THE GREEK MIND IN PRESENCE OF DEATH. 



271 



animal or some fabulous creature. On a tomb at 

 Athens, erected in memory of one Leon, stands a 

 marble Hon, evidently in punning allusion to his 

 name. Over the tomb of the celebrated courte- 

 san Lai's, in the suburbs of Corinth, was a group 

 representing a lioness standing over a prostrate 

 ram — a symbol the reference of which to the ex- 

 traordinary career and splendid success of the 

 woman is evidently appropriate. Stone snakes 

 often guarded a tomb, in imitation of the living 

 snakes sure soon to glide about it, on the same 

 principle on which, when the Athenians sought a 

 (loral decoration for a stele, they selected the 

 acanthus, which is notorious for freely growing 

 among stones. But it was especially the forms 

 of female monsters — sirens, sphinxes, and har- 

 pies — which were selected for the adornment of 

 tombs. All these were spoken of in legend as 

 fatal evils, carrying off to death young men and 

 maidens. The sirens especially slew the young 

 after attracting them by the sweetness of their 

 singing, and so well became the graves of those 

 who were lost in the mid ardor of their pursuit 

 of the delights of youth. 



Battles of heroes and Amazons, Dionysiac 

 revels, and mythological scenes, occurring on 

 sarcophagi, belong invariably to Roman times, 

 and represent phases of thought quite other than 

 those suggested by the reliefs inspired by genuine 

 Greek feeling. It is extremely seldom that any 

 mythological subject is found on Greek tombs at 

 all. Indeed, I am aware but of two instances. 

 Charon is allowed, by the general consent of 

 archaeologists, to be represented in a scene above 

 described. And in another very interesting rep- 

 resentation — which, however, is not Athenian — 

 Hermes appears as the conductor of souls, lead- 

 ing gently by the hand a young girl to the future 

 world. So small is the part played by the gods 

 in sepulchral scenes. Not a trace appears of 

 scenes of future happiness or misery, no allusion 

 to that future judgment of souls which is so 

 prominently brought before us in Egyptian pict- 

 ures. Only, in times when the Egyptian worship 

 of Sarapis and Isis had penetrated to Athens, and 

 served there to impart purer and higher views as 

 to future punishment and reward, we do some- 

 times find the priestess of Isis going before the 

 departed with all pomp of worship to guide them 

 through the perils of the last journey, and lead 

 them to a safe resting-place. But these scenes 

 only illustrate the triumph of the religious no- 

 tions of the Egyptians over the susceptible 

 Greeks at a time when their national city life was 

 extinct, and they were driven by the fewer attrac- 



tions of the present life to think more about the 

 possibilities of the next. 



It seems to be desirable, in view of the un- 

 founded assertions so frequently set forth on the 

 subject of Greek art, to gather what light we can 

 on that most interesting subject from the facts 

 above summarized. In doing so, however, it is 

 above all things necessary to bear in mind the 

 conditions under which sepulchral monuments 

 were designed and executed. And, first, it is 

 quite clear that, where several persons who died 

 at intervals are buried in one tomb, they cannot 

 all have been adequately represented in the re- 

 lief which would naturally be the production of 

 a single time. A citizen dies, and a relief is 

 erected over his body, perhaps representing him 

 as taking a farewell of his wife, while his infant 

 son stands by. This same son, maybe, dies in 

 middle life and is buried with his father, and an 

 epigram is inserted on the monument stating the 

 fact. It may thus happen that a man of thirty 

 or forty may appear in the sepulchral relief as 

 an infant. Such slight inconsistencies are insep- 

 arable from the nature of these monuments. But 

 it must be confessed that sometimes between in- 

 scription and sculpture there are contradictions 

 which cannot be thus easily explained, and which 

 raise serious reflections. The fact is that the 

 conviction is forced upon us, by the comparison 

 of a multitude of instances, that very often the 

 relief placed on a tomb did not possess much ref- 

 erence to its contents. There can be no doubt 

 that the more ordinary sorts of representations 

 were made in numbers by the sculptors, and, as 

 we should phrase it, kept in stock by them for 

 customers to choose from. And, if the would-be 

 buyer found a group of which the general out- 

 line and arrangement suited him, he would scarce- 

 ly decline to purchase it because it was not en- 

 tirely appropriate, because it made his wife look 

 twenty years too young, or even turned the boys 

 of his family into girls. Like a true Athenian he 

 would probably be more disposed to make use of 

 such a discrepancy as an argument to induce the 

 seller to lower his price than to incur the expense 

 of having a new slab executed on purpose for 

 him. Those who are let into this secret will not 

 be surprised if they occasionally find a subject 

 repeated exactly on two tombs without variation, 

 nor if a sculptured group is little in harmony 

 with the inscribed list of the dead. 



Even in those cases in which a relief was 

 executed by special order on the death of a per- 

 son, a relief adapted in plan and intended in de- 

 tails to represent the deceased happy amid his 



