(LIBRARY!
UNIVERSITY OR
CALIFORNIA I
SAN DIEGO -\
GREEK STUDIES
GREEK STUDIES
A SERIES OF ESSAYS
BY
WALTER \ PA'
LATE FELLOW OF BRASENOSE COLLEGE
PREPARED FOR THE PRESS
BY
CHARLES L. SHADWELL
FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE
Nefo
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO.. LTD.
I8 97
All rights reserved
COPYRIGHT, 1894,
BY MACMILLAN AND CO.
Set up and electrotyped December, 1894. Reprinted
September, 1895; January, 1897.
Nortooot
J. 6. Gushing & Co. Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.
PREFACE
THE present volume consists of a collection of essays
by the late Mr. Pater, all of which have already been
given to the public in various Magazines; and it is
owing to the kindness of the several proprietors of
those Magazines that they can now be brought
together in a collected shape. It will, it is believed,
be felt, that their value is considerably enhanced by
their appearance in a single volume, where they can
throw light upon one another, and exhibit by their
connexion a more complete view of the scope and
purpose of Mr. Pater in dealing with the art and
literature of the ancient world.
The essays fall into two distinct groups, one dealing
with the subjects of Greek mythology and Greek
poetry, the other with the history of Greek sculpture
and Greek architecture. But these two groups are
not wholly distinct ; they mutually illustrate one
v
vi PREFACE
another, and serve to enforce Mr. Pater's conception
of the essential unity, in all its many-sidedness, of
the Greek character. The god understood as the
" spiritual form " of the things of nature is not only the
key-note of the " Study of Dionysus l " and " The Myth
of Demeter and Persephone 2 ", but reappears as con-
tributing to the interpretation of the growth of Greek
sculpture 3 ." Thus, though in the bibliography of
his writings, the two groups are separated by a con-
siderable interval, there is no change of view ; he had
already reached the centre of the problem, and, the
secret once gained, his mode of treatment of the dif-
ferent aspects of Greek life and thought is permanent
and consistent.
The essay on "The Myth of Demeter and Per-
sephone " was originally prepared as two lectures, for
delivery, in 1875, at tne Birmingham and Midland
Institute. These lectures were published in the
Fortnightly Review, in Jan. and Feb. 1876. The
" Study of Dionysus " appeared in the same Review
in Dec. 1876. "The Bacchanals of Euripides" must
have been written about the same time, as a sequel
to the " Study of Dionysus "; for, in 1878, Mr. Pater
revised the four essays, with the intention, apparently,
1 See p. 28. 2 See p. 100.
8 See pp. 231, 269.
PREFACE vii
of publishing them collectively in a volume, an inten-
tion afterwards abandoned. The text now printed
has, except that of " The Bacchanals ", been taken from
proofs then set up, further corrected in manuscript.
" The Bacchanals ", written long before, was not pub-
lished until 1889, when it appeared in Macmillaris
Magazine for May. It was reprinted, without altera-
tion, prefixed to Dr. Tyrrell's edition of the Bacchae.
" Hippolytus Veiled " first appeared in August 1889,
in Macmillaris Magazine. It was afterwards re-
written, but with only a few substantial alterations,
in Mr. Pater's own hand, with a view, probably, of
republishing it with other essays. This last revise
has been followed in the text now printed.
The papers on Greek sculpture J are all that remain
of a series which, if Mr. Pater had lived, would,
probably, have grown into a still more important
work. Such a work would have included one or
more essays on Pheidias and the Parthenon, of which
only a fragment, though an important fragment, can
be found amongst his papers ; and it was to have
1 " The Beginnings of Greek Sculpture " was published in the
Fortnightly Review, Feb. and March, 1880; "The Marbles
of ^Egina " in the same Review in April. " The Age of
Athletic Prizemen " was published in the Contemporary
Review in February of the present year.
viii PREFACE
been prefaced by an Introduction to Greek Studies,
only a page or two of which was ever written.
This is not the place to speak of Mr. Pater's private
virtues, the personal charm of his character, the
brightness of his talk, the warmth of his friendship,
the devotion of his family life. But a few words may
be permitted on the value of the work by which he
will be known to those who never saw him.
Persons only superficially acquainted, or by hearsay,
with his writings, are apt to sum up his merits as
a writer by saying that he was a master, or a con-
summate master of style ; but those who have really
studied what he wrote do not need to be told that his
distinction does not lie in his literary grace alone, his
fastidious choice of language, his power of word-
painting, but in the depth and seriousness of his
studies. That the amount he has produced, in a
literary life of thirty years, is not greater, is one
proof among many of the spirit in which he worked.
His genius was " an infinite capacity for taking pains ".
That delicacy of insight, that gift of penetrating into
the heart of things, that subtleness of interpretation,
which with him seems an instinct, is the outcome of
hard, patient, conscientious study. If he had chosen,
he might, without difficulty, have produced a far
greater body of work of less value ; and from a
PREFACE ix
worldly point of view, he would have been wise.
Such was not his understanding of the use of his
talents. Cut multum datum est, multum quaeretur ab
eo. Those who wish to understand the spirit in
which he worked, will find it in this volume.
C. L. S.
Oct. 1894.
CONTENTS
PACK
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS : THE SPIRITUAL FORM OF
FIRE AND DEW I
THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES .... 49
THE MYTH OF DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE.
I '. . . .... 80
II. . .115
HIPPOLYTUS VEILED: A STUDY FROM EURIPIDES . 157
THE BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE.
I. THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART . . 195
II. THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES . . . . 236
THE MARBLES OF .EGINA . . . . . 266
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN : A CHAPTER IN
GREEK ART 286
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
THE SPIRITUAL FORM OF FIRE AND DEW
WRITERS on mythology speak habitually of the
religion of the Greeks. In this speaking, they are
really using a misleading expression, and should speak
rather of religions ; each race and class of Greeks
the Dorians, the people of the coast, the fishers
having had a religion of its own, conceived of the
objects that came nearest to it and were most in its
thoughts, and the resulting usages and ideas never
having come to have a precisely harmonised system,
after the analogy of some other religions. The religion
of Dionysus is the religion of people who pass their
lives among the vines. As the religion of Demeter
carries us back to the cornfields and farmsteads of
Greece, and places us, in fancy, among a primitive
race, in the furrow and beside the granary ; so the
religion of Dionysus carries us back to its vineyards,
B 1
2 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
and is a monument of the ways and thoughts of
people whose days go by beside the winepress, and
under the green and purple shadows, and whose ma-
terial happiness depends on the crop of grapes. For
them the thought of Dionysus and his circle, a little
Olympus outside the greater, covered the whole of
life, and was a complete religion, a sacred representa-
tion or interpretation of the whole human experience,
modified by the special limitations, the special privi-
leges of insight or suggestion, incident to their peculiar
mode of existence.
Now, if the reader wishes to understand what the
scope of the religion of Dionysus was to the Greeks
who lived in it, all it represented to them by way of
one clearly conceived yet complex symbol, let him
reflect what the loss would be if all the effect and ex-
pression drawn from the imagery of the vine and the
cup fell out of the whole body of existing poetry ; how
many fascinating trains of reflexion, what colour and
substance would therewith have been deducted from it,
filled as it is, apart from the more aweful associations
of the Christian ritual, apart from Galahad's cup, with
all the various symbolism of the fruit of the vine.
That supposed loss is but an imperfect measure of all
that the name of Dionysus recalled to the Greek mind,
under a single imaginable form, an outward body of
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 3
flesh presented to the senses, and comprehending, as
its animating soul, a whole world of thoughts, surmises,
greater and less experiences.
The student of the comparative science of religions
finds in the religion of Dionysus one of many modes
of that primitive tree -worship which, growing out of
some universal instinctive belief that trees and flowers
are indeed habitations of living spirits, is found almost
everywhere in the earlier stages of civilisation, en-
shrined in legend or custom, often graceful enough, as
if the delicate beauty of the object of worship had
effectually taken hold on the fancy of the worshipper.
Shelley's Sensitive Plant shows in what mists of poetical
reverie such feeling may still float about a mind full
of modern lights, the feeling we too have of a life in the
green world, always ready to assert its claim over our
sympathetic fancies. Who has not at moments felt
the scruple, which is with us always regarding animal
life, following the signs of animation further still, till
one almost hesitates to pluck out the little soul of
flower or leaf?
And in so graceful a faith the Greeks had their
share ; what was crude and inane in it becoming, in
the atmosphere of their energetic, imaginative intel-
ligence, refined and humanised. The oak-grove of
Dodona, the seat of their most venerable oracle, did
4 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
but perpetuate the fancy that the sounds of the wind
in the trees may be, for certain prepared and chosen
ears, intelligible voices ; they could believe in the
transmigration of souls into mulberry and laurel, mint
and hyacinth ; and the dainty Metamorphoses of Ovid
are but a fossilised form of one morsel here and there,
from a whole world of transformation, with which their
nimble fancy was perpetually playing. "Together
with them," says the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite, of
the Hamadryads, the nymphs which animate the
forest trees, " with them, at the moment of their birth,
grew up out of the soil, oak-tree or pine, fair, flourish-
ing among the mountains. And when at last the ap-
pointed hour of their death has come, first of all, those
fair trees are dried up ; the bark perishes from around
them, and the branches fall away ; and therewith the
soul of them deserts the light of the sun."
These then are the nurses of the vine, bracing it
with interchange of sun and shade. They bathe, they
dance, they sing songs of enchantment, so that those
who seem oddly in love with nature, and strange
among their fellows, are still said to be nympholepti ;
above all, they are weavers or spinsters, spinning or
weaving with airiest fingers, and subtlest, many-coloured
threads, the foliage of the trees, the petals of flowers,
the skins of the fruit, the long thin stalks on which
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 5
the poplar leaves are set so lightly that Homer com-
pares to them, in their constant motion, the maids who
sit spinning in the house of Alcinous. The nymphs
of Naxos, where the grape-skin is darkest, weave for
him a purple robe. Only, the ivy is never transformed,
is visible as natural ivy to the last, pressing the dark
outline of its leaves close upon the firm, white, quite
human flesh of the god's forehead.
In its earliest form, then, the religion of Dionysus
presents us with the most graceful phase of this grace-
ful worship, occupying a place between the ruder
fancies of half-civilised people concerning life in flower
or tree, and the dreamy after-fancies of the poet of
the Sensitive Plant. He is the soul of the individual
vine, first; the young vine at the house-door of the
newly married, for instance, as the vine-grower stoops
over it, coaxing and nursing it, like a pet animal or a
little child ; afterwards, the soul of the whole species,
the spirit of fire and dew, alive and leaping in a
thousand vines, as the higher intelligence, brooding
more deeply over things, pursues, in thought, the
generation of sweetness and strength in the veins of
the tree, the transformation of water into wine, little
by little ; noting all the influences upon it of the
heaven above and the earth beneath ; and shadowing
forth, in each pause of the process, an intervening
6 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
person what is to us but the secret chemistry of
nature being to them the mediation of living spirits.
So they passed on to think of Dionysus (naming him
at last from the brightness of the sky and the moisture
of the earth) not merely as the soul of the vine, but
of all that life in flowing things of which the vine is
the symbol, because its most emphatic example. At
Delos he bears a son, from whom in turn spring the
three mysterious sisters QEno, Spermo, and Elais, who,
dwelling in the island, exercise respectively the gifts
of turning all things at will into oil, and corn, and
wine. In the JBaccha of Euripides, he gives his
followers, by miracle, honey and milk, and the water
gushes for them from the smitten rock. He comes
at last to have a scope equal to that of Demeter, a
realm as wide and mysterious as hers ; the whole
productive power of the earth is in him, and the
explanation of its annual change. As some embody
their intuitions of that power in corn, so others in
wine. He is the dispenser of the earth's hidden
wealth, giver of riches through the vine, as Demeter
through the grain. And as Demeter sends the airy,
dainty-wheeled and dainty-winged spirit of Triptole-
mus to bear her gifts abroad on all winds, so Dionysus
goes on his eastern journey, with its many intricate ad-
ventures, on which he carries his gifts to every people.
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 7
A little Olympus outside the greater, I said, of
Dionysus and his companions ; he is the centre of
a cycle, the hierarchy of the creatures of water and
sunlight in many degrees; and that fantastic system
of tree-worship places round him, not the fondly
whispering spirits of the more graceful inhabitants or
woodland only, the nymphs of the poplar and the
pine, but the whole satyr circle, intervening between
the headship of the vine and the mere earth, the
grosser, less human spirits, incorporate and made
visible, of the more coarse and sluggish sorts of vege-
table strength, the fig, the reed, the ineradicable weed-
things which will attach themselves, climbing about
the vine-poles, or seeking the sun between the hot
stones. For as Dionysus, the spiritual form of the
vine, is of the highest human type, so the fig-tree
and the reed have animal souls, mistakeable in the
thoughts of a later, imperfectly remembering age,
for mere abstractions of animal nature ; Snubnose,
and Sweetwine, and Silenus, the oldest of them all, so
old that he has come to have the gift of prophecy.
Quite different from them in origin and intent, but
confused with them in form, are those other com-
panions of Dionysus, Pan and his children. Home-
spun dream of simple people, and like them in the
uneventful tenour of his existence, he has almost no
8 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
story ; he is but a presence ; the spiritual form of
Arcadia, and the ways of human life there ; the re-
flexion, in sacred image or ideal, of its flocks, and
orchards, and wild honey ; the dangers of its hunters ;
its weariness in noonday heat ; its children, agile as
the goats they tend, who run, in their picturesque
rags, across the solitary wanderer's path, to startle
him, in the unfamiliar upper places ; its one adorn-
ment and solace being the dance to the homely shep-
herd's pipe, cut by Pan first from the sedges of the
brook Molpeia.
Breathing of remote nature, the sense of which is
so profound in the Homeric hymn to Pan, the pines,
the foldings of the hills, the leaping streams, the
strange echoings and dying of sound on the heights,
"the bird, which among the petals of many- flowered
spring, pouring out a dirge, sends forth her honey-
voiced song," " the crocus and the hyacinth disorderly
mixed in the deep grass " things which the religion
of Dionysus loves Pan joins the company of the
satyrs. Amongst them, they give their names to
insolence and mockery, and the finer sorts of malice,
to unmeaning and ridiculous fear. But the best spirits
have found in them also a certain human pathos, as
in displaced beings, coming even nearer to most men,
in their very roughness, than the noble and delicate
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 9
person of the vine ; dubious creatures, half-way
between the animal and human kinds, speculating
wistfully on their being, because not wholly under-
standing themselves and their place in nature ; as the
animals seem always to have this expression to some
noticeable degree in the presence of man. In the later
school of Attic sculpture they are treated with more
and more of refinement, till in some happy moment
Praxiteles conceived a model, often repeated, which
concentrates this sentiment of true humour concerning
them ; a model of dainty natural ease in posture, but
with the legs slightly crossed, as only lowly-bred gods
are used to carry them, and with some puzzled trouble
of youth, you might wish for a moment to smoothe
away, puckering the forehead a little, between the
pointed ears, on which the goodly hair of his animal
strength grows low. Little by little, the signs of
brute nature are subordinated, or disappear; and at
last, Robetta, a humble Italian engraver of the fifteenth
century, entering into the Greek fancy because it
belongs to all ages, has expressed it in its most exqui-
site form, in a design of Ceres and her children, of
whom their mother is no longer afraid, as in the
Homeric hymn to Pan. The puck-noses have grown
delicate, so that, with Plato's infatuated lover, you
may call them winsome, if you please ; and no one
10 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
would wish those hairy little shanks away, with which
one of the small Pans walks at her side, grasping her
skirt stoutly ; while the other, the sick or weary one,
rides in the arms of Ceres herself, who in graceful
Italian dress, and decked airily with fruit and corn,
steps across a country of cut sheaves, pressing it closely
to her, with a child's peevish trouble in its face, and
its small goat-legs and tiny hoofs folded over together,
precisely after the manner of a little child.
There is one element in the conception of Dionysus,
which his connexion with the satyrs, Marsyas being
one of them, and with Pan, from whom the flute
passed to all the shepherds of Theocritus, alike illus-
trates, his interest, namely, in one of the great species
of music. One form of that wilder vegetation, of
which the Satyr race is the soul made visible, is the
reed, which the creature plucks and trims into musical
pipes. And as Apollo inspires and rules over all the
music of strings, so Dionysus inspires and rules over
all the music of the reed, the water-plant, in which the
ideas of water and of vegetable life are brought close
together, natural property, therefore, of the spirit of
life in the green sap. I said that the religion of
Dionysus was, for those who lived in it, a complete
religion, a complete sacred representation and inter-
pretation of the whole of life ; and as, in his relation
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 11
to the vine, he fills for them the place of Demeter, is
the life of the earth through the grape as she through
the grain, so, in this other phase of his being, in his
relation to the reed, he fills for them the place of
Apollo ; he is the inherent cause of music and poetry ;
he inspires ; he explains the phenomena of enthusi-
asm, as distinguished by Plato in the Phadrus, the
secrets of possession by a higher and more energetic
spirit than one's own, the gift of self-revelation, of
passing out of oneself through words, tones, gestures.
A winged Dionysus, venerated at Amyclse, was per-
haps meant to represent him thus, as the god of en-
thusiasm, of the rising up on those spiritual wings, of
which also we hear something in the Phadrus of Plato.
The artists of the Renaissance occupied themselves
much with the person and the story of Dionysus ; and
Michelangelo, in a work still remaining in Florence,
in which he essayed with success to produce a thing
which should pass with the critics for a piece of
ancient sculpture, has represented him in the fulness,
as it seems, of this enthusiasm, an image of delighted,
entire surrender to transporting dreams. And this is
no subtle after-thought of a later age, but true to
certain finer movements of old Greek sentiment,
though it may seem to have waited for the hand of
Michelangelo before it attained complete realisation.
12 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
The head of Ion leans, as they recline at the banquet,
on the shoulder of Charmides ; he mutters in his sleep
of things seen therein, but awakes as the flute- players
enter, whom Charmides has hired for his birthday
supper. The soul of Callias, who sits on the other
side of Charmides, flashes out ; he counterfeits, with
life-like gesture, the personal tricks of friend or foe ;
or the things he could never utter before, he finds
words for now; the secrets of life are on his lips.
It is in this loosening of the lips and heart, strictly,
that Dionysus is the Deliverer, Eleutherios ; and of
such enthusiasm, or ecstasy, is, in a certain sense, an
older patron than Apollo himself. Even at Delphi,
the centre of Greek inspiration and of the religion
of Apollo, his claim always maintained itself; and
signs are not wanting that Apollo was but a later
comer there. There, under his later reign, hard by
the golden image of Apollo himself, near the sacred
tripod on which the Pythia sat to prophesy, was to
be seen a strange object a sort of coffin or cinerary
urn with the inscription, " Here lieth the body of
Dionysus, the son of Semele." The pediment of the
great temple was divided between them Apollo with
the nine Muses on that side, Dionysus, with perhaps
three times three Graces, on this. A third of the
whole year was held sacred to him ; the four winter
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 13
months were the months of Dionysus ; and in the
shrine of Apollo itself he was worshipped with almost
equal devotion.
The religion of Dionysus takes us back, then, into
that old Greek life of the vineyards, as we see it on
many painted vases, with much there as we should
find it now, as we see it in Bennozzo Gozzoli's mediae-
val fresco of the Invention of Wine in the Campo
Santo at Pisa the family of Noah, presented among
all the circumstances of a Tuscan vineyard, around
the press from which the first wine is flowing, a
painted idyll, with its vintage colours still opulent in
decay, and not without its solemn touch of biblical
symbolism. For differences, we detect in that primi-
tive life, and under that Greek sky, a nimbler play of
fancy, lightly and unsuspiciously investing all things
with personal aspect and incident, and a certain mys-
tical apprehension, now almost departed, of unseen
powers beyond the material veil of things, correspond-
ing to the exceptional vigour and variety of the Greek
organisation. This peasant life lies, in unhistoric
time, behind the definite forms with which poetry and
a refined priesthood afterwards clothed the religion of
Dionysus ; and the mere scenery and circumstances
of the vineyard have determined many things in its
development. The noise of the vineyard still sounds
14 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
in some of his epithets, perhaps in his best-known
name lacchus, Bacchus. The masks suspended on
base or cornice, so familiar an ornament in later
Greek architecture, are the little faces hanging from
the vines, and moving in the wind, to scare the birds.
That garland of ivy, the aesthetic value of which is
so great in the later imagery of Dionysus and his
descendants, the leaves of which floating from his
hair, become so noble in the hands of Titian and
Tintoret, was actually worn on the head for coolness ;
his earliest and most sacred images were wrought in
the wood of the vine. The people of the vineyard
had their feast, the little or country Dionysia, which
still lived on, side by side with the greater ceremonies
of a later time, celebrated in December, the time of
the storing of the new wine. It was then that the
potters' fair came, calpis and amphora, together with
lamps against the winter, laid out in order for the
choice of buyers ; for Keramus, the Greek Vase, is a
son of Dionysus, of wine and of Athene, who teaches
men all serviceable and decorative art. Then the
goat was killed, and its blood poured out at the root
of the vines ; and Dionysus literally drank the blood
of goats ; and, being Greeks, with quick and mobile
sympathies, 8<n8ai/Aoves, "superstitious," or rather
" susceptible of religious impressions," some among
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 15
them, remembering those departed since last year,
add yet a little more, and a little wine and water for
the dead also ; brooding how the sense of these
things might pass below the roots, to spirits hungry
and thirsty, perhaps, in their shadowy homes. But
the gaiety, that gaiety which Aristophanes in the
Acharnians has depicted with so many vivid touches,
as a thing of which civil war had deprived the villages
of Attica, preponderates over the grave. The trav-
elling country show comes round with its puppets;
even the slaves have their holiday l ; the mirth be-
comes excessive ; they hide their faces under gro-
tesque masks of bark, or stain them with wine-lees, or
potters' crimson even, like the old rude idols painted
red ; and carry in midnight procession such rough
symbols of the productive force of nature as the
women and children had best not look upon ; which
will be frowned upon, and refine themselves, or dis-
appear, in the feasts of cultivated Athens.
Of the whole story of Dionysus, it was the episode
of his marriage with Ariadne about which ancient art
concerned itself oftenest, and with most effect. Here,
although the antiquarian may still detect circumstances
1 There were some who suspected Dionysus of a secret demo-
cratic interest; though indeed he was liberator only of men's hearts,
and eAev0epeiif only because he never forgot Eleutheras, the little
place which, in Attica, first received him.
