272 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



family or pursuing his favorite avocation, we 

 must not expect too much. Even here, the 

 sculptor confines himself to a generalized or 

 idealized representation. Probably he knew 

 naught of the dead, almost certainly he took no 

 pains to exactly imitate the living. Hence the 

 same conventional types, the bearded man, the 

 veiled woman, the girl, the infant, repeat them- 

 selves almost without variety, through all the 

 Macedonian period of Athenian graves. The 

 men who appear on sepulchral reliefs of the 

 same period are as much alike one to another as 

 the horsemen of the frieze of the Parthenon, or 

 the fighting heroes of the iEgina pediments. In 

 Roman times this is far less the case ; but, among 

 the Greeks of the fourth and third centuries b. c, 

 the artist was careful only of the type, and care- 

 less of the individual peculiarities ; so far at 

 least as existing remains enable us to judge. 



Nevertheless, it is quite an error to suppose 

 that the Athenians were all cast in one mould. 

 They differed one from another quite as much as 

 an equal number of Englishmen taken at random. 

 And of this the proof is conclusive. For there 

 still exists at Athens a remarkable series of por- 

 traits of those citizens who in succeeding years 

 undertook the office of gymnasiarch. This series 

 stretches over a long period, and while it is true 

 that that period belongs to the decline, not the 

 flourishing greatness of the city, yet there is no 

 reason to believe that at the time Athenian blood 

 had been very much mixed with that of other 

 races, or the type deteriorated. Taking these 

 statues, then, as portraits of some of the most 

 prominent Athenian citizens, and probably some 

 of the purest-blooded, what do we find ? One 

 head is almost African in type, with thick lips 

 and woolly hair ; one might be taken for that of 

 an English judge ; one for that of an Italian 

 street-musician. Looking on these faces, one can 

 scarcely believe that the artists did not grossly 

 exaggerate the salient characteristics of the faces 

 of those they had to portray. And even if it 

 were so, we may safely affirm that an Athenian 

 crowd of the period must have contained as many 

 widely-divergent types as an English or French 

 one. So of the Greek princes who reigned dur- 

 ing the third and second centuries before the 

 Christian era over the disjecta membra, the frag- 

 ments of the empire of the Great Alexander, we 

 possess quite a portrait-gallery in their numerous 

 and excellent coins. Here, too, we find the widest 

 variety of type, many coins presenting to us heads 

 which no one, whose knowledge of Greek art was 

 superficial, would suppose to be Greek at all. 



But although individual Greeks differed thus 

 widely one from another, and although, in the 

 Alexandrine times of Greek art, artists quite un- 

 derstood the art of taking portraits, yet through- 

 out the forms and features of those sculptured on 

 tombs are quite conventionally rendered. And 

 in nothing does one see more clearly than here 

 the blending of Attic good taste with Attic super- 

 ficiality, and dislike of too deep or too persistent 

 emotion. For a tombstone calling up in a gen- 

 eral way past life and past happiness would be 

 a constant source of emotion, gentle and melan- 

 choly, but not too intense in degree ; while the 

 sight of the very features of dead father, mother, 

 wife, or child, would be too startling, and cause 

 far more pain than pleasure. We moderns are 

 less afraid of pain, and, when we place on tombs 

 any representation of the dead at all, make it as 

 exact a likeness as we can. But most, even now, 

 prefer a mere slab in the graveyard, and a por- 

 trait in the family-room or the bedroom. 



The sources of these generalized types of 

 man, youth, woman, and child, are of course to 

 be found in the common feeling of the Hellenic 

 nation, working through the brains and hands of 

 the ablest statuaries. As in the accepted type 

 of Zeus, the Greek sculptures embodied all that 

 seemed to them most venerable, wise, and majes- 

 tic ; as in the accepted type of Apollo, they com- 

 bined youthful beauty with supreme dignity ; so 

 in the accepted type of matron they strove to 

 embody all the matronly virtues, in the young 

 girl all childish grace and promise, in the beard- 

 ed man the dignity and self-control of a worthy 

 citizen, such as Aristides or Epaminondas. The 

 type was fixed in the case of human beings, as in 

 the case of the Hellenic deities, by the sculptures 

 of the generation which succeeded those who had 

 fought at Marathon and Plataese, and altered but 

 little after that until the collapse of Hellenic in- 

 dependence and Hellenic art. 



Goethe has expressed, in a passage which 

 cannot be too often quoted, the ultimate truth 

 about Greek sepulchral reliefs : 



" The wind which blows from the tombs of the 

 ancients comes with gentle breath as over a mound 

 of roses. The reliefs are touching and pathetic, 

 and always represent life. There stand father and 

 mother, their son between them, gazing at one an- 

 other with unspeakable truth to nature. Here a 

 pair clasp hands. Here a father seems to rest on 

 his couch and wait to be entertained by his fami- 

 ly. To me, the presence of these scenes was very 

 touching. Their art is of a late period, yet are 

 they simple, natural, and of universal interest. 



