah! wert thou by, Holding thy loving hand that I might die.' The following professes to belong to a tomb of Ajax, on which was placed a mourning woman, who represented his unappreciated worth or valour:-- On Ajax' tomb with closely shaven hair I sit, sad Worth, in semblance of despair, Grief-struck at heart that with the Achaean host Deceitful Fraud more weight than I can boast. LATER MONUMENTS OF ASIA MINOR The sepulchral monuments of Greece Proper are all on a modest scale, and noteworthy on account of their beauty of design and charm of sentiment rather than for their magnificence or costliness. In order to find sumptuous tombs erected by Greek architects and decorated by the great Greek sculptors, we must cross over into Asia. We have in a previous chapter spoken of some of the monuments of Asia Minor which are contemporary with the earliest tombs of Greece. We have now to observe how Greece in the later fifth and the fourth centuries paid back the artistic debt which she owed to Asia. The custom of erecting magnificent memorials of departed rulers long prevailed in all parts of Asia. And when Greece stood without a rival in the arts of architecture and sculpture, it was natural that the wealthy princes who planned the monuments of their predecessors, or sometimes their own destined tombs, should import Greek artists, and allow them a free hand to produce great mausoleums, in which the art of Greece registered in beautiful forms the affection of kinsfolk and the veneration of subject populations. Without at all intending to exhaust the subject, I propose to give some account of a few of the most noteworthy of these monuments, especially of the Nereid monument and the Gyeulbashi heroon in Lycia, and the Mausoleum a Halicarnassus. These tombs I select not as typical of their age and country, but rather as exceptional. They represent the almost complete victory in Asia not only of Greek art, but even of Greek ideas. Side by side with these monuments there were erected in Asia Minor, and especially in Lycia, tombs in which native tendencies, such as we have seen in an earlier chapter were still dominant. Sir Charles Fellows brought from Lycia some tombs of this character, and casts of the reliefs of others which remain in their site. The most interesting representation is from a tomb at Cadyanda, on which we see banqueting scenes, dancing figures, a group of four girls playing with knucklebones, and so forth, with bilingual inscriptions in Greek and Lycian. But to comment on these scenes as if they were of Hellenic origin would lead us far astray. Like the paintings and reliefs of Etruria, they represent a peculiar and lost phase of civilization, thinly veneered by the art and thought of Hellas. From the present point of view the most important of the scenes depicted on this monument is to be found in one of the pediments . The hero of whom the tomb is a memorial is seated in state, sceptre in hand: his wife sits opposite, and the children are grouped about them. Further to the right are attendants on a smaller scale. One dog is asleep under the master's chair, another lies in the corner of the pediment. In the other pediment there is a warlike scene, of which only one-half is preserved. The midmost figure, doubtless the hero again, is on horseback charging an overthrown foe, to whose aid his companions, clad as Greek hoplites, hurry forward. The representation here is no doubt of some notable feat of arms of the owner of the tomb. To the warlike scene the peaceful scene first described corresponds. At first sight it seems merely a picture out of daily life: but if we bear in mind the ordinary symbolism of the Greek tomb we may fairly find in it some sepulchral significance. The grouping of the children about their parents reminds us of many Attic sepulchral reliefs, and the train of attendants bears a decided resemblance to the group of votaries usual on heroizing reliefs. In fact, we find here what is called by archaeologists a contamination. The Asiatic custom of regarding a tomb as a monument of the fame and a record of the exploits of some great ruler or leader of men is penetrated by the genius of Attic sepulchral art, and takes new and more beautiful forms. Treating the two pediments as striking the keynote of the whole sculptural adornment of the monument, we shall not hesitate to find in all its representations allusions to the life and exploits of the hero whom it commemorates. But of the four friezes which encircled the building at various heights, three furnish us with information which is too vague to be historically useful. The theme of the first is battle, of the third hunting, of the fourth feasting and repose. It is only the frieze numbered as the second in the publications which gives us more detailed and accurate information. Here are unfolded to us the successive scenes of the siege and capture of a hostile city; the battle before the walls, the attempt to storm and the defence, the parleying and surrender, the escape of some of the inhabitants and the leading into captivity of others. In the scene of capitulation the central figure is an Eastern king or ruler, in Persian cap; behind him an attendant bears a sunshade; around him stand his guards. This potentate is approached by two elderly men, staid and dignified, who are clearly the representatives of the city, and come asking for terms. In other scenes we find a bold but a necessarily unsuccessful attempt to represent without due perspective the city walls with the heads of the defenders showing above them, the women wailing, the attacking force adjusting the ladders for scaling, or repulsing sorties of the besieged. The siege and the capture of a hostile city was evidently one of the most notable events of the life of the hero of the monument. With