16 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
which link the persons and incidents of the legend
with the mystical life of the earth, as symbols of its
annual change, yet the merely human interest of the
story has prevailed over its earlier significance ; the
spiritual form of fire and dew has become a romantic
lover. And as a story of romantic love, fullest per-
haps of all the motives of classic legend of the pride
of life, it survived with undiminished interest to a
later world, two of the greatest masters of Italian
painting having poured their whole power into it;
Titian with greater space of ingathered shore and
mountain, and solemn foliage, and fiery animal life ;
Tintoret with profounder luxury of delight in the
nearness to each other, and imminent embrace, of
glorious bodily presences ; and both alike with con-
summate beauty of physical form. Hardly less
humanised is the Theban legend of Dionysus, the
legend of his birth from Semele, which, out of the
entire body of tradition concerning him, was accepted
as central by the Athenian imagination. For the
people of Attica, he comes from Bceotia, a country
of northern marsh and mist, but from whose sombre,
black marble towns came also the vine, the musical
reed cut from its sedges, and the worship of the
Graces, always so closely connected with the religion
of Dionysus. " At Thebes alone," says Sophocles,
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 17
"mortal women bear immortal gods." His mother
is the daughter of Cadmus, himself marked out by
many curious circumstances as the close kinsman of
the earth, to which he all but returns at last, as the
serpent, in his old age, attesting some closer sense
lingering there of the affinity of man with the dust
from whence he came. Semele, an old Greek word,
as it seems, for the surface of the earth, the daughter
of Cadmus, beloved by Zeus, desires to see her lover
in the glory with which he is seen by the immortal
Hera. He appears to her in lightning. But the
mortal may not behold him and live. Semele gives
premature birth to the child Dionysus ; whom, to
preserve it from the jealousy of Hera, Zeus hides in
a part of his thigh, the child returning into the loins
of its father, whence in due time it is born again.
Yet in this fantastic story, hardly less than in the
legend of Ariadne, the story of Dionysus has become
a story of human persons, with human fortunes, and
even more intimately human appeal to sympathy ; so
that Euripides, pre-eminent as a poet of pathos, finds
in it a subject altogether to his mind. All the interest
now turns on the development of its points of moral
or sentimental significance ; the love of the immortal
for the mortal, the presumption of the daughter of
man who desires to see the divine form as it is ;
c
18 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
on the fact that . not without loss of sight, or life
itself, can man look upon it. The travail of nature
has been transformed into the pangs of the human
mother; and the poet dwells much on the pathetic
incident of death in childbirth, making Dionysus, as
Callimachus calls him, a seven months' child, cast out
among its enemies, motherless. And as a consequence
of this human interest, the legend attaches itself, as
in an actual history, to definite sacred objects and
places, the venerable relic of the wooden image which
fell into the chamber of Semele with the lightning-
flash, and which the piety of a later age covered with
plates of brass ; the Ivy-Fountain near Thebes, the
water of which was so wonderfully bright and sweet
to drink, where the nymphs bathed the new-born
child ; the grave of Semele, in a sacred enclosure
grown with ancient vines, where some volcanic heat
or flame was perhaps actually traceable, near the
lightning-struck ruins of her supposed abode.
Yet, though the mystical body of the earth is for-
gotten in the human anguish of the mother of Dio-
nysus, the sense of his essence of fire and dew still
lingers in his most sacred name, as the son of Semele,
Dithyrambus. We speak of a certain wild music in
words or rhythm as dithyrambic, like the dithyram-
bus, that is, the wild choral-singing of the worshippers
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 19
of Dionysus. But Dithyrambus seems to have been,
in the first instance, the name, not of the hymn, but
of the god to whom the hymn is sung ; and, through
a tangle of curious etymological speculations as to the
precise derivation of this name, one thing seems clearly
visible, that it commemorates, namely, the double
birth of the vine-god; that he is born once and
again ; his birth, first of fire, and afterwards of dew ;
the two dangers that beset him ; his victory over two
enemies, the capricious, excessive heats and colds of
spring.
He is irvpiytvris, then, fire-born, the son of light-
ning; lightning being to light, as regards concentra-
tion, what wine is to the other strengths of the earth.
And who that has rested a hand on the glittering silex
of a vineyard slope in August, where the pale globes
of sweetness are lying, does not feel this? It is
out of the bitter salts of a smitten, volcanic soil that
it comes up with the most curious virtues. The
mother faints and is parched up by the heat which
brings the child to the birth ; and it pierces through,
a wonder of freshness, drawing its everlasting green
and typical coolness out of the midst of the ashes ;
its own stem becoming at last like a tangled mass of
tortured metal. In thinking of Dionysus, then, as
fire-born, the Greeks apprehend and embody the sen-
20 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
timent, the poetry, of all tender things which grow
out of a hard soil, or in any sense blossom before the
leaf, like the little mezereon-plant of English gardens,
with its pale-purple, wine- scented flowers upon the
leafless twigs in February, or like the almond-trees of
Tuscany, or Aaron's rod that budded, or the staff in
the hand of the Pope when Tannhauser's repentance
is accepted.
And his second birth is of the dew. The fire of
which he was born would destroy him in his turn, as
it withered up his mother ; a second danger comes ;
from this the plant is protected by the influence of
the cooling cloud, the lower part of his father the sky,
in which it is wrapped and hidden, and of which it is
born again, its second mother being, in some versions
of the legend, Hy the Dew. The nursery, where
Zeus places it to be brought up, is a cave in Mount
Nysa, sought by a misdirected ingenuity in many
lands, but really, like the place of the carrying away
of Persephone, a place of fantasy, the oozy place of
springs in the hollow of the hillside, nowhere and every-
where, where the vine was "invented." The nymphs
of the trees overshadow it from above ; the nymphs of
the springs sustain it from below the Hyades, those
first leaping maenads, who, as the springs become rain-
clouds, go up to heaven among the stars, and descend
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 21
again, as dew or shower, upon it ; so that the religion
of Dionysus connects itself, not with tree-worship only,
but also with ancient water- worship, the worship of the
spiritual forms of springs and streams. To escape from
his enemies Dionysus leaps into the sea, the original
of all rain and springs, whence, in early summer, the
women of Elis and Argos were wont to call him, with
the singing of a hymn. And again, in thus commem-
orating Dionysus as born of the dew, the Greeks appre-
hend and embody the sentiment, the poetry, of water.
For not the heat only, but its solace the freshness of
the cup this too was felt by those people of the vine-
yard, whom the prophet Melampus had taught to mix
always their wine with water, and with whom the water-
ing of the vines became a religious ceremony ; the very
dead, as they thought, drinking of and refreshed by the
stream. And who that has ever felt the heat of a south-
ern country does not know this poetry, the motive of
the loveliest of all the works attributed to Giorgione,
the Fete Champetre in the Louvre ; the intense sensa-
tions, the subtle and far-reaching symbolisms, which,
in these places, cling about the touch and sound and
sight of it? Think of the darkness of the well in
the breathless court, with the delicate ring of ferns
kept alive just within the opening ; of the sound of
the fresh water flowing through the wooden pipes into
22 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
the houses of Venice, on summer mornings ; of the
cry Acqua fresco, ! at Padua or Verona, when the
people run to buy what they prize, in its rare purity,
more than wine, bringing pleasures so full of exquisite
appeal to the imagination, that, in these streets, the
very beggars, one thinks, might exhaust all the phi-
losophy of the epicurean.
Out of all these fancies comes the vine-growers' god,
the spiritual form of fire and dew. Beyond the famous
representations of Dionysus in later art and poetry
the Bacchanals of Euripides, the statuary of the school
of Praxiteles a multitude of literary allusions and
local customs carry us back to this world of vision
unchecked by positive knowledge, in which the myth
is begotten among a primitive people, as they won-
dered over the life of the thing their hands helped
forward, till it became for them a kind of spirit, and
their culture of it a kind of worship. Dionysus, as we
see him in art and poetry, is the projected expression
of the ways and dreams of this primitive people,
brooded over and harmonised by the energetic Greek
imagination ; the religious imagination of the Greeks
being, precisely, a unifying or identifying power, bring-
ing together things naturally asunder, making, as it
were, for the human body a soul of waters, for the
human soul a body of flowers ; welding into something
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 23
like the identity of a human personality the whole
range of man's experiences of a given object, or series
of objects all their outward qualities, and the visible
facts regarding them all the hidden ordinances by
which those facts and qualities hold of unseen forces,
and have their roots in purely visionary places.
Dionysus came later than the other gods to the
centres of Greek life ; and, as a consequence of this,
he is presented to us in an earlier stage of develop-
ment than they ; that element of natural fact which
is the original essence of all mythology being more
unmistakeably impressed upon us here than in other
myths. Not the least interesting point in the study
of him is, that he illustrates very clearly, not only
the earlier, but also a certain later influence of this
element of natural fact, in the development of the
gods of Greece. For the physical sense, latent in it,
is the clue, not merely to the original signification
of the incidents of the divine story, but also to the
source of the peculiar imaginative expression which
its persons subsequently retain, in the forms of the
higher Greek sculpture. And this leads me to some
general thoughts on the relation of Greek sculpture
to mythology, which may help to explain what the
function of the imagination in Greek sculpture really
was, in its handling of divine persons.
24 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
That Zeus is, in earliest, original, primitive inten-
tion, the open sky, across which the thunder some-
times sounds, and from which the rain descends
is a fact which not only explains the various stories
related concerning him, but determines also the ex-
pression which he retained in the work of Pheidias, so
far as it is possible to recall it, long after the growth
of those later stories had obscured, for the minds of
his worshippers, his primary signification. If men felt,
as Arrian tells us, that it was a calamity to die without
having seen the Zeus of Olyrnpia ; that was because
they experienced the impress there of that which the
eye and the whole being of man love to find above
him ; and the genius of Pheidias had availed to shed,
upon the gold and ivory of the physical form, the
blandness, the breadth, the smile of the open sky ; the
mild heat of it still coming and going, in the face of
the father of all the children of sunshine and shower ;
as if one of the great white clouds had composed
itself into it, and looked down upon them thus, out
of the midsummer noonday; so that those things
might be felt as warm, and fresh, and blue, by the
young and the old, the weak and the strong, who
came to sun themselves in the god's presence, as
procession and hymn rolled on, in the fragrant and
tranquil courts of the great Olympian temple ; while
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 25
all the time those people consciously apprehended in
the carved image of Zeus none but the personal, and
really human, characteristics.
Or think, again, of the Zeus of Dodona. The
oracle of Dodona, with its dim grove of oaks, and
sounding instruments of brass to husband the faintest
whisper in the leaves, was but a great consecration of
that sense of a mysterious will, of which people still
feel, or seem to feel, the expression, in the motions
of the wind, as it comes and goes, and which makes
it, indeed, seem almost more than a mere symbol
of the spirit within us. For Zeus was, indeed, the
god of the winds also ; ^Eolus, their so-called god,
being only his mortal minister, as having come, by
long study of them, through signs in the fire and
the like, to have a certain communicable skill regard-
ing them, in relation to practical uses. Now, suppose
a Greek sculptor to have proposed to himself to pre-
sent to his worshippers the image of this Zeus of
Dodona, who is in the trees and on the currents of
the air. Then, if he had been a really imaginative
sculptor, working as Pheidias worked, the very soul of
those moving, sonorous creatures would have passed
through his hand, into the eyes and hair of the image ;
as they can actually pass into the visible expression
of those who have drunk deeply of them ; as we may
26 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
notice, sometimes, in our walks on mountain or
shore.
Victory again Nike associated so often with
Zeus on the top of his staff, on the foot of his
throne, on the palm of his extended hand meant
originally, mythologic science tells us, only the great
victory of the sky, the triumph of morning over dark-
ness. But that physical morning of her origin has its
ministry to the later aesthetic sense also. For if
Nike, when she appears in company with the mortal,
and wholly fleshly hero, in whose chariot she stands to
guide the horses, or whom she crowns with her gar-
land of parsley or bay, or whose names she writes on
a shield, is imaginatively conceived, it is because the
old skyey influences are still not quite suppressed in
her clear-set eyes, and the dew of the morning still
clings to her wings and her floating hair.
The office of the imagination, then, in Greek sculp-
ture, in its handling of divine persons, is thus to
condense the impressions of natural things into human
form ; to retain that early mystical sense of water, or
wind, or light, in the moulding of eye and brow ;
to arrest it, or rather, perhaps, to set it free, there, as
human expression. The body of man, indeed, was
for the Greeks, still the genuine work of Prometheus ;
its connexion with earth and air asserted in many
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 27
a legend, not shaded down, as with us, through in-
numerable stages of descent, but direct and immedi-
ate ; in precise contrast to our physical theory of
our life, which never seems to fade, dream over it as
we will, out of the light of common day. The oracles
with their messages to human intelligence from birds
and springs of water, or vapours of the earth, were
a witness to that connexion. Their story went back,
as they believed, with unbroken continuity, and in
the very places where their later life was lived, to a
past, stretching beyond, yet continuous with, actual
memory, in which heaven and earth mingled ; to
those who were sons and daughters of stars, and
streams, and dew ; to an ancestry of grander men and
women, actually clothed in, or incorporate with, the
qualities and influences of those objects ; and we can
hardly over-estimate the influence on the Greek imag-
ination of this mythical connexion with the natural
world, at not so remote a date, and of the solem-
nising power exercised thereby over their thoughts.
In this intensely poetical situation, the historical
Greeks, the Athenians of the age of Pericles, found
themselves ; it was as if the actual roads on which
men daily walk, went up and on, into a visible
wonderland.
With such habitual impressions concerning the
28 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
body, the physical nature of man, the Greek sculptor,
in his later day, still free in imagination, through the
lingering influence of those early dreams, may have
more easily infused into human form the sense of sun,
or lightning, or cloud, to which it was so closely akin,
the spiritual flesh allying itself happily to mystical
meanings, and readily expressing seemingly unspeak-
able qualities. But the human form is a limiting
influence also ; and in proportion as art impressed
human form, in sculpture or in the drama, on the
vaguer conceptions of the Greek mind, there was
danger of an escape from them of the free spirit of
air, and light, and sky. Hence, all through the
history of Greek art, there is a struggle, a Streben,
as the Germans say, between the palpable and limited
human form, and the floating essence it is to contain.
On the one hand, was the teeming, still fluid world,
of old beliefs, as we see it reflected in the somewhat
formless theogony of Hesiod ; a world, the Titanic
vastness of which is congruous with a certain sub-
limity of speech, when he has to speak, for instance,
of motion or space ; as the Greek language itself has
a primitive copiousness and energy of words, for wind,
fire, water, cold, sound attesting a deep suscepti-
bility to the impressions of those things yet with
edges, most often, melting into each other. On the
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 29
other hand, there was that limiting, controlling ten-
dency, identified with the Dorian influence in the
history of the Greek mind, the spirit of a severe and
wholly self-conscious intelligence ; bent on impressing
everywhere, in the products of the imagination, the
definite, perfectly conceivable human form, as the
only worthy subject of art; less in sympathy with
the mystical genealogies of Hesiod, than with the
heroes of Homer, ending in the entirely humanised
religion of Apollo, the clearly understood humanity
of the old Greek warriors in the marbles of ^Egina.
The representation of man, as he is or might be,
became the aim of sculpture, and the achievement of
this the subject of its whole history ; one early carver
had opened the eyes, another the lips, a third had
given motion to the feet ; in various ways, in spite of
the retention of archaic idols, the genuine human ex-
pression had come, with the truthfulness of life itself.
These two tendencies, then, met and struggled and
were harmonised in the supreme imagination, of
Pheidias, in sculpture of ^Eschylus, in the drama.
Hence, a series of wondrous personalities, of which
the Greek imagination became the dwelling-place ;
beautiful, perfectly understood human outlines, em-
bodying a strange, delightful, lingering sense of
clouds and water and sun. Such a world, the world
30 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
of really imaginative Greek sculpture, we still see,
reflected in many a humble vase or battered coin, in
Bacchante, and Centaur, and Amazon; evolved out
of that " vasty deep " ; with most command, in the
consummate fragments of the Parthenon ; not, indeed,
so that he who runs may read, the gifts of Greek
sculpture being always delicate, and asking much of
the receiver ; but yet visible, and a pledge to us, of
creative power, as, to the worshipper, of the presence,
which, without that material pledge, had but vaguely
haunted the fields and groves.
This, then, was what the Greek imagination did
for men's sense and experience of natural forces, in
Athene, in Zeus, in Poseidon; for men's sense and
experience of their own bodily qualities swiftness,
energy, power of concentrating sight and hand and
foot on a momentary physical act in the close hair,
the chastened muscle, the perfectly poised attention of
the quoit-player; for men's sense, again, of ethical
qualities restless idealism, inward vision, power of
presence through that vision in scenes behind the ex-
perience of ordinary men in the idealised Alex-
ander.
To illustrate this function of the imagination, as
especially developed in Greek art, we may reflect on
what happens with us in the use of certain names, as
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 31
expressing summarily, this name for you and that for
me Helen, Gretchen, Mary a hundred associ-
ations, trains of sound, forms, impressions, remem-
bered in all sorts of degrees, which, through a very
wide and full experience, they have the power of
bringing with them ; in which respect, such names are
but revealing instances of the whole significance, power,
and use of language in general. Well, the mythical
conception, projected at last, in drama or sculpture,
is the name, the instrument of the identification, of
the given matter, of its unity in variety, its outline
or definition in mystery; its spiritual form, to use
again the expression I have borrowed from William
Blake form, with hands, and lips, and opened eye-
lids spiritual, as conveying to us, in that, the soul of
rain, or of a Greek river, or of swiftness, or purity.
To illustrate this, think what the effect would be,
if you could associate, by some trick of memory,
a certain group of natural objects, in all their varied
perspective, their changes of colour and tone in
varying light and shade, with the being and image
of an actual person. You travelled through a country
of clear rivers and wide meadows, or of high windy
places, or of lowly grass and willows, or of the Lady
of the Lake; and all the complex impressions of
these objects wound themselves, as a second animated
32 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
body, new and more subtle, around the person of
some one left there, so that they no longer come
to 'recollection apart from each other. Now try to
conceive the image of an actual person, in whom,
somehow, all those impressions of the vine and its
fruit, as the highest type of the life of the green
sap, had become incorporate ; all the scents and
colours of its flower and fruit, and something of
its curling foliage ; the chances of its growth ; the
enthusiasm, the easy flow of more choice expression,
as its juices mount within one ; for the image is
eloquent, too, in word, gesture, and glancing of the
eyes, which seem to be informed by some soul of
the vine within it : as Wordsworth says,
" Beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face"
so conceive an image into which the beauty, " born "
of the vine, has passed ; and you have the idea of
Dionysus, as he appears, entirely fashioned at last
by central Greek poetry and art, and is consecrated in
the Qlvo<t>6pM and the 'AvOeo-TrjpLa, the great festivals
of the Winepress and the Flowers.
The word wine, and with it the germ of the myth
of Dionysus, is older than the separation of the Indo-
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 33
Germanic race. Yet, with the people of Athens,
Dionysus counted as the youngest of the gods; he
was also the son of a mortal, dead in childbirth, and
seems always to have exercised the charm of the latest
born, in a sort of allowable fondness. Through the
fine-spun speculations of modern ethnologists and
grammarians, noting the changes in the letters of his
name, and catching at the slightest historical records
of his worship, we may trace his coming from Phrygia,
the birthplace of the more mystical elements of Greek
religion, over the mountains of Thrace. On the
heights of Pangaeus he leaves an oracle, with a per-
petually burning fire, famous down to the time of
Augustus, who reverently visited it. Southwards still,
over the hills of Parnassus, which remained for the
inspired women of Boeotia the centre of his presence,
he comes to Thebes, and the family of Cadmus.
From Boeotia he passes to Attica; to the villages
first ; at last to Athens ; at an assignable date, under
Peisistratus ; out of the country, into the town.
To this stage of his town-life, that Dionysus of
" enthusiasm " already belonged ; it was to the Athe-
nians of the town, to urbane young men, sitting
together at the banquet, that those expressions of a
sudden eloquence came, of the loosened utterance
and finer speech, its colour and imagery. Dionysus,
34 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
then, has entered Athens, to become urbane like
them ; to walk along the marble streets in frequent
procession, in the persons of noble youths, like those
who at the Oschophoria bore the branches of the vine
from his temple, to the temple of Athene of the
Parasol, or of beautiful slaves ; to contribute through
the arts to the adornment of life, yet perhaps also in
part to weaken it, relaxing ancient austerity. Gradu-
ally, his rough country feasts will be outdone by the
feasts of the town ; and as comedy arose out of those,
so these will give rise to tragedy. For his entrance
upon this new stage of his career, his coming into the
town, is from the first tinged with melancholy, as if in
entering the town he had put off his country peace.
The other Olympians are above sorrow. Dionysus,
like a strenuous mortal hero, like Hercules or Perseus,
has his alternations of joy and sorrow, of struggle and
hard-won triumph. It is out of the sorrows of Diony-
sus, then, of Dionysus in winter that all Greek
tragedy grows ; out of the song of the sorrows of
Dionysus, sung at his winter feast by the chorus of
satyrs, singers clad in goat-skins, in memory of his
rural life, one and another of whom, from time to
time, steps out of the company to emphasise and
develope this or that circumstance of the story ; and
so the song becomes dramatic. He will soon forget
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 35
that early country life, or remember it but as the
dreamy background of his later existence. He will
become, as always in later art and poetry, of dazzling
whiteness ; no longer dark with the air and sun, but
like one co-Kiarpo^Kus brought up under the shade
of Eastern porticoes or pavilions, or in the light that
has only reached him softened through the texture of
green leaves ; honey-pale, like the delicate people of
the city, like the flesh of women, as those old vase-
painters conceive of it, who leave their hands and
faces untouched with the pencil on the white clay.
The ruddy god of the vineyard, stained with wine-lees,
or coarser colour, will hardly recognise his double, in
the white, graceful, mournful figure, weeping, chastened,
lifting up his arms in yearning affection towards his
late-found mother, as we see him on a famous Etrus-
can mirror. Only, in thinking of this early tragedy, of
these town-feasts, and of the entrance of Dionysus
into Athens, you must suppose, not the later Athens
which is oftenest in our thoughts, the Athens of Peri-
cles and Pheidias ; but that little earlier Athens of
Peisistratus, which the Persians destroyed, which some
of us perhaps would rather have seen, in its early
simplicity, than the greater one ; when the old image
of the god. carved probably out of the stock of an
enormous vine, had just come from the village of
36 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
Eleutherae to his first temple in the Lenceum the
quarter of the winepresses, near the Limnce the
marshy place, which in Athens represents the cave of
Nysa; its little buildings on the hill-top, still with
steep rocky ways, crowding round the ancient temple
of Erectheus and the grave of Cecrops, with the old
miraculous olive-tree still growing there, and the old
snake of Athene Polias still alive somewhere in the
temple court.
