Tlie Evolution of Sculpture. 351 



Oriental stiffness ; never belies its medium. Indeed, even in 

 Greece itself it has not done so in the earliest art-products 

 known to us e. g., the Spartan grave-reliefs, the Agemo of 

 Asea, the Apollo of Tenea, and even the so-called Mara- 

 thonian soldier. 



But a time finally comes when Greece breaks through the 

 bonds of Orientalism, when she rises above the stiff, mathe- 

 matical order to the order of life and its beauty ; when the 

 human spirit for the first time becomes conscious of its 

 freedom. When the cunning of Themistocles enables a 

 handful of freedom-loving Greeks to baffle and rout all the 

 brute force and stiff despotism of Persia, the cunning of 

 Phidias overcomes all the brute forces that he finds in stone 

 and bronze, and makes them vehicles for living and breath- 

 ing thoughts of freedom. The one is the counterpart of 

 the other. 



When we speak of the sculpture of Greece, we at once 

 think of the Parthenon marbles, the Hermes of Praxiteles, 

 the Venus of Melos, etc. But these mark the ripeness and 

 decay of Greek sculpture, not its evolution, which is all prior 

 to the Parthenon marbles. Indeed, we can trace the whole 

 history of sculpture in Greece itself growth, ripeness, decay. 



In the tombs of Mycenae, Tiryns, Nauplia, and other 

 places, we find small clay images, rude as can be, the earliest 

 attempts to body forth the unseen. They are doubtless 

 images of gods and ancestors, such as were to be found in 

 every family. We hear of them among the Hebrews as 

 teraphim, among the Etruscans and Romans as lares and 

 penates. The Greeks had, no doubt, similar things from 

 very early times ; but it is curious enough that in Homer 

 we find no mention of idols of any kind, except the Palla- 

 dium, which seems to have been of wood. And doubtless 

 by Homer's time the clay images had to some extent been 

 superseded by wooden ones. How rude some of these were 

 we may understand when we hear that the statue of Hera, 

 at Samos, was a mere board, and those of the Dioscuri, at 

 Sparta, little better than rude crosses. Yet such things 

 were held very sacred, and were worshiped even after art 

 had advanced to a far higher stage. The improvement of 

 these rude statues is connected with the half-mythical 

 name of Daedalus. He is the reputed originator of those 

 ccoana, or wooden statues, which were the chief objects of 

 worship in very many Greek temples. None of these re- 

 main to us, but we may judge of their character by certain 