some plausibility archaeologists have found allusion to the same siege in the beautiful figures of women which stood between the columns of the pteron, the temple-like structure which crowned the monument. These figures represent young girls in the dress of Attic maidens flying in haste and alarm from some danger which threatens them. At their feet are various marine creatures: the dolphin, the sea-snake, a crab, a water-bird, or a fish. This curious circumstance has given rise to the commonly accepted view that they represent Nereid nymphs hastily escaping over the surface of the sea from some rude alarm, flying in disorder to their father Nereus, as they do on more than one vase when Peleus has laid hands on their sister Thetis. What more likely to cause a panic among the shy and peaceful ladies of the sea than a marine battle, or even the attack of an army on a city of the seacoast? Urlichs has tried to show that all the historical indications which may be derived from the frieze of the siege and from the presence of the flying Nereids may be explained if we assign the tomb to the king or satrap, Pericles of Xanthus, who, as we learn from a fragment of Theopompus, laid siege to the neighbouring city of Telmessus, and after a stubborn resistance compelled it to capitulate. Before we can accept or reject this theory we must briefly consider two questions. Is an actual historic event depicted on the tomb, or is the representation merely of a mythical siege of the past? And what is the date of the monument? As to the first of these questions I have already sufficiently indicated my view. The sculptural history of the siege is too detailed and precise to be a rendering of a merely typical or ideal siege. The two emissaries of the besiegers must have had prototypes, and recent prototypes, in real life; and the king before whom they stand is no mythical chief, but the ruler for whom the tomb was made. This has been disputed by Wolters, but the general consensus of archaeologists is against him. On the other point, the date of the monument, there has been much wider divergence of opinion. At first, in England, it was placed in the sixth century, as a monument of the conquest of Xanthus by Harpagus, the general of Cyrus. This, however, is quite impossible. Soon the pendulum swung too far in the other direction, and the sculpture was brought down to the fourth century, and even connected with the school of Scopas. The date fixed by Furtw?ngler, the latter part of the fifth century, is now generally accepted. In the forms of the Nereids we may trace the artistic influence of the Victory of Paeonius, set up about B.C. 424. And if some of the figures of the friezes be carefully considered they will be found to show traces of undeveloped art, even of archaism. The Nereid monument belongs to the age of the Parthenon and the temple of Athena Nike, not to the age of the Mausoleum. If therefore we were compelled, as Urlichs supposed, to assign the taking of Telmessus by Pericles to so late a date as the 102nd Olympiad , we should be obliged to give up its assignment to that king. But there is no conclusive reason for the date fixed by Urlichs. There is therefore no improbability that our monument may be a memorial of Pericles of Xanthus. In any case it has an important place among the remains of antiquity, because it stands in the line of descent, a line marked by many lacunae, which connects the mural reliefs of Assyria, with their fulness of historic detail, and the magnificent monuments of imperial Rome. The Nereid Monument and that of Gyeulbashi, as well as some of the sarcophagi from Sidon, with which I shall deal in the fifteenth chapter, naturally strike the student as being set in a key somewhat different from that of ordinary Greek sculpture. The mythological scenes portrayed on them find ready parallels in Greece, but the more historic scenes carry our minds to the wall-sculptures of Assyria or the reliefs of Roman columns, such as those of Trajan and Aurelius, rather than to other Greek works. The reason of this is probably that the art of these Asiatic monuments is influenced by that of Ionia, which is to us, unfortunately, but little known. The Ionian tendency was towards history, that of the Dorians towards religion. The great Greek painters, following Ionian precedent, celebrated in their works many historic battles. Bularchus in very early times is said to have portrayed, for a Lydian king, a victory of the Magnesians: Panaenus painted at Athens the battle of Marathon, Androcydes of Cyzicus painted for the Thebans a picture of their victory at Plataea, and Euphranor depicted the battle of Mantineia. But in Greece sculpture took a different and more ideal line, and translated the battles of the present into mythic combats of the past, in which Centaurs and Amazons rather than fellow-Greeks represented the vanquished party. The sculpture of the Nereid monument is dominated by a more realistic and historic spirit. The sculpture at Gyeulbashi is on the border-line, so that we find it hard to decide whether the scene of the siege there portrayed is Ilium or Lycia, and whether the battles are being fought on the windy plain of Troy or the southern coast of Asia Minor. The sculpture of the Mausoleum is of the purely Greek and ideal character. But the greatest of the Sidonian sarcophagi returns, as we shall see, in the age of Alexander the Great, to a more realistic level. The heroon of Gyeulbashi was discovered in the heart of Lycia by Sch?nborn in 1842. For a long time the discovery remained almost unnoticed. But a few years ago an Austrian expedition was sent to secure such remains of the monument as have artistic value, and these are now deposited in the Museum of Vienna. Unfortunately they have suffered terribly, being