The artists of the Italian Renaissance have treated
Dionysus many times, and with great effect, but always
in his joy, as an embodiment of that glory of nature
to which the Renaissance was a return. But in an
early engraving of Mocetto there is for once a Diony-
sus treated differently. The cold light of the back-
ground displays a barren hill, the bridge and towers
of an Italian town, and quiet water. In the fore-
ground, at the root of a vine, Dionysus is sitting, in
a posture of statuesque weariness ; the leaves of the
vine are grandly drawn, and wreathing heavily round
the head of the god, suggest the notion of his incor-
poration into it. The right hand, holding a great
vessel languidly and indifferently, lets the stream of
wine flow along the earth ; while the left supports the
forehead, shadowing heavily a face, comely, but full
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 37
of an expression of painful brooding. One knows
not how far one may really be from the mind of the
old Italian engraver, in gathering from his design this
impression of a melancholy and sorrowing Dionysus.
But modern motives are clearer; and in a Bacchus
by a young Hebrew painter, in the exhibition of the
Royal Academy of 1868, there was a complete and
very fascinating realisation of such a motive ; the god
of the bitterness of wine, " of things too sweet " ; the
sea-water of the Lesbian grape become somewhat
brackish in the cup. Touched by the sentiment of
this subtler, melancholy Dionysus, we may ask whether
anything similar in feeling is to be actually found in
the range of Greek ideas ; had some antitype of
this fascinating figure any place in Greek religion?
Yes ; in a certain darker side of the double god of
nature, obscured behind the brighter episodes of
Thebes and Naxos, but never quite forgotten, some-
thing corresponding to this deeper, more refined idea,
really existed the conception of Dionysus Zagreus ;
an image, which has left, indeed, but little effect in
Greek art and poetry, which criticism has to put
patiently together, out of late, scattered hints in
various writers ; but which is yet discernible, clearly
enough to show that it really visited certain Greek
minds here and there ; and discernible, not as a late
38 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
after-thought, but as a tradition really primitive, and
harmonious with the original motive of the idea of
Dionysus. In its potential, though unrealised scope,
it is perhaps the subtlest dream in Greek religious
poetry, and is, at least, part of the complete physiog-
nomy of Dionysus, as it actually reveals itself to the
modern student, after a complete survey.
The whole compass of the idea of Dionysus, a dual
god of both summer and winter, became ultimately,
as we saw, almost identical with that of Demeter.
The Phrygians believed that the god slept in winter
and awoke in summer, and celebrated his waking and
sleeping; or that he was bound and imprisoned in
winter, and unbound in spring. We saw how, in Elis
and at Argos, the women called him out of the sea,
with the singing of hymns, in early spring ; and a
beautiful ceremony in the temple at Delphi, which,
as we know, he shares with Apollo, described by Plu-
tarch, represents his mystical resurrection. Yearly,
about the time of the shortest day, just as the light
begins to increase, and while hope is still tremulously
strung, the priestesses of Dionysus were wont to
assemble with many lights at his shrine, and there,
with songs and dances, awoke the new-born child
after his wintry sleep, waving in a sacred cradle, like
the great basket used for winnowing corn, a symbol-
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 39
ical image, or perhaps a real infant. He is twofold
then a Doppelganger ; like Persephone, he belongs
to two worlds, and has much in common with her,
and a full share of those dark possibilities which,
even apart from the story of the rape, belong to her.
He is a Chthonian god, and, like all the children of
the earth, has an element of sadness ; like Hades
himself, he is hollow and devouring, an eater of
man's flesh sarcophagus the grave which con-
sumed unaware the ivory-white shoulder of Pelops.
And you have no sooner caught a glimpse of this
image, than a certain perceptible shadow comes creep-
ing over the whole story ; for, in effect, we have seen
glimpses of the sorrowing Dionysus, all along. Part
of the interest of the Theban legend of his birth is
that he comes of the marriage of a god with a mortal
woman; and from the first, like mortal heroes, he
falls within the sphere of human chances. At first,
indeed, the melancholy settles round the person of
his mother, dead in childbirth, and ignorant of the
glory of her son ; in shame, according to Euripides ;
punished, as her own sisters allege, for impiety. The
death of Semele is a sort of ideal or type of this
peculiar claim on human pity, as the descent of
Persephone into Hades, of all human pity over the
early death of women. Accordingly, his triumph
40 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
being now consummated, he descends into Hades,
through the unfathomable Alcyonian lake, according
to the most central version of the legend, to bring
her up from thence ; and that Hermes, the shadowy
conductor of souls, is constantly associated with Dio-
nysus, in the story of his early life, is not without
significance in this connexion. As in Delphi the
winter months were sacred to him, so in Athens his
feasts all fall within the four months on this and the
other side of the shortest day ; as Persephone spends
those four months a third part of the year in
Hades. Son or brother of Persephone he actually
becomes at last, in confused, half-developed tradition ;
and even has his place, with his dark sister, in the
Eleusinian mysteries, as lacchus ; where, on the sixth
day of the feast, in the great procession from Athens
to Eleusis, we may still realise his image, moving up
and down above the heads of the vast multitude, as
he goes, beside " the two" to the temple of Demeter,
amid the light of torches at noonday.
But it was among the mountains of Thrace that this
gloomier element in the being of Dionysus had taken
the strongest hold. As in sunny villages of Attica the
cheerful elements of his religion had been developed,
so, in those wilder northern regions, people continued
to brood over its darker side, and hence a current of
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 41
gloomy legend descended into Greece. The subject
of the Bacchanals of Euripides is the infatuated
opposition of Pentheus, king of Thebes, to Dionysus
and his religion ; his cruelty to the god, whom he
shuts up in prison, and who appears on the stage
with his delicate limbs cruelly bound, but who is
finally triumphant ; Pentheus, the man of grief, being
torn to pieces by his own mother, in the judicial mad-
ness sent upon her by the god. In this play, Eurip-
ides has only taken one of many versions of the same
story, in all of which Dionysus is victorious, his enemy
being torn to pieces by the sacred women, or by wild
horses, or dogs, or the fangs of cold ; or the maenad
Ambrosia, whom he is supposed to pursue for pur-
poses of lust, suddenly becomes a vine, and binds him
down to the earth inextricably, in her serpentine coils.
In all these instances, then, Dionysus punishes his
enemies by repaying them in kind. But a deeper
vein of poetry pauses at the sorrow, and in the con-
flict does not too soon anticipate the final triumph.
It is Dionysus himself who exhausts these sufferings.
Hence, in many forms reflexes of all the various
phases of his wintry existence the image of Dio-
nysus Zagreus, the Hunter of Dionysus in winter
storming wildly on the dark Thracian hills, from which,
like Ares and Boreas, he originally descends into
42 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
Greece ; the thought of the hunter concentrating into
itself all men's forebodings over the departure of the
year at its richest, and the death of all sweet things in
the long-continued cold, when the sick and the old and
little children, gazing out morning after morning on
the dun sky, can hardly believe in the return any more
of a bright day. Or he is connected with the fears,
the dangers and hardships of the hunter himself, lost
or slain sometimes, far from home, in the dense
woods of the mountains, as he seeks his meat so
ardently; becoming, in his chase, almost akin to the
wild beasts to the wolf, who comes before us in the
name of Lycurgus, one of his bitterest enemies
and a phase, therefore, of his own personality, in the
true intention of the myth. This transformation, this
image of the beautiful soft creature become an enemy
of human kind, putting off himself in his madness,
wronged by his own fierce hunger and thirst, and
haunting, with terrible sounds, the high Thracian
farms, is the most tragic note of the whole picture,
and links him on to one of the gloomiest creations of
later romance, the were-wolf, the belief in which still
lingers in Greece, as in France, where it seems to
become incorporate in the darkest of all romantic
histories, that of Gilles de Retz.
And now we see why the tradition of human
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 43
sacrifice lingered on in Greece, in connexion with
Dionysus, as a thing of actual detail, and not remote,
so that Dionysius of Halicarnassus counts it among
the horrors of Greek religion. That the sacred women
of Dionysus ate, in mystical ceremony, raw flesh, and
drank blood, is a fact often mentioned, and com-
memorates, as it seems, the actual sacrifice of a fair
boy deliberately torn to pieces, fading at last into
a symbolical offering. At Delphi, the wolf was pre-
served for him, on the principle by which Venus
loves the dove, and Hera peacocks ; and there were
places in which, after the sacrifice of a kid to him,
a curious mimic pursuit of the priest who had offered
it represented the still surviving horror of one who
had thrown a child to the wolves. The three
daughters of Minyas devote themselves to his wor-
ship ; they cast lots, and one of them offers her
own tender infant to be torn by the three, like a
roe ; then the other women pursue them, and they
are turned into bats, or moths, or other creatures
of the night. And fable is endorsed by history;
Plutarch telling us how, before the battle of Salamis,
with the assent of Themistocles, three Persian captive
youths were offered to Dionysus the Devourer.
As, then, some embodied their fears of winter in
Persephone, others embodied them in Dionysus, a
44 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
devouring god, whose sinister side (as the best wine
itself has its treacheries) is illustrated in the dark and
shameful secret society described by Livy, in which
his worship ended at Rome, afterwards abolished
by solemn act of the senate. He becomes a new
Aidoneus, a hunter of men's souls ; like him, to be
appeased only by costly sacrifices.
And then, Dionysus recovering from his mid-
winter madness, how intensely these people conceive
the spring ! It is that triumphant Dionysus, cured of
his great malady, and sane in the clear light of
the longer days, whom Euripides in the Bacchanals
sets before us, as still, essentially, the Hunter,
Zagreus ; though he keeps the red streams and torn
flesh away from the delicate body of the god, in his
long vesture of white and gold, and fragrant with
Eastern odours. Of this I hope to speak in another
paper; let me conclude this by one phase more of
religious custom.
If Dionysus, like Persephone, has his gloomy side,
like her he has also a peculiar message for a cer-
tain number of refined minds, seeking, in the later
days of Greek religion, such modifications of the old
legend as may minister to ethical culture, to the
perfecting of the moral nature. A type of second
birth, from first to last, he opens, in his series of
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 45
annual changes, for minds on the look-out for it, the
hope of a possible analogy, between the resurrection
of nature, and something else, as yet unrealised, re-
served for human souls ; and the beautiful, weeping
creature, vexed by the wind, suffering, torn to pieces,
and rejuvenescent again at last, like a tender shoot
of living green out of the hardness and stony dark-
ness of the earth, becomes an emblem or ideal of
chastening and purification, and of final victory
through suffering. It is the finer, mystical senti-
ment of the few, detached from the coarser and more
material religion of the many, and accompanying it,
through the course of its history, as its ethereal, less
palpable, life-giving soul, and, as always happens,
seeking the quiet, and not too anxious to make itself
felt by others. With some unfixed, though real, place
in the general scheme of Greek religion, this phase
of the worship of Dionysus had its special develop-
ment in the Orphic literature and mysteries. Obscure
as are those followers of the mystical Orpheus, we
yet certainly see them, moving, and playing their
part, in the later ages of Greek religion. Old friends
with new faces, though they had, as Plato witnesses,
their less worthy aspect, in certain appeals to vulgar,
superstitious fears, they seem to have been not without
the charm of a real and inward religious beauty, with
46 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
their neologies, their new readings of old legends,
their sense of mystical second meanings, as they re-
fined upon themes grown too familiar, and linked, in
a sophisticated age, the new to the old. In this
respect, we may perhaps liken them to the mendi-
cant orders in the Middle Ages, with their florid,
romantic theology, beyond the bounds of orthodox
tradition, giving so much new matter to art and
poetry. They are a picturesque addition, also, to the
exterior of Greek life, with their white dresses, their
dirges, their fastings and ecstasies, their outward as-
ceticism and material purifications. And the central
object of their worship comes before us as a tortured,
persecuted, slain god the suffering Dionysus of
whose legend they have their own special and eso-
teric version. That version, embodied in a supposed
Orphic poem, The Occultation of Dionysus, is repre-
sented only by the details that have passed from it
into the almost endless Dionysiaca of Nonnus, a
writer of the fourth century ; and the imagery has to
be put back into the shrine, bit by bit, and finally
incomplete. Its central point is the picture of the
rending to pieces of a divine child, of whom a tradi-
tion, scanty indeed, but harmonious in its variations,
had long maintained itself. It was in memory of it,
that those who were initiated into the Orphic mys-
A STUDY OF DIONYSUS 47
teries tasted of the raw flesh of the sacrifice, and
thereafter ate flesh no more ; and it connected itself
with that strange object in the Delphic shrine, the
grave of Dionysus.
Son, first, of Zeus, and of Persephone whom Zeus
woos, in the form of a serpent the white, golden-
haired child, the best-beloved of his father, and des-
tined by him to be the ruler of the world, grows up
in secret. But one day, Zeus, departing on a journey,
in his great fondness for the child, delivered to him
his crown and staff, and so left him shut in a strong
tower. Then it came to pass that the jealous Here
sent out the Titans against him. They approached
the crowned child, and with many sorts of playthings
enticed him away, to have him in their power, and
then miserably slew him hacking his body to
pieces, as the wind tears the vine, with the axe
Pelekus, which, like the swords of Roland and Arthur,
has its proper name. The fragments of the body they
boiled in a great cauldron, and made an impious
banquet upon them, afterwards carrying the bones to
Apollo, whose rival the young child should have been,
thinking to do him service. But Apollo, in great pity
for this his youngest brother, laid the bones in a
grave, within his own holy place. Meanwhile, Here,
full of her vengeance, brings to Zeus the heart of the
48 A STUDY OF DIONYSUS
child, which she had snatched, still beating, from the
hands of the Titans. But Zeus delivered the heart to
Semele ; and the soul of the child remaining awhile
in Hades, where Demeter made for it new flesh, was
thereafter born of Semele a second Zagreus the
younger, or Theban Dionysus.
THE BACCHANALS OF
EURIPIDES
So far, I have endeavoured to present, with some-
thing of the concrete character of a picture, Dionysus,
the old Greek god, as we may discern him through a
multitude of stray hints in art and poetry and religious
custom, through modern speculation on the tendencies
of early thought, through traits and touches in our
own actual states of mind, which may seem sympa-
thetic with those tendencies. In such a picture there
must necessarily be a certain artificiality; things
near and far, matter of varying degrees of certainty,
fact and surmise, being reflected and concentrated,
for its production, as if on the surface of a mirror.
Such concrete character, however, Greek poet or
sculptor, from time to time, impressed on the vague
world of popular belief and usage around him; and
in the Bacchanals of Euripides we have an example
of the figurative or imaginative power of poetry,
selecting and combining, at will, from that mixed
E 49
SO THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES
and floating mass, weaving the many-coloured threads
together, blending the various phases of legend all
the light and shade of the subject into a shape,
substantial and firmly set, through which a mere
fluctuating tradition might retain a permanent place
in men's imaginations. Here, in what Euripides
really says, in what we actually see on the stage, as
we read his play, we are dealing with a single real
object, not with uncertain effects of many half-
fancied objects. Let me leave you for a time
almost wholly in his hands, while you look very
closely at his work, so as to discriminate its out-
lines clearly.
This tragedy of the Bacchanals a sort of masque
or morality, as we say a monument as central for
the legend of Dionysus as the Homeric hymn for
that of Demeter, is unique in Greek literature, and
has also a singular interest in the life of Euripides
himself. He is writing in old age (the piece was
not played till after his death), not at Athens, nor for
a polished Attic audience, but for a wilder and less
temperately cultivated sort of people, at the court of
Archelaus, in Macedonia. Writing in old age, he
is in that subdued mood, a mood not necessarily
sordid, in which (the shudder at the nearer approach
of the unknown world coming over him more fre-
THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 51
quently than of old) accustomed ideas, conformable
to a sort of common sense regarding the unseen,
oftentimes regain what they may have lost, in a
man's allegiance. It is a sort of madness, he begins
to think, to differ from the received opinions thereon.
Not that he is insincere or ironical, but that he tends,
in the sum of probabilities, to dwell on their more
peaceful side; to sit quiet, for the short remaining
time, in the reflexion of the more cheerfully lighted
side of things; and what is accustomed what holds
of familiar usage comes to seem the whole essence
of wisdom, on all subjects; and the well-known
delineation of the vague country, in Homer or
Hesiod, one's best attainable mental outfit, for the
journey thither. With this sort of quiet wisdom the
whole play is penetrated. Euripides has said, or
seemed to say, many things concerning Greek relig-
ion, at variance with received opinion; and now,
in the end of life, he desires to make his peace
what shall at any rate be peace with men. He is in
the mood for acquiescence, or even for a palinode;
and this takes the direction, partly of mere submission
to, partly of a refining upon, the authorised religious
tradition: he calmly sophisticates this or that ele-
ment of it which had seemed grotesque; and has,
like any modern writer, a theory how myths were
52 THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES
made, and how in lapse of time their first signification
gets to be obscured among mortals; and what he sub-
mits to, that he will also adorn fondly, by his genius
for words.
And that very neighbourhood afforded him his
opportunity. It was in the neighbourhood of Pella,
the Macedonian capital, that the worship of Dionysus,
the newest of the gods, prevailed in its most extrava-
gant form the Thiasus, or wild, nocturnal proces-
sion of Bacchic women, retired to the woods and hills
for that purpose, with its accompaniments of music,
and lights, and dancing. Rational and moderate
Athenians, as we may gather from some admissions
of Euripides himself, somewhat despised all that;
while those who were more fanatical forsook the
home celebrations, and went on pilgrimage from
Attica to Cithaeron or Delphi. But, at Pella persons
of high birth took part in the exercise, and at a
later period we read in Plutarch how Olympias, the
mother of Alexander the Great, was devoted to this
enthusiastic worship. Although in one of Botticelli's
pictures the angels dance very sweetly, and may
represent many circumstances actually recorded in
the Hebrew scriptures, yet we hardly understand the
dance as a religious ceremony; the bare mention of
it sets us thinking on some fundamental differences
THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 53
between the pagan religions and our own. It is to
such ecstasies, however, that all nature-worship seems
to tend; that giddy, intoxicating sense of spring
that tingling in the veins, sympathetic with the
yearning life of the earth, having, apparently, in all
times and places, prompted some mode of wild
dancing. Coleridge, in one of his fantastic specu-
lations, refining on the German word for enthusiasm
Schwdrmerei, swarming, as he says, "like the
swarming of bees together" has explained how
the sympathies of mere numbers, as such, the random
catching on fire of one here and another there, when
people are collected together, generates as if by mere
contact, some new and rapturous spirit, not traceable
in the individual units of a multitude. Such swarm-
ing was the essence of that strange dance of the
Bacchic women: literally like winged things, they
follow, with motives, we may suppose, never quite
made clear even to themselves, their new, strange,
romantic god. Himself a woman-like god, it was
on women and feminine souls that his power mainly
fell. At Elis, it was the women who had their own
little song with which at spring-time they professed
to call him from the sea: at Brasiae they had their
own temple where none but women might enter; and
so the Thiasus, also, is almost exclusively formed
54 THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES
of women of those who experience most directly
the influence of things which touch thought through
the senses the presence of night, the expectation
of morning, the nearness of wild, unsophisticated,
natural things the echoes, the coolness, the noise
of frightened creatures as they climbed through the
darkness, the sunrise seen from the hill-tops, the
disillusion, the bitterness of satiety, the deep slumber
which comes with the morning. Athenians visiting
the Macedonian capital would hear, and from time
to time actually see, something of a religious custom,
in which the habit of an earlier world might seem to
survive. As they saw the lights flitting over the
mountains, and heard the wild, sharp cries of the
women, there was presented, as a singular fact in
the more prosaic actual life of a later time, an
enthusiasm otherwise relegated to the wonderland
of a distant past, in which a supposed primitive
harmony and understanding between man and nature
renewed itself. Later sisters of Centaur and Amazon,
the Maenads, as they beat the earth in strange sym-
pathy with its waking up from sleep, or as, in the
description of the Messenger, in the play of Euripides,
they lie sleeping in the glen, revealed among the morn-
ing mists, were themselves indeed as remnants
flecks left here and there and not yet quite evaporated
THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 55
under the hard light of a later and commoner day
of a certain cloud-world which had once covered
all things with a veil of mystery. Whether or not, in
what was often probably coarse as well as extravagant,
there may have lurked some finer vein of ethical
symbolism, such as Euripides hints at the soberer
influence, in the Thiasus, of keen air and animal
expansion, certainly, for art, and a poetry delighting
in colour and form, it was a custom rich in sugges-
tion. The imitative arts would draw from it alto-
gether new motives of freedom and energy, of freshness
in old forms. It is from this fantastic scene that the
beautiful wind-touched draperies, the rhythm, the
heads suddenly thrown back, of many a Pompeian
wall-painting and sarcophagus-frieze are originally
derived; and that melting languor, that perfectly
composed lassitude of the fallen Maenad, became a
fixed type in the school of grace, the school of
Praxiteles.
The circumstances of the place thus combining
with his peculiar motive, Euripides writes the Bac-
chanals. It is this extravagant phase of religion,
and the latest-born of the gods, which as an amende
honorable to the once slighted traditions of Greek
belief, he undertakes to interpret to an audience
composed of people who, like Scyles, the Hellenising
56 THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES
king of Scythia, feel the attraction of Greek religion
and Greek usage, but on their quainter side, and
partly relish that extravagance. Subject and audience
alike stimulate the romantic temper, and the tragedy
of the Bacchanals, with its innovations in metre and
diction, expressly noted as foreign or barbarous
all the charm and grace of the clear-pitched singing
of the chorus, notwithstanding with its subtleties
and sophistications, its grotesques, mingled with and
heightening a real shudder at the horror of the
theme, and a peculiarly fine and human pathos, is
almost wholly without the reassuring calm, generally
characteristic of the endings of Greek tragedy: is
itself excited, troubled, disturbing a spotted or
dappled thing, like the oddly dappled fawn-skins of
its own masquerade, so aptly expressive of the shifty,
twofold, rapidly-doubling genius of the divine, wild
creature himself. Let us listen and watch the strange
masks coming and going, for a while, as far as may
be as we should do with a modern play. What are
its charms? What is still alive, impressive, and
really poetical for us, in the dim old Greek play?