of limestone and not of marble, from exposure to the weather, and some of the friezes have almost perished. Casts of the better-preserved portions are to be found at South Kensington and Oxford. And the whole monument is published in the completest and most satisfactory form by Professor Benndorf. In form the heroon differs entirely, as will be seen from the engraving from other Lycian monuments. The actual grave is a modest construction in the form of a sarcophagus surmounted by a cover with gables. This stands transversely within a walled enclosure some 78 feet long by 68 wide, inside measurement. The enclosing wall is built solidly of squared stones. And it is this which is the interesting part of the whole; for the wall is adorned without and within with a series of reliefs, presenting us with a whole gallery of representations remarkable alike for their style and their subjects, some of which are portrayed nowhere else in the whole range of Greek sculpture. The keynote here again is furnished by the group of seated heroic personages. This group is sculptured over the door through which the enclosure is entered; unfortunately it has so severely suffered that the details are obscure. The great lintel stone over the doorway is decorated as follows. Above are the foreparts of four winged bulls, separated by rosettes and a gorgon-head. Immediately below these are seated two pairs of figures, in each case male and female. The men are bearded, the women veiled. Husband and wife are turned towards one another, and behind the wife in each group stands a girl, a daughter or servant, holding in one instance a casket, in the other raising her arms in an attitude of sorrow. These two heroic pairs are probably the proprietors of the sacred enclosure, which was built like a finely carved casket to hold their ashes. In the decoration of the casket we find one Oriental motive. Over the door inside is a line of dwarfs, or of repetitions of the Egyptian monster Bes, holding musical instruments or dancing. Here we have a touch lent by a religion less refined and artistic than that of the anthropomorphic Greeks. The rest of the reliefs take their subjects from the legendary tales of Greece. We do not appear to have here, as on the Nereid monument, allusions to the lives of the buried heroes. There is no scene which bears the impress of history. The Greek artists who were employed by the wealthy Lycian family to adorn the wall seem to have been left quite free in their choice of subjects. So they run on almost without plan, from tale to tale and from scene to scene. Sometimes we have two subjects, one above the other, quite independent one of the other. Sometimes the two lines of decorations are occupied with a single scene. It would be useless to attempt to describe in detail scenes which we are unable to set before the eyes of the reader. The landing of the Greeks at Troy, the siege of the City, the battle of Achilles with the Amazons who come to its rescue, Odysseus meeting Penelope, and shooting down the suitors, are taken from the cycle of Trojan legend. Then we have the hunting of the Calydonian boar, the carrying off of the daughters of Leucippus, the expedition of the Seven against Thebes, all portrayed with the freedom which Greek artists use, always ready to subordinate strict fidelity to tradition to the necessities of art and the love of balance and measure. The interest of those scenes is great, but it does not belong to our subject. The art is not sepulchral, but of the myth-loving kind which prevails in the decoration of Greek temples, and which once marked the lost masterpieces of the great Greek painters. Professor Benndorf has tried, and not unsuccessfully, to prove that in the reliefs of Gyeulbashi we may find clear traces of the influence of the great Thasian painter Polygnotus, another of whose lines of influence reached the sculptors of the Parthenon. The Lycian heroon and the Attic temple are works of about the same period, widely as they differ in some respects. At Athens the influence of Polygnotus is fairly and fully translated into sculptural style. In Lycia the sculptor has less transforming vigour, and he retains in the work of the chisel some conventions appropriate only to the work of the brush. One other important tomb must be mentioned which was built in Asia, though its construction is purely Greek, its material the marble of Pentelicus, and its erection on the coast of Asia Minor no more than an instance of the fortune of war. Among the discoveries, with the fruits of which Sir Charles Newton enriched the British Museum, there were few which he valued more highly than that of the Lion-tomb of Cnidus. The huge lion, which is now in the Mausoleum Room of the British Museum, reclined on the top of a building made solid to receive his vast weight, looking out over the Carian Sea. We engrave the whole monument as restored by Mr. Pullan. 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. So their artistic and idealizing tendency had to work without constant reference to, and correction by, nature. Thus, while the types of the horse, the bull, and the dog went on developing on the lines of love and appreciation of nature, the type of the lion became fantastic and poor. The soul of the lion does not inhabit the bodies prepared for it by Greek artists. Nevertheless the Cnidian monument has its interest. It is conjectured, with a high degree of probability, that it was set up by Conon, after his great victory of 394 B.C. over the Spartan fleet at Cnidus. It commemorates alike the battle and the Athenians who fell in it. It is an Attic tomb though not erected in Attica, more imposing as a historical monument than the reliefs of the Cerameicus, but inferior to them in the higher artistic qualities. They are also luxuriously published in official publications of the Russian Government, offering to the student of history a new chapter, showing how, in the Crimea of old, Greek and Scythian met, how the Greek refined the Scythian and supplied him with admirable works of art, and how the Scythian lent the Greek armour and clothes, besides no doubt supplying him with timber, corn, and skins. And to the student of art they exhibit the richness and the taste displayed by Athenian craftsmen in the fourth century, in the production even of the smallest and least considered of the appliances of daily life. THE MAUSOLEUM We turn next to the Mausoleum, the great tomb erected in honour of Mausolus, king of Caria, by his widow Artemisia, in the middle of the fourth century. It ranked among the wonders of the world, and was the work of the most celebrated artists of Greece. The discovery of its remains by Sir Charles Newton occupies a prominent position among the first-rate achievements of English excavators. And their acquisition by the British Museum has made the National Gallery of Sculpture almost as rich in fourth-century sculpture as the purchase of the Elgin marbles had made it in the sculpture of the fifth century. The problem of the reconstruction of the Mausoleum is among the most interesting of those connected with the history of Greek architecture. Generally speaking, after the excavation of the site of the great Greek building, its restoration is by no means difficult. The laws of Greek architecture are so precise, and its forms so simple, that it is possible from the evidence of a few stones to reconstruct it with the certainty with which the skilled palaeontologist constructs a geological animal from the evidence of a few bones. The wonderful reconstructions of Dr. D?rpfeld on the Athenian Acropolis, at Olympia, and elsewhere, have commonly but little in them which is arbitrary, though much which is brilliant. Dr. D?rpfeld has not yet attempted the Mausoleum. But it is safe to say that in its reconstruction he would meet difficulties such as he has not yet encountered. At first sight, the materials for a reconstruction seem very abundant. We have an elaborate description of the monument by Pliny. We have an account of its partial destruction in the sixteenth century by the Knights of St. John. And the excavations on the site conducted by Sir Charles Newton were complete and systematic. But the advantage derived from all this richness of material is more than balanced by the fact that the Mausoleum was a work of new and original design. It was no Greek temple, made according to well-established rules, but a monument intended to stand alone through the centuries. Thus the man who would successfully restore its design must venture to rise above convention, and has need of a thorough grasp of the tendencies and possibilities of Greek architecture. Setting aside the fanciful reconstructions proposed by scholars before Newton's excavations, we pass to those made with the data now available. The earliest reconstruction, one to which we must attach considerable value, is that set forth by the excavators themselves. It is hard to say who is responsible for it. It was first projected by Lieut. Smith, an engineer attached to the expedition, revised and completed by Mr. Pullan the architect, adopted and defended by Sir Charles Newton himself. Plans based upon this, but differing from it in various points, were set forth by Mr. Fergusson and Dr. Petersen. But since neither of these writers has fairly grappled with the subject from the beginning, we may feel justified in not paying much heed to their plans. If we are to set aside a restoration made on the spot, with all local knowledge and every resource, it must be only after a very careful and complete survey of all the available evidence. The plans of Pullan, Fergusson, and Petersen have won their way into our books, and are frequently treated as final. But final they certainly are not. They have never, until quite lately, been collated with sufficient care with the evidence, especially with the ancient authorities. They contain violations of precedent and probability which it is not easy to justify. Mr. Oldfield has therefore done an excellent work in his recent attempt to improve upon the received restorations, an attempt marked by extreme care, lucidity, and ingenuity. It is, unfortunately, not possible here to criticize in satisfactory detail the views of Mr. Oldfield and his predecessors. I propose only to set forth briefly the sum of the evidence which exists for the reconstruction, after engraving side by side the plans set forth by Mr. Pullan and Mr. Oldfield on the basis of that evidence. Readers to whom such inquiries have no interest would do well to omit the rest of this chapter. Our materials are of four kinds. First we have the statements of certain ancient writers. Second, we have the curious account by Guichard of the state of the building when it was partially destroyed by the Knights of St. John in 1522. Third, we may cite the analogy of other ancient buildings of the same kind, so far as they are preserved. And of course all these sources of information must be used in strict subordination to the evidence of excavation and of the remains actually existing. Hyginus mentions three facts in regard to the Mausoleum; he says that it was of Parian marble, 80 feet in height, 1,350 feet in circumference. In two of these statements he is certainly right. The marble of the Mausoleum is Parian, and the circuit of the sacred enclosure or peribolus is given by Newton as 1,348 English feet. But as to the height of the building Hyginus contradicts Pliny, and must probably be corrected by him. Add to tbrJar First Page Next Page |
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