The scene is laid at Thebes, where the memory
of Semele, the mother of Dionysus, is still under
a cloud. Her own sisters, sinning against natural
affection, pitiless over her pathetic death and finding
THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 57
in it only a judgment upon the impiety with which,
having shamed herself with some mortal lover, she
had thrown the blame of her sin upon Zeus, have,
so far, triumphed over her. The true and glorious
version of her story lives only in the subdued memory
of the two aged men, Teiresias the prophet, and her
father Cadmus, apt now to let things go loosely by,
who has delegated his royal power to Pentheus, the
son of one of those sisters a hot-headed and
impious youth. So things had passed at Thebes;
and now a strange circumstance has happened. An
odd sickness has fallen upon the women: Dionysus
has sent the sting of his enthusiasm upon them, and
has pushed it to a sort of madness, a madness which
imitates the true Thiasus. Forced to have the form
without the profit of his worship, the whole female
population, leaving distaff and spindle, and headed
by the three princesses, have deserted the town, and
are lying encamped on the bare rocks, or under the
pines, among the solitudes of Cithaeron. And it is
just at this point that the divine child, supposed to
have perished at his mother's side in the flames,
returns to his birthplace, grown to manhood.
Dionysus himself speaks the prologue. He is on
a journey through the world to found a new religion;
and the first motive of this new religion is the vindi-
58 THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES
cation of the memory of his mother. In explaining
this design, Euripides, who seeks always for pathetic
effect, tells in few words, touching because simple,
the story of Semele here, and again still more
intensely in the chorus which follows the merely
human sentiment of maternity being not forgotten,
even amid the thought of the divine embraces of her
fiery bed-fellow. It is out of tenderness for her
that the son's divinity is to be revealed. A yearning
affection, the affection with which we see him lifting
up his arms about her, satisfied at last, on an old
Etruscan metal mirror, has led him from place to
place : everywhere he has had his dances and estab-
lished his worship; 'and everywhere his presence has
been her justification. First of all the towns in
Greece he comes to Thebes, the scene of her sorrows :
he is standing beside the sacred waters of Dirce and
Ismenus: the holy place is in sight: he hears the
Greek speech, and sees at last the ruins of the place
of her lying-in, at once his own birth-chamber and
his mother's tomb. His image, as it detaches itself
little by little from the episodes of the play, and is
further characterised by the songs of the chorus, has
a singular completeness of symbolical effect. The
incidents of a fully developed human personality are
superinduced on the mystical and abstract essence
THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 59
of that fiery spirit in the flowing veins of the earth
the aroma of the green world is retained in the
fair human body, set forth in all sorts of finer ethical
lights and shades with a wonderful kind of subtlety.
In the course of his long progress from land to land,
the gold, the flowers, the incense of the East, have
attached themselves deeply to him : their effect and
expression rest now upon his flesh like the gleaming
of that old ambrosial ointment of which Homer
speaks as resting ever on the persons of the gods,
and cling to his clothing the mitre binding his
perfumed yellow hair the long tunic down to the
white feet, somewhat womanly, and the fawn-skin,
with its rich spots, wrapped about the shoulders. As
the door opens to admit him, the scented air of the
vineyards (for the vine-blossom has an exquisite per-
fume) blows through; while the convolvulus on his
mystic rod represents all wreathing flowery things
whatever, with or without fruit, as in America all
such plants are still called vines. " Sweet upon the
mountains," the excitement of which he loves so
deeply and to which he constantly invites his fol-
lowers "sweet upon the mountains," and -pro-
foundly amorous, his presence embodies all the
voluptuous abundance of Asia, its beating sun, its
"fair-towered cities, full of inhabitants," which the
60 THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES
chorus describe in their luscious vocabulary, with the
rich Eastern names Lydia, Persia, Arabia Felix:
he is a sorcerer or an enchanter, the tyrant Pentheus
thinks: the springs of water, the flowing of honey
and milk and wine, are his miracles, wrought in
person.
We shall see presently how, writing for that
northern audience, Euripides crosses the Theban
with the gloomier Thracian legend, and lets the
darker stain show through. Yet, from the first, amid
all this floweriness, a touch or trace of that gloom
is discernible. The fawn-skin, composed now so
daintily over the shoulders, may be worn with the
whole coat of the animal made up, the hoofs gilded
and tied together over the right shoulder, to leave
the right arm disengaged to strike, its head clothing
the human head within, as Alexander, on some of his
coins, looks out from the elephant's scalp, and Her-
cules out of the jaws of a lion, on the coins of
Camarina. Those diminutive golden horns attached
to the forehead, represent not fecundity merely, nor
merely the crisp tossing of the waves of streams, but
horns of offence. And our fingers must beware of
the thyrsus, tossed about so wantonly by himself and
his chorus. The pine-cone at its top does but cover
a spear-point; and the thing is a weapon the sharp
THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 61
spear of the hunter Zagreus though hidden now by
the fresh leaves, and that button of pine-cone (useful
also to dip in wine, to check the sweetness) which he
has plucked down, coming through the forest, at
peace for a while this spring morning.
And the chorus emphasise this character, their
songs weaving for the whole piece, in words more
effective than any painted scenery, a certain con-
gruous background which heightens all; the intimate
sense of mountains and mountain things being in
this way maintained throughout, and concentrated
on the central figure. "He is sweet among the
mountains," they say, "when he drops down upon
the plain, out of his mystic musings" and we may
think we see the green festoons of the vine dropping
quickly, from foot-place to foot-place, down the
broken hill-side in spring, when like the Bacchanals,
all who can, wander out of the town to enjoy the
earliest heats. "Let us go out into the fields," we
say; a strange madness seems to lurk among the
flowers, ready to lay hold on us also; avriKa ya iraa-a
Xopeura soon the whole earth will dance and sing.
Dionysus is especially a woman's deity, and he
comes from the east conducted by a chorus of
gracious Lydian women, his true sisters Bassarids,
clad like himself in the long tunic, or bassara.
62 THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES
They move and speak to the music of clangorous
metallic instruments, cymbals and tambourines, re-
lieved by the clearer notes of the pipe; and there
is a strange variety of almost imitative sounds for
such music, in their very words. The Homeric
hymn to Demeter precedes the art of sculpture, but
is rich in suggestions for it; here, on the contrary,
in the first chorus of the Bacchanals, as elsewhere in
the play, we feel that the poetry of Euripides is
probably borrowing something from art; that in these
choruses, with their repetitions and refrains, he is
reproducing perhaps the spirit of some sculptured
relief which, like Luca della Robbia's celebrated
work for the organ-loft of the cathedral of Florence,
worked by various subtleties of line, not in the lips
and eyes only, but in the drapery and hands also,
to a strange reality of impression of musical effect
on visible things.
They beat their drums before the palace; and then
a humorous little scene, a reflex of the old Dionysiac
comedy of that laughter which was an essential
element of the earliest worship of Dionysus follows
the first chorus. The old blind prophet Teiresias,
and the aged king Cadmus, always secretly true to
him, have agreed to celebrate the Thiasus, and accept
his divinity openly. The youthful god has nowhere
THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 63
said decisively that he will have none but young men
in his sacred dance. But for that purpose they must
put on the long tunic, and that spotted skin which
only rustics wear, and assume the thyrsus and ivy-
crown. Teiresias arrives and is seen knocking at the
doors. And then, just as in the medieval mystery,
comes the inevitable grotesque, not unwelcome to
our poet, who is wont in his plays, perhaps not
altogether consciously, to intensify by its relief both
the pity and the terror of his conceptions. At the
summons of Teiresias, Cadmus appears, already
arrayed like him in the appointed ornaments, in all
their odd contrast with the infirmity and staidness of
old age. Even in old men's veins the spring leaps
again, and they are more than ready to begin danc-
ing. But they are shy of the untried dress, and one
of them is blind TTOL Set ^o/aeueiv; Trot KaOurrdvai
Tr68a ; KO.I Kpara o-eio-ot TroXtov ; and then the difficulty
of the way! the long, steep journey to the glens!
may pilgrims boil their peas? might they proceed to
the place in carriages? At last, while the audience
laugh more or less delicately at their aged fumblings,
in some co-operative manner, the eyes of the one
combining with the hands of the other, the pair are
about to set forth.
Here Pentheus is seen approaching the palace in
64 THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES
extreme haste. He has been absent from home, and
returning, has just heard of the state of things at
Thebes the strange malady of the women, the
dancings, the arrival of the mysterious stranger: he
finds all the women departed from the town, and sees
Cadmus and Teiresias in masque. Like the exag-
gerated diabolical figures in some of the religious
plays and imageries of the Middle Age, he is an
impersonation of stupid impiety, one of those whom
the gods willing to destroy first infatuate. Alternat-
ing between glib unwisdom and coarse mockery,
between violence and a pretence of moral austerity,
he understands only the sorriest motives; thinks the
whole thing feigned, and fancies the stranger, so
effeminate, so attractive of women with whom he
remains day and night, but a poor sensual creature,
and the real motive of the Bacchic women the indul-
gence of their lust; his ridiculous old grandfather
he is ready to renounce, and accuses Teiresias of
having in view only some fresh source of professional
profit to himself in connexion with some new-fangled
oracle; his petty spite avenges itself on the prophet
by an order to root up the sacred chair, where he sits
to watch the birds for divination, and disturb the
order of his sacred place; and even from the moment
of his entrance the mark of his doom seems already
THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 65
set upon him, in an impotent trembling which others
notice in him. Those of the women who still
loitered, he has already caused to be shut up in the
common prison; the others, with Ino, Autonoe, and
his own mother, Agave, he will hunt out of the glens;
while the stranger is threatened with various cruel
forms of death. But Teiresias and Cadmus stay to
reason with him, and induce him to abide wisely
with them; the prophet fittingly becomes the inter-
preter of Dionysus, and explains the true nature of
the visitor; his divinity, the completion or counter-
part of that of Demeter; his gift of prophecy; all
the soothing influences he brings with him; above
all, his gift of the medicine of sleep to weary
mortals. But the reason of Pentheus is already
sickening, and the judicial madness gathering over
it. Teiresias and Cadmus can but "go pray." So
again, not without the laughter of the audience,
supporting each other a little grotesquely against a
fall, they get away at last.
And then, again as in those quaintly carved and
coloured imageries of the Middle Age the martyr-
dom of the youthful Saint Firmin, for instance,
round the choir at Amiens comes the full contrast,
with a quite medieval simplicity and directness, be-
tween the insolence of the tyrant, now at last in sight
66 THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES
of his prey, and the outraged beauty of the youthful
god, meek, surrounded by his enemies, like some
fair wild creature in the snare of the hunter. Diony-
sus has been taken prisoner; he is led on to the stage,
with his hands bound, but still holding the thyrsus.
Unresisting he had submitted himself to his captors;
his colour had not changed; with a smile he had
bidden them do their will, so that even they are
touched with awe, and are almost ready to admit his
divinity. Marvellously white and red, he stands
there; and now, unwilling to be revealed to the un-
worthy, and requiring a fitness in the receiver, he
represents himself, in answer to the inquiries of Pen-
theus, not as Dionysus, but simply as the god's
prophet, in full trust in whom he desires to hear his
sentence. Then the long hair falls to the ground
under the shears; the mystic wand is torn from his
hand, and he is led away to be tied up, like some
dangerous wild animal, in a dark place near the
king's stables.
Up to this point in the play, there has been a
noticeable ambiguity as to the person of Dionysus,
the main figure of the piece; he is in part Dionysus,
indeed; but in part, only his messenger, or minister
preparing his way; a certain harshness of effect in
the actual appearance of a god upon the stage being
THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 67
in this way relieved, or made easy, as by a gradual
revelation in two steps. To Pentheus, in his invin-
cible ignorance, his essence remains to the last un-
revealed, and even the women of the chorus seem to
understand in him, so far, only the forerunner of
their real leader. As he goes away bound, therefore,
they too, threatened also in their turn with slavery,
invoke his greater original to appear and deliver
them. In pathetic cries they reproach Thebes for
rejecting them rip dratVci, TI/AC <evys; yet they
foretell his future greatness; a new Orpheus, he will
more than renew that old miraculous reign over ani-
mals and plants. Their song is full of suggestions of
wood and river. It is as if, for a moment, Dionysus
became the suffering vine again; and the rustle of
the leaves, and water come through their words to
refresh it. The fountain of Dirce still haunted by
the virgins of Thebes, where the infant god was
cooled and washed from the flecks of his fiery birth,
becomes typical of the coolness of all springs, and
is made, by a really poetic licence, the daughter of
the distant Achelous the earliest born, the father
in myth, of all Greek rivers.
A giddy sonorous scene of portents and surprises
follows a distant, exaggerated, dramatic reflex of
that old thundering tumult of the festival in the vine-
68 THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES
yard in which Dionysus reappears, miraculously set
free from his bonds. First, in answer to the deep-
toned invocation of the chorus, a great voice is heard
from within, proclaiming him to be the son of Semele
and Zeus. Then, amid the short, broken, rapturous
cries of the women of the chorus, proclaiming him
master, the noise of an earthquake passes slowly; the
pillars of the palace are seen waving to and fro; while
the strange, memorial fire from the tomb of Semele
blazes up and envelopes the whole building. The
terrified women fling themselves on the ground; and
then, at last, as the place is shaken open, Dionysus
is seen stepping out from among the tottering masses
of the mimic palace, bidding them arise and fear
not. But just here comes a long pause in the action
of the play, in which we must listen to a messenger
newly arrived from the glens, to tell us what he has
seen there, among the Maenads. The singular, some-
what sinister beauty of this speech, and a similar one
subsequent a fair description of morning on the
mountain-tops, with the Bacchic women sleeping,
which turns suddenly to a hard, coarse picture of
animals cruelly rent is one of the special curiosi-
ties which distinguish this play; and, as it is wholly
narrative, I shall give it in English prose, abbreviat-
ing, here and there, some details which seem to have
but a metrical value :
THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 69
" I was driving my herd of cattle to the summit of
the scaur to feed, what time the sun sent forth his
earliest beams to warm the earth. And lo! three
companies of women, and at the head of one of them
Autonoe, thy mother Agave at the head of the second,
and Ino at the head of the third. And they all slept,
with limbs relaxed, leaned against the low boughs of
the pines, or with head thrown heedlessly among the
oak-leaves strewn upon the ground all in the sleep
of temperance, not, as thou saidst, pursuing Cypris
through the solitudes of the forest, drunken with
wine, amid the low rustling of the lotus-pipe.
"And thy mother, when she heard the lowing of
the kine, stood up in the midst of them, and cried to
them to shake off sleep. And they, casting slumber
from their eyes, started upright, a marvel of beauty
and order, young and old and maidens yet unmarried.
And first, they let fall their hair upon their shoulders;
and those whose cinctures were unbound re-composed
the spotted fawn-skins, knotting them about with
snakes, which rose and licked them on the chin.
Some, lately mothers, who with breasts still swelling
had left their babes behind, nursed in their arms
antelopes, or wild whelps of wolves, and yielded
them their milk to drink; and upon their heads they
placed crowns of ivy or of oak, or of flowering con-
70 THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES
volvulus. Then one, taking a thyrsus-wand, struck
with it upon a rock, and thereupon leapt out a fine
rain of water; another let down a reed upon the earth,
and a fount of wine was sent forth there ; and those
whose thirst was for a white stream, skimming the
surface with their finger-tips, gathered from it abun-
dance of milk; and from the ivy of the mystic wands
streams of honey distilled. Verily ! hadst thou seen
these things, thou wouldst have worshipped whom
now thou revilest.
" And we shepherds and herdsmen came together
to question with each other over this matter what
strange and terrible things they do. And a certain
wayfarer from the city, subtle in speech, spake to us
'O ! dwellers upon these solemn ledges of the hills,
will ye that we hunt down, and take, amid her revel-
ries, Agave, the mother of Pentheus, according to the
king's pleasure?' And he seemed to us to speak
wisely; and we lay in wait among the bushes; and
they, at the time appointed, began moving their
wands for the Bacchic dance, calling with one voice
upon Bromius ! lacchus ! the son of Zeus ! and
the whole mountain was moved with ecstasy together,
and the wild creatures; nothing but was moved in
their running. And it chanced that Agave, in her
leaping, lighted near me, and I sprang from my
THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 71
hiding-place, willing to lay hold on her; and she
groaned out, *O! dogs of hunting, these fellows are
upon our traces; but follow me! follow! with the
mystic wands for weapons in your hands. ' And we,
by flight, hardly escaped tearing to pieces at their
hands, who thereupon advanced with knifeless fingers
upon the young of the kine, as they nipped the green;
and then hadst thou seen one holding a bleating
calf in her hands, with udder distent, straining it
asunder; others tore the heifers to shreds amongst
them ; tossed up and down the morsels lay in sight
flank or hoof or hung from the fir-trees, dropping
churned blood. The fierce, horned bulls stumbled
forward, their breasts upon the ground, dragged on by
myriad hands of young women, and in a moment the
inner parts were rent to morsels. So, like a flock of
birds aloft in flight, they retreat upon the level lands
outstretched below, which by the waters of Asopus
put forth the fair-flowering crop of Theban people
Hysiae and Erythrse below the precipice of
Cithaeron."
A grotesque scene follows, in which the humour we
noted, on seeing those two old men diffidently set
forth in chaplet and fawn-skin, deepens into a pro-
found tragic irony. Pentheus is determined to go
72 THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES
out in arms against the Bacchanals and put them to
death, when a sudden desire seizes him to witness
them in their encampment upon the mountains.
Dionysus, whom he still supposes to be but a prophet
or messenger of the god, engages to conduct him
thither; and, for greater security among the danger-
ous women, proposes that he shall disguise himself
in female attire. As Pentheus goes within for that
purpose, he lingers for a moment behind him, and
in prophetic speech declares the approaching end;
the victim has fallen into the net; and he goes in to
assist at the toilet, to array him in the ornaments
which he will carry to Hades, destroyed by his own
mother's hands. It is characteristic of Euripides
part of his fine tact and subtlety to relieve and jus-
tify what seems tedious, or constrained, or merely
terrible and grotesque, by a suddenly suggested trait
of homely pathos, or a glimpse of natural beauty, or
a morsel of form or colour seemingly taken directly
from picture or sculpture. So here, in this fantas-
tic scene our thoughts are changed in a moment by
the singing of the chorus, and divert for a while to
the dark-haired tresses of the wood; the breath of the
river-side is upon us; beside it, a fawn escaped from
the hunter's net, is flying swiftly in its joy; like
it, the Maenad rushes along; and we see the little
THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 73
head thrown back upon the neck, in deep aspiration,
to drink in the dew.
Meantime, Pentheus has assumed his disguise, and
comes forth tricked up with false hair and the dress
of a Bacchanal; but still with some misgivings at the
thought of going thus attired through the streets of
Thebes, and with many laughable readjustments of
the unwonted articles of clothing. And with the
woman's dress, his madness is closing faster round
him; just before, in the palace, terrified at the noise
of the earthquake, he had drawn sword upon a mere
fantastic appearance, and pierced only the empty
air. Now he begins to see the sun double, and
Thebes with all its towers repeated, while his con-
ductor seems to him transformed into a wild beast;
and now and then, we come upon some touches of a
curious psychology, so that we might almost seem to
be reading a modern poet. As if Euripides had
been aware of a not unknown symptom of incipient
madness (it is said) in which the patient, losing
the sense of resistance, while lifting small objects
imagines himself to be raising enormous weights, Pen-
theus, as he lifts the thyrsus, fancies he could lift
Cithseron with all the Bacchanals upon it. At all this
the laughter of course will pass round the theatre-
while those who really pierce into the purpose of the
74 THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES
poet, shudder, as they see the victim thus gro-
tesquely clad going to his doom, already foreseen
in the ominous chant of the chorus and as it
were his grave-clothes, in the dress which makes
him ridiculous.
Presently a messenger arrives to announce that
Pentheus is dead, and then another curious narrative
sets forth the manner of his death. Full of wild,
coarse, revolting details, of course not without pa-
thetic touches, and with the loveliness of the serving
Maenads, and of their mountain solitudes their
trees and water never quite forgotten, it de-
scribes how, venturing as a spy too near the sacred
circle, Pentheus was fallen upon, like a wild beast,
by the mystic huntresses and torn to pieces, his
mother being the first to begin "the sacred rites
of slaughter."
And at last Agave herself comes upon the stage,
holding aloft the head of her son, fixed upon the
sharp end of the thyrsus, calling upon the women of
the chorus to welcome the revel of the Evian god;
who, accordingly, admit her into the company, pro-
fessing themselves her fellow-revellers, the Baccha-
nals being thus absorbed into the chorus for the rest
of the play. For, indeed, all through it, the true,
though partly suppressed relation of the chorus to the
THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 75
Bacchanals is this, that the women of the chorus,
staid and temperate for the moment, following Dio-
nysus in his alternations, are but the paler sisters of
his more wild and gloomy votaries the true fol-
lowers of the mystical Dionysus the real chorus of
Zagreus; the idea that their violent proceedings are
the result of madness only, sent on them as a punish-
ment for their original rejection of the god, being,
as I said, when seen from the deeper motives of the
myth, only a " sophism " of Euripides a piece of
rationalism of which he avails himself for the pur-
pose of softening down the tradition of which he has
undertaken to be the poet. Agave comes on the
stage, then, bloodstained, exulting in her "victory
of tears," still quite visibly mad indeed, and with
the outward signs of madness, and as her mind wan-
ders, musing still on the fancy that the dead head in
her hands is that of a lion she has slain among the
mountains a young lion, she avers, as she notices
the down on the young man's chin, and his abundant
hair a fancy in which the chorus humour her, will-
ing to deal gently with the poor distraught creature.
Supported by them, she rejoices "exceedingly, ex-
ceedingly," declaring herself "fortunate" in such
goodly spoil; priding herself that the victim has
been slain, not with iron weapons, but with her own
76 THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES
white fingers, she summons all Thebes to come and
behold. She calls for her aged father to draw near
and see; and for Pentheus himself, at last, that he
may mount and rivet her trophy, appropriately deco-
rative there, between the triglyphs of the cornice
below the roof, visible to all.
And now, from this point onwards, Dionysus him-
self becomes more and more clearly discernible as
the hunter, a wily hunter, and man the prey he hunts
for; "Our king is a hunter," cry the chorus, as they
unite in Agave's triumph and give their sanction to
her deed. And as the Bacchanals supplement the
chorus, and must be added to it to make the concep-
tion of it complete; so in the conception of Diony-
sus also a certain transference, or substitution, must
be made much of the horror and sorrow of Agave,
of Pentheus, of the whole tragic situation, must be
transferred to him, if we wish to realise in the older,
profounder, and more complete sense of his nature,
that mystical being of Greek tradition to whom all
these experiences his madness, the chase, his im-
prisonment and death, his peace again really
belong; and to discern which, through Euripides'
peculiar treatment of his subject, is part of the
curious interest of this play.
Through the sophism of Euripides! For that,
THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 77
again, is the really descriptive word, with which
Euripides, a lover of sophisms, as Aristophanes
knows, himself supplies us. Well; this softened
version of the Bacchic madness is a sophism of
Euripides; and Dionysus Omophagus the eater
of raw flesh, must be added to the golden image of
Dionysus Meilichius the honey-sweet, if the old
tradition in its completeness is to be, in spite of that
sophism, our closing impression; if we are to catch,
in its fulness, that deep under-current of horror which
runs below, all through this masque of spring, and
realise the spectacle of that wild chase, in which
Dionysus is ultimately both the hunter and the
spoil.
But meantime another person appears on the stage ;
Cadmus enters, followed by attendants bearing on a
bier the torn limbs of Pentheus, which, lying wildly
scattered through the tangled wood, have been with
difficulty collected and now decently put together and
covered over. In the little that still remains before
the end of the play, destiny now hurrying things rap-
idly forward, and strong emotions, hopes and fore-
bodings being now closely packed, Euripides has
before him an artistic problem of enormous diffi-
culty. Perhaps this very haste and close-packing of
the matter, which keeps the mind from dwelling over-
78 THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES
much on detail, relieves its real extravagance, and
those who read it carefully will think that the pathos
of Euripides has been equal to the occasion. In a
few profoundly designed touches he depicts the per-
plexity of Cadmus, in whose house a god had become
an inmate, only to destroy it the regret of the old
man for the one male child to whom that house had
looked up as the pillar whereby aged people might
feel secure; the piteous craziness of Agave; the un-
conscious irony with which she caresses the florid,
youthful head of her son; the delicate breaking of
the thing to her reviving intelligence, as Cadmus,
though he can but wish that she might live on for
ever in her visionary enjoyment, prepares the way,
by playing on that other horrible legend of the Theban
house, the tearing of Actaeon to death he too de-
stroyed by a god. He gives us the sense of Agave's
gradual return to reason through many glimmering
doubts, till she wakes up at last to find the real face
turned up towards the mother and murderess; the
quite naturally spontaneous sorrow of the mother,
ending with her confession, down to her last sigh,
and the final breaking up of the house of Cadmus;
with a result so genuine, heartfelt, and dignified
withal in its expression of a strange ineffable woe,
that a fragment of it, the lamentation of Agave over
THE BACCHANALS OF EURIPIDES 79
her son, in which the long-pent agony at last finds
vent, were, it is supposed, adopted into his paler
work by an early Christian poet, and have figured
since, as touches of real fire, in the Christus Patiens
of Gregory Nazianzen.
THE MYTH OF DEMETER AND
PERSEPHONE
No chapter in the history of human imagination is
more curious than the myth of Demeter, and Kore
or Persephone. Alien in some respects from the
genuine traditions of Greek mythology, a relic of
the earlier inhabitants of Greece, and having but a
subordinate place in the religion of Homer, it yet
asserted its interest, little by little, and took a com-
plex hold on the minds of the Greeks, becoming
finally the central and most popular subject of their
national worship. Following its changes, we come
across various phases of Greek culture, which are not
without their likenesses in the modern mind. We
trace it in the dim first period of instinctive popular
conception; we see it connecting itself with many
impressive elements of art, and poetry, and religious
custom, with the picturesque superstitions of the
many, and with the finer intuitions of the few; and
80
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 8}
besides this, it is in itself full of interest and sugges-
tion, to all for whom the ideas of the Greek religion
have any real meaning in the modern world. And
the fortune of the myth has not deserted it in later
times. In the year 1780, the long-lost text of the
Homeric Hymn to Demeter was discovered among
the manuscripts of the imperial library at Moscow;
and, in our own generation, the tact of an eminent
student of Greek art, Sir Charles Newton, has restored
to the world the buried treasures of the little temple
and precinct of Demeter, at Cnidus, which have
many claims to rank in the central order of Greek
sculpture. The present essay is an attempt to select
and weave together, for those who are now approach-
ing the deeper study of Greek thought, whatever de-
tails in the development of this myth, arranged with
a view rather to a total impression than to the debate
of particular points, may seem likely to increase their
stock of poetical impressions, and to add to this
some criticisms on the expression which it has left
of itself in extant art and poetry.
The central expression, then, of the story of De-
meter and Persephone is the Homeric hymn, to which
Grote has assigned a date at least as early as six hun-
dred years before Christ. The one survivor of a
whole family of hymns on this subject, it was written,
82 THE MYTH OF
perhaps, for one of those contests which took place
on the seventh day of the Eleusinian festival, and
in which a bunch of ears of corn was the prize ; per-
haps, for actual use in the mysteries themselves, by
the Hierophantes, or Interpreter, who showed to the
worshippers at Eleusis those sacred places to which
the poem contains so many references. About the
composition itself there are many difficult questions,
with various surmises as to why it has remained only
in this unique manuscript of the end of the fourteenth
century. Portions of the text are missing, and there
are probably some additions by later hands; yet
most scholars have admitted that it possesses some
of the true characteristics of the Homeric style, some
genuine echoes of the age immediately succeeding
that which produced the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Listen now to a somewhat abbreviated version of it.
" I begin the song of Demeter " says the prize-
poet, or the Interpreter, the Sacristan of the holy
places "the song of Demeter and her daughter
Persephone, whom Aidoneus carried away by the
consent of Zeus, as she played, apart from her mother,
with the deep-bosomed daughters of the Ocean,
gathering flowers in a meadow of soft grass roses
and the crocus and fair violets and flags, and hya-
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 83
cinths, and, above all, the strange flower of the narcis-
sus, which the Earth, favouring the desire of Aidoneus,
brought forth for the first time, to snare the footsteps
of the flower-like girl. A hundred heads of blossom
grew up from the roots of it, and the sky and the
earth and the salt wave of the sea were glad at the
scent thereof. She stretched forth her hands to take
the flower ; thereupon the earth opened, and the king
of the great nation of the dead sprang out with his
immortal horses. He seized the unwilling girl, and
bore her away weeping, on his golden chariot. She
uttered a shrill cry, calling upon her father Zeus ; but
neither man nor god heard her voice, nor even the
nymphs of the meadow where she played ; except
Hecate only, the daughter of Persaeus, sitting, as
ever, in her cave, half veiled with a shining veil,
thinking delicate thoughts ; she, and the Sun also,
heard her.
" So long as she could still see the earth, and the
sky, and the sea with the great waves moving, and the
beams of the sun, and still thought to see again her
mother, and the race of the ever-living gods, so long
hope soothed her, in the midst of her grief. The
peaks of the hills and the depths of the sea echoed
her cry. And the mother heard it. A sharp pain
seized her at the heart ; she plucked the veil from her
84 THE MYTH OF
hair, and cast down the blue hood from her shoulders,
and fled forth like a bird, seeking Persephone over
dry land and sea. But neither man nor god would
tell her the truth ; nor did any bird come to her as
a sure messenger.
" Nine days she wandered up and down upon the
earth, having blazing torches in her hands ; and, in
her great sorrow, she refused to taste of ambrosia, or
of the cup of the sweet nectar, nor washed her face.
But when the tenth morning came, Hecate met her,
having a light in her hands. But Hecate had heard
the voice only, and had seen no one, and could not
tell Demeter who had borne the girl away. And
Demeter said not a word, but fled away swiftly
with her, having the blazing torches in her hands, till
they came to the Sun, the watchman both of gods and
men; and the goddess questioned him, and the Sun
told her the whole story.
" Then a more terrible grief took possession of
Demeter, and, in her anger against Zeus, she forsook
the assembly of the gods and abode among men, for
a long time veiling her beauty under a worn counte-
nance, so that none who looked upon her knew her,
until she came to the house of Celeus, who was then
king of Eleusis. In her sorrow, she sat down at the
wayside by the virgin's well, where the people of
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 85
Eleusis come to draw water, under the shadow of an
olive-tree. She seemed as an aged woman whose
time of child-bearing is gone by, and from whom the
gifts of Aphrodite have been withdrawn, like one of
the hired servants, who nurse the children or keep
house, in kings' palaces. And the daughters of Celeus,
four of them, like goddesses, possessing the flower of
their youth, Callidice, Cleisidice, Demo, and Callithoe
the eldest of them, coming to draw water that they
might bear it in their brazen pitchers to their father's
house, saw Demeter and knew her not. The gods are
hard for men to recognise.
" They asked her kindly what she did there, alone ;
and Demeter answered, dissemblingly, that she was
escaped from certain pirates, who had carried her
from her home and meant to sell her as a slave. Then
they prayed her to abide there while they returned to
the palace, to ask their mother's permission to bring
her home.
"Demeter bowed her head in assent; and they,
having filled their shining vessels with water, bore
them away, rejoicing in their beauty. They came
quickly to their father's house, and told their mother
what they had seen and heard. Their mother bade
them return, and hire the woman for a great price ;
and they, like the hinds or young heifers leaping in
86 THE MYTH OF
the fields in spring, fulfilled with the pasture, holding
up the folds of their raiment, sped along the hollow
road-way, their hair, in colour like the crocus, floating
about their shoulders as they went. They found the
glorious goddess still sitting by the wayside, unmoved.
Then they led her to their father's house ; and she,
veiled from head to foot, in her deep grief, followed
them on the way, and her blue robe gathered itself as
she walked, in many folds about her feet. They came
to the house, and passed through the sunny porch,
where their mother, Metaneira, was sitting against one
of the pillars of the roof, having a young child in her
bosom. They ran up to her; but Demeter crossed
the threshold, and, as she passed through, her head
rose and touched the roof, and her presence filled the
doorway with a divine brightness.
" Still they did not wholly recognise her. After a
time she was made to smile. She refused to drink
wine, but tasted of a cup mingled of water and barley,
flavoured with mint. It happened that Metaneira had
lately borne a child. It had come beyond hope, long
after its elder brethren, and was the object of a
peculiar tenderness and of many prayers with all.
Demeter consented to remain, and become the nurse
of this child. She took the child in her immortal
hands, and placed it in her fragrant bosom ; and the
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 87
heart of the mother rejoiced. Thus Demeter nursed
Demophoon. And the child . grew like a god, neither
sucking the breast, nor eating bread ; but Demeter
daily anointed it with ambrosia, as if it had indeed
been the child of a god, breathing sweetly over it and
holding it in her bosom ; and at nights, when she lay
alone with the child, she would hide it secretly in the
red strength of the fire, like a brand ; for her heart
yearned towards it, and she would fain have given to
it immortal youth.
" But the foolishness of his mother prevented it.
For a suspicion growing up within her, she awaited
her time, and one night peeped in upon them, and
thereupon cried out in terror at what she saw. And
the goddess heard her; and a sudden anger seizing
her, she plucked the child from the fire and cast it on
the ground, the child she would fain have made
immortal, but who must now share the common des-
tiny of all men, though some inscrutable grace should
still be his, because he had lain for a while on the
knees and in the bosom of the goddess.
"Then Demeter manifested herself openly. She
put away the mask of old age, and changed her form,
and the spirit of beauty breathed about her. A fra-
grant odour fell from her raiment, and her flesh shone
from afar; the long yellow hair descended waving
88 THE MYTH OF
over her shoulders, and the great house was filled as
with the brightness of lightning. She passed out
through the halls ; and Metaneira fell to the earth,
and was speechless for a long time, and remembered
not to lift the child from the ground. But the sisters,
hearing its piteous cries, leapt from their beds and
ran to it. Then one of them lifted the child from
the earth, and wrapped it in her bosom, and another
hastened to her mother's chamber to awake her :
they came round the child, and washed away the
flecks of the fire from its panting body, and kissed
it tenderly all about : but the anguish of the child
ceased not ; the arms of other and different nurses
were about to enfold it.
" So, all night, trembling with fear, they sought to
propitiate the glorious goddess; and in the morning
they told all to their father, Celeus. And he, accord-
ing to the commands of the goddess, built a fair
temple ; and all the people assisted ; and when it
was finished every man departed to his own home.
Then Demeter returned, and sat down within the
temple-walls, and remained still apart from the com-
pany of the gods, alone in her wasting regret for her
daughter Persephone.
" And, in her anger, she sent upon the earth a year
of grievous famine. The dry seed remained hidden
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 89
in the soil; in vain the oxen drew the ploughshare
through the furrows; much white seed-corn fell
fruitless on the earth, and the whole human race had
like to have perished, and the gods had no more
service of men, unless Zeus had interfered. First he
sent Iris, afterwards all the gods, one by one, to turn
Demeter from her anger; but none was able to
persuade her; she heard their words with a hard
countenance, and vowed by no means to return to
Olympus, nor to yield the fruit of the earth, until
her eyes had seen her lost daughter again. Then,
last of all, Zeus sent Hermes into the kingdom of
the dead, to persuade Aidoneus to suffer his bride to
return to the light of day. And Hermes found the
king at home in his palace, sitting on a couch, beside
the shrinking Persephone, consumed within herself
by desire for her mother. A doubtful smile passed
over the face of Aidoneus ; yet he obeyed the mes-
sage, and bade Persephone return ; yet praying her a
little to have gentle thoughts of him, nor judge him
too hardly, who was also an immortal god. And Per-
sephone arose up quickly in great joy ; only, ere she
departed, he caused her to eat a morsel of sweet
pomegranate, designing secretly thereby, that she
should not remain always upon earth, but might some
time return to him. And Aidoneus yoked the horses
90 THE MYTH OF
to his chariot; and Persephone ascended into it ; and
Hermes took the reins in his hands and drove out
through the infernal halls ; and the horses ran will-
ingly ; and they two quickly passed over the ways of
that long journey, neither the waters of the sea, nor
of the rivers, nor the deep ravines of the hills, nor
the cliffs of the shore, resisting them ; till at last
Hermes placed Persephone before the door of the.
temple where her mother was; who, seeing her, ran
out quickly to meet her, like a maenad coming down
a mountain-side, dusky with woods.
"So they spent all that day together in intimate
communion, having many things to hear and tell.
Then Zeus sent to them Rhea, his venerable mother,
the oldest of divine persons, to bring them back
reconciled, to the company of the gods ; and he or-
dained that Persephone should remain two parts of
the year with her mother, and one third part only
with her husband, in the kingdom of the dead. So
Demeter suffered the earth to yield its fruits once
more, and the land was suddenly laden with leaves
and flowers and waving corn. Also she visited
Triptolemus and the other princes of Eleusis, and
instructed them in the performance of her sacred
rites, those mysteries of which no tongue may speak.
Only, blessed is he whose eyes have seen them; his
lot after death is not as the lot of other men ! "
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 91
In the story of Demeter, as in all Greek myths, we
may trace the action of three different influences,
which have moulded it with varying effects, in three
successive phases of its development. There is first
its half-conscious, instinctive, or mystical, phase, in
which, under the form of an unwritten legend, living
from mouth to mouth, and with details changing as it
passes from place to place, there lie certain primitive
impressions of the phenomena of the natural world. We
may trace it next in its conscious, poetical or literary,
phase, in which the poets become the depositaries of
the vague instinctive product of the popular imagina-
tion, and handle it with a purely literary interest, fixing
its outlines, and simplifying or developing its situa-
tions. Thirdly, the myth passes into the ethical phase,
in which the persons and the incidents of the poetical
narrative are realised as abstract symbols, because in-
tensely characteristic examples, of moral or spiritual
conditions. Behind the adventures of the stealing of
Persephone and the wanderings of Demeter in search
of her, as we find them in the Homeric hymn, we may
discern the confused conception, under which that
early age, in which the myths were first created, rep-
resented to itself those changes in physical things, that
order of summer and winter, of which it had no scien-
tific, or systematic explanation, but in which, never-
92 THE MYTH OF
theless, it divined a multitude of living agencies,
corresponding to those ascertained forces, of which
our colder modern science tells the number and the
names. Demeter Demeter and Persephone, at
first, in a sort of confused union is the earth, in the
fixed order of its annual changes, but also in all the
accident and detail of the growth and decay of its
children. Of this conception, floating loosely in the
air, the poets of a later age take possession ; they
create Demeter and Persephone as we know them in
art and poetry. From the vague and fluctuating
union, in which together they had represented the
earth and its changes, the mother and the daughter
define themselves with special functions, and with
fixed, well-understood relationships, the incidents and
emotions of which soon weave themselves into a pa-
thetic story. Lastly, in proportion as the literary or
aesthetic activity completes the picture or the poem,
the ethical interest makes itself felt. These strange
persons Demeter and Persephone, these marvel-
lous incidents the translation into Hades, the seek-
ing of Demeter, the return of Persephone to her,
lend themselves to the elevation and correction of
the sentiments of sorrow and awe, by the presentment
to the senses and the imagination of an ideal expres-
sion of them. Demeter cannot but seem the type of
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 93
divine grief. Persephone is the goddess of death, yet
with a promise of life to come. Those three phases,
then, which are more or less discernible in all
mythical development, and constitute a natural order
in it, based on the necessary conditions of human
apprehension, are fixed more plainly, perhaps, than
in any other passage of Greek mythology in the story
of Demeter. And as the Homeric hymn is the cen-
tral expression of its literary or poetical phase, so
the marble remains, of which I shall have to speak
by and bye, are the central extant illustration of what
I have called its ethical phase.
Homer, in the Iliad, knows Demeter, but only as
the goddess of the fields, the originator and patroness
of the labours of the countryman, in their yearly order.
She stands, with her hair yellow like the ripe corn, at
the threshing-floor, and takes her share in the toil, the
heap of grain whitening, as the flails, moving in the
wind, disperse the chaff. Out in the fresh fields, she
yields to the embraces of lasion, to the extreme jeal-
ousy of Zeus, who slays her mortal lover with light-
ning. The flowery town of Pyrasus the wheat-town,
an ancient place in Thessaly, is her sacred precinct.
But when Homer gives a list of the orthodox gods,
her name is not mentioned.
Homer, in the Odyssey, knows Persephone also,
9+ THE MYTH OF
but not as Kore ; only as the queen of the dead
eiratvrj Ilepo-e^ovi? dreadful Persephone, the goddess
of destruction and death, according to the apparent
import of her name. She accomplishes men's evil
prayers ; she is the mistress and manager of men's
shades, to which she can dispense a little more or less
of life, dwelling in her mouldering palace on the steep
shore of the Oceanus, with its groves of barren willows
and tall poplars. But that Homer knew her as the
daughter of Demeter there are no signs ; and of his
knowledge of the rape of Persephone there is only the
faintest sign, he names Hades by the golden reins
of his chariot, and his beautiful horses.
The main theme, then, the most characteristic pecul-
iarities, of the story, as subsequently developed, are
not to be found, expressly, in the true Homer. We
have in him, on the one hand, Demeter, as the per-
fectly fresh and blithe goddess of the fields, whose
children, if she has them, must be as the perfectly
discreet and peaceful, unravished Kore ; on the other
hand, we have Persephone, as the wholly terrible god-
dess of death, who brings to Ulysses the querulous
shadows of the dead, and has the head of the gorgon
Medusa in her keeping. And it is only when these
two contrasted images have been brought into inti-
mate relationship, only when Kore and Persephone
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 95
have been identified, that the deeper mythology of
Demeter begins.
This combination has taken place in Hesiod ; and
in three lines of the Theogony we find the stealing of
Persephone by Aidoneus, 1 one of those things in
Hesiod, perhaps, which are really older than Homer.
Hesiod has been called the poet of helots, and is
thought to have preserved some of the traditions of
those earlier inhabitants of Greece who had become
, a kind of serfs ; and in a certain shadowiness in his
conceptions of the gods, contrasting with the concrete
and heroic forms of the gods of Homer, we may per-
haps trace something of the quiet unspoken brood-
ing of a subdued people of that silently dreaming
temper to which the story of Persephone properly
belongs. However this may be, it is in Hesiod that
the two images, unassociated in Homer the goddess
of summer and the goddess of death, Kore and Per-
sephone are identified with much significance ; and
that strange, dual being makes her first appearance,
whose latent capabilities the poets afterwards devel-
oped ; among the rest, a peculiar blending of those
two contrasted aspects, full of purpose for the duly
1 Theogony, 912-914:
Avrkp 6 AiJ/iTjrpos iro\v<p6p{lr)s is X^x* ^Ocv,
if r^/ce HepffeQbvTjv \fVK&\evov, f/v 'Ai'5wvet)j
qpircurev ijs irapa. /j.T)rp6s tdwKe dt uriritra Zew.
96 THE MYTH OF
chastened intelligence ; death, resurrection, rejuvenes-
cence. Awake, and sing, ye that dwell in the dust !
Modern science explains the changes of the natural
world by the hypothesis of certain unconscious forces ;
and the sum of these forces, in their combined action,
constitutes the scientific conception of nature. But,
side by side with the growth of this more mechanical
conception, an older and more spiritual, Platonic,
philosophy has always maintained itself, a philosophy
more of instinct than of the understanding, the mental
starting-point of which is not an observed sequence of
outward phenomena, but some such feeling as most of
us have on the first warmer days in spring, when we
seem to feel the genial processes of nature actually at
work ; as if just below the mould, and in the hard
wood of the trees, there were really circulating some
spirit of life, akin to that which makes its energies
felt within ourselves. Starting with a hundred in-
stincts such as this, that older unmechanical, spiritual,
or Platonic, philosophy envisages nature rather as the
unity of a living spirit or person, revealing itself in
various degrees to the kindred spirit of the observer,
than as a system of mechanical forces. Such a phi-
losophy is a systematised form of that sort of poetry
(we may study it, for instance, either in Shelley or in
Wordsworth), which also has its fancies of a spirit
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 97
of the earth, or of the sky, a personal intelligence
abiding in them, the existence of which is assumed
in every suggestion such poetry makes to us of
a sympathy between the ways and aspects of outward
nature and the moods of men. And what stood to
the primitive intelligence in place of such meta-
physical conceptions were those cosmical stories or
myths, such as this of Demeter and Persephone,
which, springing up spontaneously in many minds,
came at last to represent to them, in a certain number
of sensibly realised images, all they knew, felt, or
fancied, of the natural world about them. The sky
in its unity and its variety, the sea in its unity and
its variety, mirrored themselves respectively in these
simple, but profoundly impressible spirits, as Zeus, as
Glaucus or Poseidon. And a large part of their
experience all, that is, that related to the earth in
its changes, the growth and decay of all things born
of it was covered by the story of Demeter, the myth
of the earth as a mother. They thought of Demeter
as the old Germans thought of Hertha, or the later
Greeks of Pan, as the Egyptians thought of Isis, the
land of the Nile, made green by the streams of
Osiris, for whose coming Isis longs, as Demeter for
Persephone ; thus naming together in her all their
fluctuating thoughts, impressions, suspicions, of the
98 THE MYTH OF
earth and its appearances, their whole complex divi-
nation of a mysterious life, a perpetual working, a
continuous act of conception there. Or they thought
of the many-coloured earth as the garment of De-
meter, as the great modern pantheist poet speaks of
it as the "garment of God." Its brooding fertility;
the spring flowers breaking from its surface, the thinly
disguised unhealthfulness of their heavy perfume, and
of their chosen places of growth ; the delicate, femi-
nine, Proserpina-like motions of all growing things ; its
fruit, full of drowsy and poisonous, or fresh, reviving
juices ; its sinister caprices also, its droughts and
sudden volcanic heats ; the long delays of spring ; its
dumb sleep, so suddenly flung away ; the sadness
which insinuates itself into its languid luxuriance ;
all this grouped itself round the persons of Demeter
and her circle. They could turn always to her, from
the actual earth itself, in aweful yet hopeful prayer,
and a devout personal gratitude, and explain it
through her, in its sorrow and its promise, its dark-
ness and its helpfulness to man.
The personification of abstract ideas by modern
painters or sculptors, of wealth, of commerce, of
health, for instance, shocks, in most cases, the aes-
thetic sense, as something conventional or rhetorical,
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 99
as a mere transparent allegory, or figure of speech,
which could please almost no one. On the other
hand, such symbolical representations, under the form
of human persons, as Giotto's Virtues and Vices at
Padua, or his Saint Poverty at Assisi, or the series
of the planets in certain early Italian engravings, are
profoundly poetical and impressive. They seem to
be something more than mere symbolism, and to be
connected with some peculiarly sympathetic penetra-
tion, on the part of the artist, into the subjects he
intended to depict. Symbolism intense as this, is
the creation of a special temper, in which a certain
simplicity, taking all things literally, au pied de la
lettre, is united to a vivid pre -occupation with the
aesthetic beauty of the image itself, the figtired side
of figurative expression, the form of the metaphor.
When it is said, " Out of his mouth goeth a sharp
sword," that temper is ready to deal directly and
boldly with that difficult image, like that old designer
of the fourteenth century, who has depicted this, and
other images of the Apocalypse, in a coloured window
at Bourges. Such symbolism cares a great deal for
the hair of Temperance, discreetly bound, for some
subtler likeness to the colour of the sky in the girdle
of Hope, for the inwoven flames in the red garment x>f
Charity. And what was specially peculiar to the
100 THE MYTH OF
temper of the old Florentine painter, Giotto, to the
temper of his age in general, doubtless, more than to
that of ours, was the persistent and universal mood of
the age in which the story of De meter and Persephone
was first created. If some painter of our own time
has conceived the image of The Day so intensely,
that we hardly think of distinguishing between the
image, with its girdle of dissolving morning mist, and
the meaning of the image ; if William Blake, to our
so great delight, makes the morning stars literally
" sing together " these fruits of individual genius are
in part also a " survival " from a different age, with
the whole mood of which this mode of expression was
more congruous than it is with ours. But there are
traces of the old temper in the man of to-day also ;
and through these we can understand that earlier
time a very poetical time, with the more highly
gifted peoples in which every impression men re-
ceived of the action of powers without or within them
suggested to them the presence of a soul or will, like
their own a person, with a living spirit, and senses,
and hands, and feet; which, when it talked of the
return of Kore to Demeter, or the marriage of Zeus and
Here, was not using rhetorical language, but yielding
to a real illusion ; to which the voice of man " was
really a stream, beauty an effluence, death a mist."
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 101.
The gods of Greek mythology overlap each other ;
they are confused or connected with each other,
lightly or deeply, as the case may be, and sometimes
have their doubles, at first sight as in a troubled
dream, yet never, when we examine each detail more
closely, without a certain truth to human reason. It
is only in a limited sense that it is possible to lift, and
examine by itself, one thread of the network of story
and imagery, which, in a certain age of civilisation,
wove itself over every detail of life and thought, over
every name in the past, and almost every place in
Greece. The story of Demeter, then, was the work
of no single author or place or time ; the poet of its
first phase was no single person, but the whole con-
sciousness of an age, though an age doubtless with
its differences of more or less imaginative individual
minds with one, here or there, eminent, though but
by a little, above a merely receptive majority, the
spokesman of a universal, though faintly-felt prepos-
session, attaching the errant fancies of the people
around him to definite names and images. The myth
grew up gradually, and at many distant places, in
many minds, independent of each other, but dealing
in a common temper with certain elements and
aspects of the natural world, as one here, and another
there, seemed to catch in that incident or detail which
102 THE MYTH OF
flashed more incisively than others on the inward eye,
some influence, or feature, or characteristic of the
great mother. The various epithets of Demeter, the
local variations of her story, its incompatible incidents,
bear witness to the manner of its generation. They
illustrate that indefiniteness which is characteristic of
Greek mythology, a theology with no central authority,
no link on historic time, liable from the first to an
unobserved transformation. They indicate the various,
far-distant spots from which the visible body of the
goddess slowly collected its constituents, and came at
last to have a well-defined existence in the popular
mind. In this sense, Demeter appears to one in her
anger, sullenly withholding the fruits of the earth, to
another in her pride of Persephone, to another in her
grateful gift of the arts of agriculture to man ; at last only,
is there a general recognition of a clearly- arrested out-
line, a tangible embodiment, which has solidified itself
in the imagination of the people, they know not how.
The worship of Demeter belongs to that older
religion, nearer to the earth, which some have thought
they could discern, behind the more definitely national
mythology of Homer. She is the goddess of dark
caves, and is not wholly free from monstrous form.
She gave men the first fig in one place, the first poppy
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 103
in another ; in another, she first taught the old Titans
to mow. She is the mother of the vine also ; and
the assumed name by which she called herself in her
wanderings, is Dos a gift ; the crane, as the har-
binger of rain, is her messenger among the birds.
She knows the magic powers of certain plants, cut
from her bosom, to bane or bless ; and, under one of
her epithets, herself presides over the springs, as also
coming from the secret places of the earth. She is
the goddess, then, at first, of the fertility of the earth
in its wildness ; and so far, her attributes are to some
degree confused with those of the Thessalian Gaia
and the Phrygian Cybele. Afterwards, and it is now
that her most characteristic attributes begin to con-
centrate themselves, she separates herself from these
confused relationships, as specially the goddess of
agriculture, of the fertility of the earth when furthered
by human skill. She is the preserver of the seed
sown in hope, under many epithets derived from the
incidents of vegetation, as the simple countryman
names her, out of a mind full of the various expe-
riences of his little garden or farm. She is the most
definite embodiment of all those fluctuating mystical
instincts, of which Gaia, 1 the mother of the earth's
1 In the Homeric hymn, pre-eminently, of the flower which grew
up for the first time, to snare the footsteps of Kore, the fair but
deadly Narcissus, the flower of vdpuri, the numbness of death.
104 THE MYTH OF
gloomier offspring, is a vaguer and mistier one. There
is nothing of the confused outline, the mere shadow-
mess of mystical dreaming, in this most concrete
human figure. No nation, less aesthetically gifted
than the Greeks, could have thus lightly thrown its
mystical surmise and divination into images so clear
and idyllic as those of the solemn goddess of the
country, in whom the characteristics of the mother
are expressed with so much tenderness, and the " beau-
teous head " of Kore, then so fresh and peaceful.
In this phase, then, the story of Demeter appears
as the peculiar creation of country-people of a high
impressibility, dreaming over their work in spring or
autumn, half consciously touched by a sense of i*s
sacredness, and a sort of mystery about it. For there
is much in the life of the farm everywhere which
gives to persons of any seriousness of disposition,
special opportunity for grave and gentle thoughts.
The temper of people engaged in the occupations
of country life, so permanent, so " near to nature," is
at all times alike ; and the habitual solemnity of
thought and expression which Wordsworth found in
the peasants of Cumberland, and the painter Francois
Millet in the peasants of "Brittany, may well have had
its prototype in early Greece. And so, even before
the development, by the poets, of their aweful and
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 105
passionate story, Demeter and Persephone seem to
have been pre-eminently the venerable, or aweful,
goddesses. Demeter haunts the fields in spring, when
the young lambs are dropped ; she visits the barns in
autumn ; she takes part in mowing and binding up the
com, and is the goddess of sheaves. She presides
over all the pleasant, significant details of the farm,
the threshing-floor and the full granary, and stands
beside the woman baking bread at the oven. With
these fancies are connected certain simple rites ; the
half-understood local observance, and the half-be-
lieved local legend, reacting capriciously on each
other. They leave her a fragment of bread and a
morsel of meat, at the cross-roads, to take on her
journey; and perhaps some real Demeter carries them
away, as she wanders through the country. The inci-
dents of their yearly labour become to them acts of
worship; they seek her blessing through many ex-
pressive names, and almost catch sight of her, at dawn
or evening, in the nooks of the fragrant fields. She
lays a finger on the grass at the road-side, and some
new flower comes up. All the picturesque implements
of country life are hers ; the poppy also, emblem of an
inexhaustible fertility, and full of mysterious juices for
the alleviation of pain. The countrywoman who puts
her child to sleep in the great, cradle-like basket for
106 THE MYTH OF
winnowing the corn, remembers Demeter Courotrophos,
the mother of corn and children alike, and makes it
a little coat out of the dress worn by its father at his
initiation into her mysteries. Yet she is an angry
goddess too, sometimes Demeter Erinnys, the gob-
lin of the neighbourhood, haunting its shadowy places.
She lies on the ground out of doors on summer nights,
and becomes wet with the dew. She grows young
again every spring, yet is of great age, the wrinkled
woman of the Homeric hymn, who becomes the nurse
of Demophoon. Other lighter, errant stories nest
themselves, as time goes on, within the greater. The
water-newt, which repels the lips of the traveller who
stoops to drink, is a certain urchin, Abas, who spoiled
by his mockery the pleasure of the thirsting goddess,
as she drank once of a wayside spring in her wander-
ings. The night-owl is the transformed Ascalabus,
who alone had seen Persephone eat that morsel of
pomegranate, in the garden of Aidoneus. The bitter
wild mint was once a girl, who for a moment had
made her jealous, in Hades.
The episode of Triptolemus, to whom Demeter
imparts the mysteries of the plough, like the details
of some sacred rite, that he may bear them abroad to
all people, embodies, in connexion with her, another
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 107
group of the circumstances of country life. As with
all fhe other episodes of the story, there are here
also local variations, traditions of various favourites of
the goddess at different places, of whom grammarians
can tell us, finally obscured behind the greater fame
of Triptolemus of Eleusis. One might fancy, at
first, that Triptolemus was a quite Boeotian divinity,
of the ploughshare. Yet we know that the thoughts
of the Greeks concerning the culture of the earth
from which they came, were most often noble ones ;
and if we examine carefully the works of ancient
art which represent him, the second thought will
suggest itself, that there was nothing clumsy or coarse
about this patron of the plough something, rather, of
the movement of delicate wind or fire, about him and
his chariot. And this finer character is explained, if,
as we are justified in doing, we bring him into closest
connexion with that episode, so full of a strange
mysticism, of the Nursing of Demophoon, in the
Homeric hymn. For, according to some traditions,
none other than Triptolemus himself was the subject
of that mysterious experiment, in which Demeter laid
the child nightly in the red heat of the fire ; and
he lives afterwards, not immortal indeed, not wholly
divine, yet, as Shakspere says, a "nimble spirit,"
feeling little of the weight of the material world about
108 THE MYTH OF
him the element of winged fire in the clay. The
delicate, fresh farm-lad we may still actually % see
sometimes, like a graceful field-flower among the corn,
becomes, in the sacred legend of agriculture, a king's
son ; and then, the fire having searched out from him
the grosser elements on that famous night, all com-
pact now of spirit, a priest also, administering the
gifts of Demeter to all the earth. Certainly, the
extant works of art which represent him, gems or
vase-paintings, conform truly enough to this ideal of
a " nimble spirit," though he wears the broad country
hat, which Hermes also wears, going swiftly, half on
the airy, mercurial wheels of his farm instrument,
harrow or plough half on wings of serpents the
worm, symbolical of the soil, but winged, as sending
up the dust committed to it, after subtle firing, in
colours and odours of fruit and flowers. It is an alto-
gether sacred character, again, that he assumes in
another precious work, of the severer period of Greek
art, lately discovered at Eleusis, and now preserved in
the museum of Athens, a singularly refined bas-relief,
in which he stands, a firm and serious youth, between
Demeter and Persephone, who places her hand as
with some sacred influence, and consecrating gesture,
upon him.
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 109
But the house of the prudent countryman will be,
of course, a place of honest manners ; and Demeter
Thesmophoros is the guardian of married life, the deity
of the discretion of wives. She is therefore the
founder of civilised order. The peaceful homes of
men, scattered about the land, in their security
Demeter represents these fruits of the earth also, not
without a suggestion of the white cities, which shine
upon the hills above the waving fields of corn, seats of
justice and of true kingship. She is also in a certain
sense the patron of travellers, having, in her long
wanderings after Persephone, recorded and handed
down those omens, caught from little things the
birds which crossed her path, the persons who met
her on the way, the words they said, the things they
carried in their hands, eivdSia o-v/x/JoAa by noting
which, men bring their journeys to a successful end ;
so that the simple countryman may pass securely on
his way ; and is led by signs from the goddess herself,
when he travels far to visit her, at Hermione or
Eleusis.
So far the attributes of Demeter and Kore are
similar. In the mythical conception, as in the relig-
ious acts connected with it, the mother and the
daughter are almost interchangeable ; they are the
two goddesses, the twin-named. Gradually, the office
110 THE MYTH OF
of Persephone is developed, defines itself; functions
distinct from those of Demeter are attributed to her.
Hitherto, always at the side of Demeter and sharing
her worship, she now appears detached from her,
going and coming, on her mysterious business. A third
part of the year she abides in darkness ; she comes up
in the spring; and every autumn, when the country-
man sows his seed in the earth, she descends thither
again, and the world of the dead lies open, spring and
autumn, to let her in and out. Persephone, then, is
the summer-time, and, in this sense, a daughter of the
earth ; but the summer as bringing winter ; the flowery
splendour and consummated glory of the year, as
thereafter immediately beginning to draw near to its
end, as the first yellow leaf crosses it, in the first
severer wind. She is the last day of spring, or the first
day of autumn, in the threefold division of the Greek
year. Her story is, indeed, but the story, in an
intenser form, of Adonis, of Hyacinth, of Adrastus
the king's blooming son, fated, in the story of He-
rodotus, to be wounded to death with an iron spear
of Linus, a fair child who is torn to pieces by hounds
every spring-time of the English Sleeping Beauty.
From being the goddess of summer and the flowers,
she becomes the goddess of night and sleep and death,
confuseable with Hecate, the goddess of midnight
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 111
terrors, Kopy appyros, the mother of the Erinnyes,
who appeared to Pindar, to warn him of his approach-
ing death, upbraiding him because he had made no
hymn in her praise, which swan's song he thereupon
began, but finished with her. She is a twofold
goddess, therefore, according as one or the other of
these two contrasted aspects of her nature is seized,
respectively. A duality, an inherent opposition in
the very conception of Persephone, runs all through
her story, and is part of her ghostly power. There is
ever something in her of a divided or ambiguous
identity: hence the many euphemisms of later
language concerning her.
The " worship of sorrow," as Goethe called it, is
sometimes supposed to have had almost no place in
the religion of the Greeks. Their religion has been
represented as a religion of mere cheerfulness, the
worship by an untroubled, unreflecting humanity,
conscious of no deeper needs, of the embodiments
of its own joyous activity. It helped to hide out of
their sight those traces of decay and weariness, of
which the Greeks were constitutionally shy, to keep
them from peeping too curiously into certain shadowy
places, appropriate enough to the gloomy imagina-
tion of the middle age ; and it hardly proposed to
itself to give consolation to people who, in truth, were
112 THE MYTH OF
never " sick or sorry." But this familiar view of Greek
religion is based on a consideration of a part only of
what is known concerning it, and really involves a
misconception, akin to that which under-estimates the
influence of the romantic spirit generally, in Greek
poetry and art ; as if Greek art had dealt exclusively
with human nature in its sanity, suppressing all motives
of strangeness, all the beauty which is born of difficulty,
permitting nothing but an Olympian, though perhaps
somewhat wearisome calm. In effect, such a concep-
tion of Greek art and poetry leaves in the central ex-
pressions of Greek culture none but negative qualities ;
and the legend of Demeter and Persephone, perhaps
the most popular of all Greek legends, is sufficient to
show that the " worship of sorrow " was not without
its function in Greek religion ; their legend is a legend
made by and for sorrowful, wistful, anxious people ;
while the most important artistic monuments of that
legend sufficiently prove that the Romantic spirit was
really at work in the minds of Greek artists, extracting
by a kind of subtle alchemy, a beauty, not without the
elements of tranquillity, of dignity and order, out of
a matter, at first sight painful and strange.
The student of origins, as French critics say, of the
earliest stages of art and poetry, must be content to
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 113
follow faint traces ; and in what has been here said,
much may seem to have been made of little, with too
much completion, by a general framework or setting,
of what after all are but doubtful or fragmentary indi-
cations. Yet there is a certain cynicism too, in that
over-positive temper, which is so jealous of our catch-
ing any resemblance in the earlier world to the thoughts
that really occupy our own minds, and which, in its
estimate of the actual fragments of antiquity, is con-
tent to find no seal of human intelligence upon them.
Slight indeed in themselves, these fragmentary indica-
tions become suggestive of much, when viewed in
the light of such general evidence about the human
imagination as is afforded by the theory of " com-
parative mythology," or what is called the theory of
" animism." Only, in the application of these theories,
the student of Greek religion must never forget that,
after all, it is with poetry, not with systematic theo-
logical belief or dogma, that he has to do. As regards
this story of Demeter and Persephone, what we actually
possess is some actual fragments of poetry, some actual
fragments of sculpture ; and with a curiosity, justified
by the direct aesthetic beauty of these fragments, we
feel our way backwards to that engaging picture of the
poet-people, with which the ingenuity of modern theory
has filled the void in our knowledge. The abstract
114 THE MYTH OF
poet of that first period of mythology, creating in this
wholly impersonal, intensely spiritual way, the ab-
stract spirit of poetry itself, rises before the mind;
and, in speaking of this poetical age, we must take
heed, before all things, in no sense to misconstrue the
poets.
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 115
II.
The stories of the Greek mythology, like other
things which belong to no man, and for which no one
in particular is responsible, had their fortunes. In
that world of floating fancies there was a struggle for
life ; there were myths which never emerged from
that first stage of popular conception, or were absorbed
by stronger competitors, because, as some true heroes
have done, they lacked the sacred poet or prophet,
and were never remodelled by literature ; while, out of
the myth of Demeter, under the careful conduct of
poetry and art, came the little pictures, the idylls,
of the Homeric hymn, and the gracious imagery of
Praxiteles. The myth has now entered its second
or poetical phase, then, in which more definite fancies
are grouped about the primitive stock, in a conscious
literary temper, and the whole interest settles round
the images of the beautiful girl going down into the
darkness, and the weary woman who seeks her lost
daughter divine persons, then sincerely believed in
by the majority of the Greeks. The Homeric hymn
is the central monument of this second phase. In it,
the changes of the natural year have become a per-
116 THE MYTH OF
sonal history, a story of human affection and sorrow,
yet with a far-reaching religious significance also, of
which the mere earthly spring and autumn are but an
analogy ; and in the development of this human ele-
ment, the writer of the hymn sometimes displays a
genuine power of pathetic expression. The whole
episode of the fostering of Demophoon, in which ovef
the body of the dying child human longing and regret
are blent so subtly with the mysterious design of the
goddess to make the child immortal, is an excellent
example of the sentiment of pity in literature. Yet
though it has reached the stage of conscious literary
interpretation, much of its early mystical or cosmical
character still lingers about the story, as it is here told.
Later mythologists simply define the personal history ;
but in this hymn we may, again and again, trace curi-
ous links of connexion with the original purpose of the
myth. Its subject is the weary woman, indeed, our
Lady of Sorrows, the mater dolorosa of the ancient
world, but with a certain latent reference, all through,
to the mystical person of the earth. Her robe of
dark blue is the raiment of her mourning, but also
the blue robe of the earth in shadow, as we see it
in Titian's landscapes; her great age is the age of
the immemorial earth ; she becomes a nurse, there-
fore, holding Demophoon in her bosom ; the folds of
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 117
her garment are fragrant, not merely with the incense
of Eleusis, but with the natural perfume of flowers and
fruit. The sweet breath with which she nourishes
the child Demophoon, is the warm west wind, feeding
all germs of vegetable life ; her bosom, where he lies,
is the bosom of the earth, with its strengthening heat,
reserved and shy, offended if human eyes scrutinise too
closely its secret chemistry ; it is with the earth's natu-
ral surface of varied colour that she has, " in time past,
given pleasure to the sun " ; the yellow hair which
falls suddenly over her shoulders, at her transformation
in the house of Celeus, is still partly the golden corn ;
in art and poetry she is ever the blond goddess ;
tarrying in her temple, of which an actual hollow in
the earth is the prototype, among the spicy odours of
the Eleusinian ritual, she is the spirit of the earth,
lying hidden in its dark folds until the return of
spring, among the flower-seeds and fragrant roots,
like the seeds and aromatic woods hidden in the
wrappings of the dead. Throughout the poem, we
have a sense of a certain nearness to nature, surviving
from an earlier world; the sea is understood as
a person, yet is still the real sea, with the waves
moving. When it is said that no bird gave Demeter
tidings of Persephone, we feel that to that earlier
world, ways of communication between all creatures
118 THE MYTH OF
may have seemed open, which are closed to us. It
is Iris who brings to Demeter the message of Zeus ;
that is, the rainbow signifies to the earth the good-
will of the rainy sky towards it. Persephone springing
up with great joy from the couch of Aidoneus, to return
to her mother, is the sudden outburst of the year. The
heavy and narcotic aroma of spring flowers hangs about
her, as about the actual spring. And this mingling of
the primitive cosmical import of the myth with the
later, personal interests of the story, is curiously illus-
trated by the place which the poem assigns to Hecate.
This strange Titaness is, first, a nymph only; after-
wards, as if changed incurably by the passionate cry
of Persephone, she becomes her constant attendant,
and is even identified with her. But in the Homeric
hymn her lunar character is clear; she is really the
moon only, who hears the cry of Persephone, as the
sun saw her, when Aidoneus carried her away. One
morning, as the mother wandered, the moon appeared,
as it does in its last quarter, rising very bright, just be-
fore dawn ; that is, in the words of the Homeric hymn,
" on the tenth morning Hecate met her, having a
light in her hands." The fascinating, but enigmatical
figure, " sitting ever in her cave, half-veiled with a
shining veil, thinking delicate thoughts," in which
we seem to see the subject of some picture of the
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 119
Italian Renaissance, is but the lover of Endymion
like Persephone, withdrawn, in her season, from the
eyes of men. The sun saw her; the moon saw her
not, but heard her cry, and is ever after the half-veiled
attendant of the queen of dreams and of the dead.
But the story of Demeter and Persephone lends
itself naturally to description, and it is in descriptive
beauties that the Homeric hymn excels ; its episodes
are finished designs, and directly stimulate the painter
and the sculptor to a rivalry with them. Weaving the
names of the flowers into his verse, names familiar to
us in English, though their Greek originals are uncer-
tain, the writer sets Persephone before us, herself like
one of them KoAvKcoTris like the budding calyx of
a flower, in a picture, which, in its mingling of a
quaint freshness and simplicity with a certain earnest-
ness, reads like a description of some early Florentine
design, such as Sandro Botticelli's Allegory of the Sea-
sons. By an exquisite chance also, a common metri-
cal expression connects the perfume of the newly-
created narcissus with the salt odour of the sea. Like
one of those early designs also, but with a deeper
infusion of religious earnestness, is the picture of
Demeter sitting at the wayside, in shadow as always,
with the well of water and the olive-tree. She has
been journeying all night, and now it is morning, and
120 THE MYTH OF
the daughters of Celeus bring their vessels to draw
water. That image of the seated Demeter, resting
after her long flight "through the dark continent," or
in the house of Celeus, when she refuses the red wine,
or again, solitary, in her newly-finished temple of
Eleusis, enthroned in her grief, fixed itself deeply on
the Greek imagination, and became a favourite subject
of Greek artists. When the daughters of Celeus
come to conduct her to Eleusis, they come as in a
Greek frieze, full of energy and motion and waving
lines, but with gold and colours upon it. Eleusis
coming the coming of Demeter thither, as thus told
in the Homeric hymn, is the central instance in Greek
mythology of such divine appearances. " She leaves
for a season the company of the gods and abides among
men " ; and men's merit is to receive her in spite of
appearances. Metaneira and others, in the Homeric
hymn, partly detect her divine character; they find
Xa/us a certain gracious air about her, which
makes them think her, perhaps, a royal person in dis-
guise. She becomes in her long wanderings almost
wholly humanised, and in return, she and Persephone,
alone of the Greek gods, seem to have been the ob-
jects of a sort of personal love and loyalty. Yet they
are ever the solemn goddesses, 0eai trep-val, the
word expressing religious awe, the Greek sense of the
divine presence.
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 121
Plato, in laying down the rules by which the poets
are to be guided in speaking about divine things to the
citizens of the ideal republic, forbids all those episodes
of mythology which represent the gods as assuming
various forms, and visiting the earth in disguise. Below
the express reasons which he assigns for this rule, we
may perhaps detect that instinctive antagonism to the
old Heraclitean philosophy of perpetual change, which
forces him, in his theory of morals and the state, of
poetry and music, of dress and manners even, and of
style in the very vessels and furniture of daily life, on
an austere simplicity, the older Dorian or Egyptian
type of a rigid, eternal immobility. The disintegrating,
centrifugal influence, which had penetrated, as he
thought, political and social existence, making men too
myriad-minded, had laid hold on the life of the gods
also, and, even in their calm sphere, one could hardly
identify a single divine person as himself, and not
another. There must, then, be no doubling, no dis-
guises, no stories of transformation. The modern
reader, however, will hardly acquiesce in this "im-
provement " of Greek mythology. He finds in these
stories, like that, for instance, of the appearance of
Athene to Telemachus, in the first book of the Odys-
sey, which has a quite biblical mysticity and solemnity,
stories in which, the hard material outline breaking
122 THE MYTH OF
up, the gods lay aside their visible form like a garment,
yet remain essentially themselves, not the least spir-
itual element of Greek religion, an evidence of the
sense therein of unseen presences, which might at any
moment cross a man's path, to be recognised, in half
disguise, by the more delicately trained eye, here or
there, by one and not by another. Whatever religious
elements they lacked, they had at least this sense of
subtler and more remote ways of personal presence.
And as there are traces in the Homeric hymn of
the primitive cosmical myth, relics of the first stage of
the development of the story, so also many of its inci-
dents are probably suggested by the circumstances
and details of the Eleusinian ritual. There were re-
ligious usages before there were distinct religious con-
ceptions, and these antecedent religious usages shape
and determine, at many points, the ultimate religious
conception, as the details of the myth interpret or
explain the religious custom. The hymn relates the
legend of certain holy places, to which various impres-
sive religious rites had attached themselves the holy
well, the old fountain, the stone of sorrow, which it
was the office of the " interpreter " of the holy places
to show to the people. The sacred way which led
from Athens to Eleusis was rich in such memorials.
The nine days of the wanderings of Demeter in the
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 123
Homeric hymn are the nine days of the duration of
the greater or autumnal mysteries ; the jesting of the
old woman lambe, who endeavours to make Demeter
smile, are the customary mockeries with which the
worshippers, as they rested on the bridge, on the
seventh day of the feast, assailed those who passed
by. The torches in the hands of Demeter are bor-
rowed from the same source ; and the shadow in
which she is constantly represented, and which is the
peculiar sign of her grief, is partly ritual, and a relic
of the caves of the old Chthonian worship, partly
poetical expressive, half of the dark earth to which
she escapes from Olympus, half of her mourning.
She appears consistently, in the hymn, as a teacher
of rites, transforming daily life, and the processes of
life, into a religious solemnity. With no misgiving as
to the proprieties of a mere narration, the hymn-writer
mingles these symbolical imitations with the outlines
of the original story ; and, in his Demeter, the dra-
matic person of the mysteries mixes itself with the
primitive mythical figure. And the worshipper, far
from being offended by these interpolations, may have
found a special impressiveness in them, as they linked
continuously its inner sense with the outward imagery
of the ritual.
And, as Demeter and her story embodied them-
124 THE MYTH OF
selves gradually in the Greek imagination, so these
mysteries in which her worship found its chief ex-
pression, grew up little by little, growing always in
close connexion with the modifications of the story,
sometimes prompting them, at other times suggested
by them. That they had a single special author is
improbable, and a mere invention of the Greeks,
ignorant of their real history and the general analogy
of such matters. Here again, as in the story itself,
the idea of development, of degrees, of a slow and
natural growth, impeded here, diverted there, is the
illuminating thought which earlier critics lacked.
"No tongue may speak of them," says the Homeric
hymn ; and the secret has certainly been kept. The
antiquarian, dealing, letter by letter, with what is
recorded of them, has left few certain data for the
reflexion of the modern student of the Greek religion ;
and of this, its central solemnity, only a fragmentary
picture can be made. It is probable that these mys-
teries developed the symbolical significance of the
story of the descent into Hades, the coming of
Demeter to Eleusis, the invention of Persephone.
They may or may not have been the vehicle of
a secret doctrine, but were certainly an artistic spec-
tacle, giving, like the mysteries of the middle age, a
dramatic representation of the sacred story, perhaps
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 125
a detailed performance, perhaps only such a conven-
tional representation, as was afforded for instance by
the medieval ceremonies of Palm Sunday ; the whole,
probably, centering in an image of Demeter the
work of Praxiteles or his school, in ivory and gold.
There is no reason to suppose any specific difference
between the observances of the Eleusinian festival and
the accustomed usages of the Greek religion ; noc-
turns, libations, quaint purifications, processions
are common incidents of all Greek worship; in all
religious ceremonies there is an element of dramatic
symbolism ; and what we really do see, through those
scattered notices, are things which have their parallels
in a later age, the whole being not altogether unlike
a modern pilgrimage. The exposition of the sacred
places the threshing-floor of Triptolemus, the rocky
seat on which Demeter had rested in her sorrow, the
well of Callichorus is not so strange, as it would
seem, had it no modern illustration. The libations,
at once a watering of the vines and a drink-offering
to the dead still needing men's services, waiting for
purification perhaps, or thirsting, like Dante's Adam
of Brescia, in their close homes must, to almost all
minds, have had a certain natural impressiveness ; and
a parallel has sometimes been drawn between this festi-
val and All Souls' Day.
126 THE MYTH OF
And who, everywhere, has not felt the mystical
influence of that prolonged silence, the mystic silence,
from which the very word "mystery" has its origin?
Something also there undoubtedly was, which coarser
minds might misunderstand. On one day, the initiated
went in procession to the sea-coast, where they under-
went a purification by bathing in the sea. On the fifth
night there was the torchlight procession; and, by a
touch of real life in him, we gather from the first page
of Plato's Republic that such processions were popular
spectacles, having a social interest, so that people
made much of attending them. There was the pro-
cession of the sacred basket filled with poppy-seeds
and pomegranates. There was the day of rest, after
the stress and excitement of the "great night." On
the sixth day, the image of lacchus, son of Demeter,
crowned with myrtle and having a torch in its hand,
was carried in procession, through thousands of spec-
tators, along the sacred way, amid joyous shouts and
songs. We have seen such processions; we under-
stand how many different senses, and how lightly,
various spectators may put on them ; how little defi-
nite meaning they may have even for those who offici-
ate in them. Here, at least, there was the image itself,
in that age, with its close connexion between religion
and art, presumably fair. Susceptibility to the im-
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 127
pressions of religious ceremonial must always have
varied with the peculiarities of individual temperament,
as it varies in our own day ; and Eleusis, with its
incense and sweet singing, may have been as little
interesting to the outward senses of some worshippers
there, as the stately and affecting ceremonies of the
medieval church to many of its own members. In a
simpler yet profounder sense than has sometimes been
supposed, these things were really addressed to the
initiated only. 1
We have to travel a long way from the Homeric
hymn to the hymn of Callimachus, who writes in the
end of Greek literature, in the third century before
Christ, in celebration of the procession of the sacred
basket of Demeter, not at the Attic, but at the Alex-
andrian Eleusinia. He developes, in something of the
prosaic spirit of a medieval writer of " mysteries," one
of the burlesque incidents of the story, the insatiable
hunger which seized on Erysichthon because he cut
down a grove sacred to the goddess. Yet he finds his
opportunities for skilful touches of poetry ; "As the
four white horses draw her sacred basket," he says, " so
will the great goddess bring us a white spring, a white
summer." He describes the grove itself, with its hedge
1 The great Greek myths are, in truth, like abstract forces, which
ally themselves to various conditions.
128 THE MYTH OF
of trees, so thick that an arrow could hardly pass
through, its pines and fruit-trees and tall poplars within,
and the water, like pale gold, running from the con-
duits. It is one of those famous poplars that receives
the first stroke ; it sounds heavily to its companion
trees, and Demeter perceives that her sacred grove is
suffering. Then comes one of those transformations
which Plato will not allow. Vainly anxious to save the
lad from his ruin, she appears in the form of a priest-
ess, but with the long hood of the goddess, and the
poppy in her hand ; and there is something of a real
shudder, some still surviving sense of a haunting pres-
ence in the groves, in the verses which describe her
sudden revelation, when the workmen flee away, leav-
ing their axes in the cleft trees.
Of the same age as the hymn of Callimachus, but
with very different qualities, is the idyll of Theocritus
on the Shepherds' Journey. Although it is possible to
define an epoch in mythological development in which
literary and artificial influences began to remodel the
primitive, popular legend, yet still, among children,
and unchanging childlike people, we may suppose that
that primitive stage always survived, and the old, in-
stinctive influences were still at work. As the subject
of popular religious celebrations also, the myth was
still the property of the people, and surrendered to its
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 129
capricious action. The shepherds in Theocritus, on
their way to celebrate one of the more homely feasts
of Demeter, about the time of harvest, are examples
of these childlike people ; the age of the poets has
long since come, but they are of the older and simpler
order, lingering on in the midst of a more self-con-
scious world. In an idyll, itself full of the delightful
gifts of Demeter, Theocritus sets them before us;
through the blazing summer day's journey, the smiling
image of the goddess is always before them ; and now
they have reached the end of their journey :
" So I, and Eucritus, and the fair Amyntichus, turned
aside into the house of Phrasidamus, and lay down with
delight in beds of sweet tamarisk and fresh cuttings
from the vines, strewn on the ground. Many poplars
and elm-trees were waving over our heads, and not far
off the running of the sacred water from the cave of
the nymphs warbled to us ; in the shimmering branches
the sun-burnt grasshoppers were busy with their talk,
and from afar the little owl cried softly, out of the
tangled thorns of the blackberry ; the larks were sing-
ing and the hedge-birds, and the turtle-dove moaned ;
the bees flew round and round the fountains, murmur-
ing softly ; the scent of late summer and of the fall of
the year was everywhere ; the pears fell from the trees
at our feet, and apples in number rolled down at our
K
130 THE MYTH OF
sides, and the young plum-trees were bent to the earth
with the weight of their fruit. The wax, four years
old, was loosed from the heads of the wine-jars. O !
nymphs of Castalia, who dwell on the steeps of Par-
nassus, tell me, I pray you, was it a draught like this
that the aged Chiron placed before Hercules, in the
stony cave of Pholus? Was it nectar like this that
made the mighty shepherd on Anapus' shore, Poly-
phemus, who flung the rocks upon Ulysses' ships, dance
among his sheepfolds ? A cup like this ye poured
out now upon the altar of Demeter, who presides over
the threshing-floor. May it be mine, once more, to
dig my big winnowing-fan through her heaps of corn ;
and may I see her smile upon me, holding poppies
and handfuls of corn in her two hands ! "
Some of the modifications of the story of Demeter,
as we find it in later poetry, have been supposed to
be due, not to the genuine action of the Greek mind,
but to the influence of that so-called Orphic literature,
which, in the generation succeeding Hesiod, brought,
from Thessaly and Phrygia, a tide of mystical ideas
into the Greek religion, sometimes, doubtless, con-
fusing the clearness and naturalness of its original
outlines, but also sometimes imparting to them a new
and peculiar grace. Under the influence of this Orphic
poetry, Demeter was blended, or identified, with Rhea
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 131
Cybele, the mother of the gods, the wilder earth-
goddess of Phrygia; and the romantic figure of
Dionysus Zagreus, Dionysus the Hunter, that most
interesting, though somewhat melancholy variation
on the better known Dionysus, was brought, as son
or brother of Persephone, into her circle, the mystical
vine, who, as Persephone descends and ascends from
the earth, is rent to pieces by the Titans every year
and remains long in Hades, but every spring-time
comes out of it again, renewing his youth. This
identification of Demeter with Rhea Cybele is the
motive which has inspired a beautiful chorus in the
Helena the new Helena of Euripides, that great
lover of all subtle refinements and modernisms, who,
in this play, has worked on a strange version of the
older story, which relates that Helen had never really
gone to Troy at all, but sent her soul only there, apart
from her sweet body, which abode all that time in
Egypt, at the court of King Proteus, where she is
found at last by her husband Menelaus, so that the
Trojan war was' about a phantom, after all. The
chorus has even less than usual to do with the action
of the play, being linked to it only by a sort of
parallel, which may be understood, between Menelaus
seeking Helen, and Demeter seeking Persephone.
Euripides, then, takes the matter of the Homeric
132 THE MYTH OF
hymn into the region of a higher and swifter poetry,
and connects it with the more stimulating imagery
of the Idaean mother. The Orphic mysticism or
enthusiasm has been admitted into the story, which
is now full of excitement, the motion of rivers,
the sounds of the Bacchic cymbals heard over the
mountains, as Demeter wanders among the woody
valleys seeking her lost daughter, all directly expressed
in the vivid Greek words. Demeter is no longer the
subdued goddess of the quietly-ordered fields, but the
mother of the gods, who has her abode in the heights
of Mount Ida, who presides over the dews and waters
of the white springs, whose flocks feed, not on grain,
but on the curling tendrils of the vine, both of which
she withholds in her anger, and whose chariot is
drawn by wild beasts, fruit and emblem of the earth
in its fiery strength. Not Hecate, but Pallas and
Artemis, in full armour, swift-footed, vindicators of
chastity, accompany her in her search for Persephone,
who is already expressly, Kopt) apprjTos " the maiden
whom none may name." When she rests from her
long wanderings, it is into the stony thickets of
Mount Ida, deep with snow, that she throws her-
self, in her profound grief. When Zeus desires to
end her pain, the Muses and the " solemn " Graces
are sent to dance and sing before her. It is then that
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 133
Cypris, the goddess of beauty, and the original cause,
therefore, of her distress, takes into her hands the
brazen tambourines of the Dionysiac worship with their
Chthonian or deep-noted sound ; and it is she, not
the old lambe, who with this wild music, heard thus
for the first time, makes Demeter smile at last.
" Great," so the chorus ends with a picture, " great is
the power of the stoles of spotted fawn-skins, and the
green leaves of ivy twisted about the sacred wands,
and the wheeling motion of the tambourine whirled
round in the air, and the long hair floating unbound
in honour of Bromius, and the nocturns of the god-
dess, when the moon looks full upon them."
The poem of Claudian on the Rape of Proserpine,
the longest extant work connected with the story
of Demeter, yet itself unfinished, closes the world of
classical poetry. Writing in the fourth century of
the Christian era, Claudian has his subject before
him in the whole extent of its various development,
and also profits by those many pictorial representa-
tions of it, which, from the famous picture of Polyg-
notus downwards, delighted the ancient world. His
poem, then, besides having an intrinsic charm, is
valuable for some reflexion in it of those lost works,
being itself pre-eminently a work in colour, and excel-
ling in a kind of painting in words, which brings its
134 THE MYTH OF
subject very pleasantly almost to the eye of the reader.
The mind of this late votary of the old gods, in a
world rapidly changing, is crowded with all the beau-
tiful forms generated by mythology, and now about to
be forgotten. In this after-glow of Latin literature,
lighted up long after their fortune had set, and just
before their long night began, they pass before us, in
his verses, with the utmost clearness, like the figures
in an actual procession. The nursing of the infant
Sun and Moon by Tethys ; Proserpine and her com-
panions gathering flowers at early dawn, when the
violets are drinking in the dew, still lying white upon
the grass ; the image of Pallas winding the peaceful
blossoms about the steel crest of her helmet; the
realm of Proserpine, softened somewhat by her com-
ing, and filled with a quiet joy; the matrons of
Elysium crowding to her marriage toilet, with the
bridal veil of yellow in their hands; the Manes,
crowned with ghostly flowers yet warmed a little,
at the marriage feast; the ominous dreams of the
mother ; the desolation of the home, like an empty
bird's-nest or an empty fold, when she returns and finds
Proserpine gone, and the spider at work over her
unfinished embroidery ; the strangely-figured raiment,
the flowers in the grass, which were once blooming
youths, having both their natural colour and the
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 135
colour of their poetry in them, and the clear little
fountain there, which was once the maiden Cyane ;
all this is shown in a series of descriptions, like the
designs in some unwinding tapestry, like Proserpine's
own embroidery, the description of which is the most
brilliant of these pictures, and, in its quaint confusion
of the images of philosophy with those of mythology,
anticipates something of the fancy of the Italian Re-
naissance.
" Proserpina, filling the house soothingly with her
low song, was working a gift against the return of
her mother, with labour all to be in vain. In it, she
marked out with her needle the houses of the gods
and the series of the elements, showing by what law,
nature, the parent of all, settled the strife of ancient
times, and the seeds of things disparted into their
places; the lighter elements are borne aloft, the
heavier fall to the centre ; the air grows bright with
heat, a blazing light whirls round the firmament;
the sea flows ; the earth hangs suspended in its place.
And there were divers colours in it ; she illuminated
the stars with gold, infused a purple shade into the
water, and heightened the shore with gems of flowers ;
and, under her skilful hand, the threads, with their
inwrought lustre, swell up, in momentary counterfeit
of the waves; you might think that the sea- wind
136 THE' MYTH OF
flapped against the rocks, and that a hollow murmur
came creeping over the thirsty sands. She puts in
the five zones, marking with a red ground the mid-
most zone, possessed by burning heat ; its outline was
parched and stiff; the threads seemed thirsty with
the constant sunshine ; on either side lay the two
zones proper for human life, where a gentle temper-
ance reigns ; and at the extremes she drew the twin
zones of numbing cold, making her work dun and sad
with the hues of perpetual frost. She paints in, too,
the sacred places of Dis, her father's brother, and the
Manes, so fatal to her ; and an omen of her doom
was not wanting ; for, as she worked, as if with fore-
knowledge of the future, her face became wet with
a sudden burst of tears. And now, in the utmost
border of the tissue, she had begun to wind in the
wavy line of the river Oceanus, with its glassy shal-
lows ; but the door sounds on its hinges, and she
perceives the goddesses coming ; the unfinished work
drops from her hands, and a ruddy blush lights up in
her clear and snow-white face."
I have reserved to the last what is perhaps the
daintiest treatment of this subject in classical litera-
ture, the account of it which Ovid gives in the Fasti
a kind of Roman Calendar for the seventh of
April, the day of the games of Ceres. He tells over
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 137
again the old story, with much of which, he says, the
reader will be already familiar ; but he has something
also of his own to add to it, which the reader will
hear for the first time ; and, like one of those old
painters who, in depicting a scene of Christian history,
drew from their own fancy or experience its special
setting and accessories, he translates the story into
something very different from the Homeric hymn.
The writer of the Homeric hymn had made Celeus a
king, and represented the scene at Eleusis in a fair
palace, like the Venetian painters who depict the per-
sons of the Holy Family with royal ornaments. Ovid,
on the other hand, is more like certain painters of the
early Florentine school, who represent the holy per-
sons amid the more touching circumstances of humble
life ; and the special something of his own which he
adds, is a pathos caught from homely things, not
without a delightful, just perceptible, shade of humour
even, so rare in such work. All the mysticism has
disappeared ; but, instead, we trace something of that
" worship of sorrow," which has been sometimes sup-
posed to have had no place in classical religious senti-
ment. In Ovid's well-finished elegiacs, Persephone's
flower-gathering, the Anthology, reaches its utmost
delicacy; but I give the following episode for the
sake of its pathetic expression.
138 THE MYTH OF
" After many wanderings Ceres was come to Attica.
There, in the utmost dejection, for the first time, she
sat down to rest on a bare stone, which the people of
Attica still call the stone of sorrow. For many days
she remained there motionless, under the open sky,
heedless of the rain and of the frosty moonlight.
Places have their fortunes ; and what is now the illus-
trious town of Eleusis was then the field of an old
man named Celeus. He was carrying home a load of
acorns, and wild berries shaken down from the bram-
bles, and dry wood for burning on the hearth; his
little daughter was leading two goats home from the
hills ; and at home there was a little boy lying sick in
his cradle. 'Mother,' said the little girl and the
goddess was moved at the name of mother 'what
do you, all alone, in this solitary place ? ' The old man
stopped too, in spite of his heavy burden, and bade
her take shelter in his cottage, though it was but a little
one. But at first she refused to come ; she looked
like an old woman, and an old woman's coif confined
her hair ; and as the man still urged her, she said to
him, ' Heaven bless you; and may children always be
yours ! My daughter has been stolen from me. Alas !
how much happier is your lot than mine ; ' and, though
weeping is impossible for the gods, as she spoke, a
bright drop, like a tear, fell into her bosom. Soft-
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 139
hearted, the little girl and the old man weep together.
And after that the good man said, ' Arise ! despise not
the shelter of my little home ; so may the daughter
whom you seek be restored to you.' ' Lead me,'
answered the goddess ; ' you have found out the secret
of moving me ; ' and she arose from the stone, and
followed the old man ; and as they went he told her
of the sick child at home how he is restless with
pain, and cannot sleep. And she, before entering the
little cottage, gathered from the untended earth the
soothing and sleep-giving poppy ; and as she gathered
it, it is said that she forgot her vow, and tasted of the
seeds, and broke her long fast, unaware. As she came
through the door, she saw the house full of trouble, for
now there was no more hope of life for the sick boy.
She saluted the mother, whose name was Metaneira,
and humbly kissed the lips of the child, with her own
lips ; then the paleness left its face, and suddenly the
parents see the strength returning to its body ; so great
is the force that comes from the divine mouth. And
the whole family was full of joy the mother and the
father and the little girl ; they were the whole house-
hold." 1
Three profound ethical conceptions, three impressive
1 With this may be connected another passage of Ovid Meta-
morphoses ; v. 391-408.
140 THE MYTH OF
sacred figures, have now defined themselves for the
Greek imagination, condensed from all the traditions
which have now been traced, from the hymns of the
poets, from the instinctive and unformulated mysticism
of primitive minds. Demeter is become the divine
sorrowing mother. Kore, the goddess of summer, is
become Persephone, the goddess of death, still associ-
ated with the forms and odours of flowers and fruit,
yet as one risen from the dead also, presenting one side
of her ambiguous nature to men's gloomier fancies.
Thirdly, there is the image of Demeter enthroned,
chastened by sorrow, and somewhat advanced in age,
blessing the earth, in her joy at the return of Kore.
The myth has now entered on the third phase of its
life, in which it becomes the property of those more
elevated spirits, who, in the decline of the Greek relig-
ion, pick and choose and modify, with perfect freedom
of mind, whatever in it may seem adapted to minister
to their culture. In this way, the myths of the Greek
religion become parts of an ideal, visible embodiments
of the susceptibilities and intuitions of the nobler kind
of souls ; and it is to this latest phase of mythological
development that the highest Greek sculpture allies
itself. Its function is to give visible aesthetic expres-
sion to the constituent parts of that ideal. As poetry
dealt chiefly with the incidents of the story, so it is
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 141
with the personages of the story with Demeter and
Kore themselves that sculpture has to do.
For the myth of Demeter, like the Greek religion in
general, had its unlovelier side, grotesque, unhellenic,
unglorified by art, illustrated well enough by the de-
scription Pausanias gives us of his visit to the cave of
the Black Demeter at Phigalia. In his time the image
itself had vanished ; but he tells us enough about it to
enable us to realise its general characteristics, mon-
strous as the special legend with which it was con-
nected, the black draperies, the horse's head united to
the woman's body, with the carved reptiles creeping
about it. If, with the thought of this gloomy image
of our mother the earth, in our minds, we take up one
of those coins which bear the image of Kore or De-
meter, 1 we shall better understand what the function
of sculpture really was, in elevating and refining the
religious conceptions of the Greeks. Looking on the
profile, for instance, on one of those coins of Messene,
which almost certainly represent Demeter, and noting
the crisp, chaste opening of the lips, the minutely
wrought earrings, and the delicately touched ears of
corn, this trifling object being justly regarded as, in
its aesthetic qualities, an epitome of art on a larger
1 On these small objects the mother and daughter are hard to
distinguish, the latter being recognisable only by a greater delicacy
in the features and the more evident stamp of youth.
142 THE MYTH OF
scale, we shall see how far the imagination of the
Greeks had travelled from what their Black Demeter
shows us had once been possible for them, and in
making the gods of their worship the objects of a
worthy companionship in their thoughts. Certainly,
the mind of the old workman who struck that coin was,
if we may trust the testimony of his work, unclouded
by impure or gloomy shadows. The thought of De-
meter is impressed here, with all the purity and pro-
portion, the purged and dainty intelligence of the
human countenance. The mystery of it is indeed
absent, perhaps could hardly have been looked for in
so slight a thing, intended for no sacred purpose, and
tossed lightly from hand to hand. But in his firm hold
on the harmonies of the human face, the designer of
this tranquil head of Demeter is on the one road to a
command over the secrets of all imaginative pathos
and mystery; though, in the perfect fairness and
blitheness of his work, he might seem almost not to
have known the incidents of her terrible story.
It is probable that, at a later period than in other
equally important temples of Greece, the earlier ar-
chaic representation of Demeter in the sanctuary of
Eleusis, was replaced by a more beautiful image in the
new style, with face and hands of ivory, having there-
fore, in tone and texture, some subtler likeness to
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 143
women's flesh, and the closely enveloping drapery
being constructed in daintily beaten plates of gold.
Praxiteles seems to have been the first to bring into
the region of a freer artistic handling these shy deities
of the earth, shrinking still within the narrow restraints
of a hieratic, conventional treatment, long after the
more genuine Olympians had broken out of them.
The school of Praxiteles, as distinguished from that of
Pheidias, is especially the school of grace, relaxing a
little the severe ethical tension of the latter, in favour
of a slightly Asiatic sinuosity and tenderness. Pausa-
nius tells us that he carved the two goddesses for the
temple of Demeter at Athens ; and Pliny speaks of two
groups of his in brass, the one representing the stealing
of Persephone, the other her later, annual descent into
Hades, conducted thither by the now pacified mother.
All alike have perished ; though perhaps some more or
less faint reflexion of the most important of these
designs may still be traced on many painted vases
which depict the stealing of Persephone, a helpless,
plucked flower in the arms of Aidoneus. And in this
almost traditional form, the subject was often repre-
sented, in low relief, on tombs, some of which still
remain ; in one or two instances, built up, oddly
enough, in the walls of Christian churches. On the
tombs of women who had died in early life, this was a
144 THE MYTH OF
favourite subject, some likeness of the actual lineaments
of the deceased being sometimes transferred to the
features of Persephone.
Yet so far, it might seem, when we consider the
interest of this story in itself, and its importance in the
Greek religion, that no adequate expression of it had
remained to us in works of art. But in the year 1857,
the discovery of the marbles, in the sacred precinct of
Demeter at Cnidus, restored to us an illustration of
the myth in its artistic phase, hardly less central than
the Homeric hymn in its poetical phase. With the
help of the descriptions and plans of Mr. Newton's
book, 1 we can form, as one always wishes to do in
such cases, a clear idea of the place where these
marbles three statues of the best style of Greek
sculpture, now in the British Museum were found.
Occupying a ledge of rock, looking towards the sea,
at the base of a cliff of upheaved limestone, of singu-
lar steepness and regularity of surface, the spot pre-
sents indications of volcanic disturbance, as if a chasm
in the earth had opened here. It was this character,
suggesting the belief in an actual connexion with the
interior of the earth, (local tradition claiming it as the
scene of the stealing of Persephone,) which probably
1 A History of Discoveries at Halicarnassus, Cnidus, and Bran-
chides.
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 145
gave rise, as in other cases where the landscape pre-
sented some peculiar feature in harmony with the
story, to the dedication upon* it of a house and an
image of Demeter, with whom were associated Kore
and " the gods with Demeter " ot Oeol napa Aa/xar/H
Aidoneus, and the mystical or Chthonian Dionysus.
The house seems to have been a small chapel only, of
simple construction, and designed for private use, the
site itself having been private property, consecrated
by a particular family, for their own religious uses,
although other persons, servants or dependents of the
founders, may also have frequented it. The architect-
ure seems to have been insignificant, but the sculpture
costly and exquisite, belonging, if contemporary with
the erection of the building, to a great period of Greek
art, of which also it is judged to possess intrinsic
marks about the year 350 before Christ, the proba-
ble date of the dedication of the little temple. The
artists by whom these works were produced were,
therefore, either the contemporaries of Praxiteles,
whose Venus was for many centuries the glory of
Cnidus, or belonged to the generation immediately
succeeding him. The temple itself was probably
thrown down by a renewal of the volcanic disturb-
ances ; the statues however remaining, and the minis-
ters and worshippers still continuing to make shift for
146 THE MYTH OF
their sacred business in the place, now doubly vener-
able, but with its temple unrestored, down to the
second or third century of the Christian era, its fre-
quenters being now perhaps mere chance comers, the
family of the original donors having become extinct,
or having deserted it. Into this later arrangement,
clearly divined by Mr. Newton, through those faint
indications which mean much for true experts, the
extant remains, as they were found upon the spot,
permit us to enter. It is one of the graves of that old
religion, but with much still fresh in it. We see it
with its provincial superstitions, and its curious magic
rites, but also with its means of really solemn impres-
sions, in the culminating forms of Greek art ; the two
faces of the Greek religion confronting each other
here, and the whole having that rare peculiarity of
a kind of personal stamp upon it, the place having
been designed to meet the fancies of one particular
soul, or at least of one family. It is always difficult to
bring the every-day aspect of Greek religion home
to us ; but even the slighter details of this little sanc-
tuary help us to do this ; and knowing so little, as we
do, of the greater mysteries of Demeter, this glance
into an actual religious place dedicated to her, and
with the air of her worship still about it, is doubly
interesting. The little votive figures of the goddesses,
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 147
in baked earth, were still lying stored in the small
treasury intended for such objects, or scattered about
the feet of the images, together with lamps in great
number, a lighted lamp being a favourite offering, in
memory of the torches with which Demeter sought
Persephone, or from some sense of inherent darkness
in these gods of the earth ; those torches in the hands
of Demeter being indeed originally the artificial warmth
and brightness of lamp and fire, on winter nights. The
dirce or spells, KaTaSeoyxot binding or devoting
certain persons to the infernal gods, inscribed on thin
rolls of lead, with holes, sometimes, for hanging them
up about those quiet statues, still lay, just as they were
left, anywhere within the sacred precinct, illustrating
at once the gloomier side of the Greek religion in
general, and of Demeter and Persephone especially,
in their character of avenging deities, and, as relics of
ancient magic, reproduced so strangely at other times
and places, reminding us of the permanence of certain
odd ways of human thought. A woman binds with
her spell the person who seduces her husband away
from her and her children ; another, the person who
has accused her of preparing poison for her husband ;
another devotes one who has not restored a borrowed
garment, or has stolen a bracelet, or certain drinking-
horns ; and, from some instances, we might infer that
148 THE MYTH OF
this was a favourite place of worship for the poor and
ignorant. In this living picture, we find still lingering
on, at the foot of the beautiful Greek marbles, that
phase of religious temper which a cynical mind might
think a truer link of its unity and permanence than
any higher aesthetic instincts a phase of it, which
the art of sculpture, humanising and refining man's
conceptions of the unseen, tended constantly to do
away. For the higher side of the Greek religion, thus
humanised and refined by art, and elevated by it to
the sense of beauty, is here also.
There were three ideal forms, as we saw, gradually
shaping themselves in the development of the story
of Demeter, waiting only for complete realisation at
the hands of the sculptor ; and now, with these forms
in our minds, let us place ourselves in thought before
the three images which once probably occupied the
three niches or ambries in the face of that singular
cliff at Cnidus, one of them being then wrought on a
larger scale. Of the three figures, one probably rep-
resents Persephone, as the goddess of the dead ; the
second, Demeter enthroned ; the third is probably a
portrait-statue of a priestess of Demeter, but may
perhaps, even so, represent Demeter herself, Demeter
Achcea, Ceres Deserta, the mater dolorosa of the
Greeks, a type not as yet recognised in any other
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 149
work of ancient art. Certainly, it seems hard not to
believe that this work is in some way connected with
the legend of the place to which it belonged, and the
main subject of which it realises so completely ; and,
at least, it shows how the higher Greek sculpture would
have worked out this motive. If Demeter at all, it is
Demeter the seeker, A^w, as she was called in
the mysteries, in some pause of her restless wandering
over the world in search of the lost child, and become
at last an abstract type of the wanderer. The Ho-
meric hymn, as we saw, had its sculptural motives, the
great gestures of Demeter, who was ever the stately
goddess, as she followed the daughters of Celeus, or
sat by the well-side, or went out and in, through the
halls of the palace, expressed in monumental words.
With the sentiment of that monumental Homeric
presence this statue is penetrated, uniting a certain
solemnity of attitude and bearing, to a profound pite-
ousness, an unrivalled pathos of expression. There is
something of the pity of Michelangelo's mater dolo-
rosa, in the wasted form and marred countenance, yet
with the light breaking faintly over it from the eyes,
which, contrary to the usual practice in ancient sculpt-
ure, are represented as looking upwards. It is the
aged woman who has escaped from pirates, who has
but just escaped being sold as a slave, calling on the
150 THE MYTH OF
young for pity. The sorrows of her long wanderings
seem to have passed into the marble ; and in this too,
it meets the demands which the reader of the Homeric
hymn, with its command over the resources of human
pathos, makes upon the sculptor. The tall figure, in
proportion above the ordinary height, is veiled, and
clad to the feet in the longer tunic, its numerous folds
hanging in heavy parallel lines, opposing the lines of
the peplus, or cloak, which cross it diagonally over the
breast, enwrapping the upper portion of the body
somewhat closely. It is the very type of the wander-
ing woman, going grandly, indeed, as Homer describes
her, yet so human in her anguish, that we seem to
recognise some far descended shadow of her, in the
homely figure of the roughly clad French peasant
woman, who, in one of Corot's pictures, is hasting
along under a sad light, as the day goes out behind
the little hiil. We have watched the growth of the
merely personal sentiment in the story ; and we may
notice that, if this figure be indeed Demeter, then the
conception of her has become wholly humanised ; no
trace of the primitive cosmical import of the myth,
no colour or scent of the mystical earth, remains
about it.
The seated figure, much mutilated, and worn by
long exposure, yet possessing, according to the best
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 151
critics, marks of the school of Praxiteles, is almost
undoubtedly the image of Demeter enthroned. Th'ree
times in the Homeric hymn she is represented as sit-
ting, once by the fountain at the wayside, again in the
house of Celeus, and again in the newly finished
temple of Eleusis ; but always in sorrow ; seated on
the Trerpa dye'Aao-Tos, which, as Ovid told us, the peo-
ple of Attica still called the stone of sorrow. Here
she is represented in her later state of reconciliation,
enthroned as the glorified mother of all things. The
delicate plaiting of the tunic about the throat, the
formal curling of the hair, and a certain weight of over-
thoughtfulness in the brows, recall the manner of
Leonardo da Vinci, a master, one of whose charac-
teristics is a very sensitive expression of the sentiment
of maternity. It reminds one especially of a work by
one of his scholars, the Virgin of the Balances, in the
Louvre, a picture which has been thought to repre-
sent, under a veil, the blessing of universal nature, and
in which the sleepy-looking heads, with a peculiar
grace and refinement of somewhat advanced life in
them, have just this half-weary posture. We see here,
then, the Here of the world below, the Stygian Juno,
the chief of those Elysian matrons who come crowd-
ing, in the poem of Claudian, to the marriage toilet of
Proserpine, the goddess of the fertility of the earth
152 THE MYTH OF
and of all creatures, but still of fertility as arisen out
of death ; T and therefore she is not without a certain
pensiveness, having seen the seed fall into the ground
and die, many times. Persephone is returned to her,
and the hair spreads, like a rich harvest, over her
shoulders ; but she is still veiled, and knows that the
seed must fall into the ground again, and Persephone
descend again from her.
The statues of the supposed priestess, and of the
enthroned Demeter, are of more than the size of life ;
the figure of Persephone is but seventeen inches high,
a daintily handled toy of Parian marble, the miniature
copy perhaps of a much larger work, which might
well be reproduced on a magnified scale. The con-
ception of Demeter is throughout chiefly human, and
even domestic, though never without a hieratic inter-
est, because she is not a goddess only, but also a
priestess. In contrast, Persephone is wholly un-
earthly, the close companion, and even the confused
double, of Hecate, the goddess of midnight terrors,
Despcena, the final mistress of all that lives ; and
as sorrow is the characteristic sentiment of Demeter,
so awe of Persephone. She is compact of sleep, and
death, and flowers, but of narcotic flowers especially,
1 " Pallere ligustra,
Exspirare rosas, decrescere lilia vidi."
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 153
a revenanf, who in the garden of Aidoneus has
eaten of the pomegranate, and bears always the
secret of decay in her, of return to the grave, in
the mystery of those swallowed seeds; sometimes,
in later work, holding in her hand the key of the
great prison-house, but which unlocks all secrets also ;
(there, finally, or through oracles revealed in dreams ;)
sometimes, like Demeter, the poppy, emblem of sleep
and death by its narcotic juices, of life and resurrec-
tion by its innumerable seeds, of the dreams, there-
fore, that may intervene between falling asleep and
waking. Treated as it is in the Homeric hymn, and
still more in this statue, the image of Persephone may
be regarded as the result of many efforts to lift the
old Chthonian gloom, still lingering on in heavier
souls, concerning the grave, to connect it with impres-
sions of dignity and beauty, and a certain sweetness
even ; it is meant to make men in love, or at least at
peace, with death. The Persephone of Praxiteles'
school, then, is Aphrodite -Persephone, Venus- Libitina.
Her shadowy eyes have gazed upon the fainter colour-
ing of the under-world, and the tranquillity, born of it,
has " passed into her face " ; for the Greek Hades is,
after all, but a quiet, twilight place, not very different
from that House of Fame where Dante places the great
souls of the classical world ; Aidoneus himself being
154 THE MYTH OF
conceived, in the highest Greek sculpture, as but a
gentler Zeus, the great innkeeper ; so that when a cer-
tain Greek sculptor had failed in his portraiture of
Zeus, because it had too little hilarity, too little, in
the eyes and brow, of the open and cheerful sky, he
only changed its title, and the thing passed excel-
lently, with its heavy locks and shadowy eyebrows, for
the god of the dead. The image of Persephone, then,
as it is here composed, with the tall, tower-like head-
dress, from which the veil depends the corn-basket,
originally carried thus by the Greek women, balanced
on the head giving the figure unusual length, has
the air of a body bound about with grave-clothes ;
while the archaic hands and feet, and a certain stiff-
ness in the folds of the drapery, give it something of
a hieratic character, and to the modern observer may
suggest a sort of kinship with the more chastened kind
of Gothic work. But quite of the school of Praxiteles
is the general character of the composition ; the
graceful waving of the hair, the fine shadows of the
little face, of the eyes and lips especially, like
the shadows of a flower a flower risen noiselessly
from its dwelling in the dust though still with that
fulness or heaviness in the brow, as of sleepy people,
which, in the delicate gradations of Greek sculpture,
distinguish the infernal deities from their Olympian
DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE 155
kindred. The object placed in the hand may be,
perhaps, a stiff, archaic flower, but is probably the
partly consumed pomegranate one morsel gone ;
the most usual emblem of Persephone being this
mystical fruit, which, because of the multitude of its
seeds, was to the Romans a symbol of fecundity, and
was sold at the doors of the temple of Ceres, that the
women might offer it there, and bear numerous chil-
dren ; and so, to the middle age, became a symbol of
the fruitful earth itself; and then of that other seed
sown in the dark under-world ; and at last of that
whole hidden region, so thickly sown, which Dante
visited, Michelino painting him, in the Duomo of
Florence, with this fruit in his hand, and Botticelli
putting it into the childish hands of Him, who, if men
" go down into hell, is there also."
There is an attractiveness in these goddesses of the
earth, akin to the influence of cool places, quiet houses,
subdued light, tranquillizing voices. What is there in
this phase of ancient religion for us, at the present
day? The myth of Demeter and Persephone, then,
illustrates the power of the Greek religion as a religion
of pure ideas of conceptions, which having no link
on historical fact, yet, because they arose naturally out
of the spirit of man, and embodied, in adequate sym-
bols, his deepest thoughts concerning the conditions
156 THE MYTH OF DEMETER AND PERSEPHONE
of his physical and spiritual life, maintained their hold
through many changes, and are still not without a sol-
emnising power even for the modern mind, which has
once admitted them as recognised and habitual inhabi-
tants ; and, abiding thus for the elevation and purifying
of our sentiments, long after the earlier and simpler
races of their worshippers have passed away, they may
be a pledge to us of the place in our culture, at once
legitimate and possible, of the associations, the con-
ceptions, the imagery, of Greek religious poetry in
general, of the poetry of all religions.
HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
A STUDY FROM EURIPIDES
CENTURIES of zealous archaeology notwithstanding,
many phases of the so varied Greek genius are recorded
for the modern student in a kind of shorthand only,
or not at all. Even for Pausanias, visiting Greece
before its direct part in affairs was quite played out,
much had perished or grown dim of its art, of the
truth of its outward history, above all of its religion
as a credible or practicable thing. And yet Pausanias
visits Greece under conditions as favourable for obser-
vation as those under which later travellers, Addison
or Eustace, proceed to Italy. For him the impress
of life in those old Greek cities is not less vivid and
entire than that of medieval Italy to ourselves; at
Siena, for instance, with its ancient palaces still in
occupation, its public edifices as serviceable as if the
old republic had but just now vacated them, the tra-
157
158 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
dition of their primitive worship still unbroken in its
churches. Had the opportunities in which Pausanias
was fortunate been ours, how many haunts of the
antique Greek life unnoticed by him we should have
peeped into, minutely systematic in our painstaking !
how many a view would broaden out where he notes
hardly anything at all on his map of Greece !
One of the most curious phases of Greek civilisation
which has thus perished for us, and regarding which,
as we may fancy, we should have made better use of
that old traveller's facilities, is the early Attic deme-
life its picturesque, intensely localised variety, in the
hollow or on the spur of mountain or sea-shore ; and
with it many a relic of primitive religion, many an early
growth of art parallel to what Vasari records of artis-
tic beginnings in the smaller cities of Italy. Colonus
and Acharnae, surviving still so vividly by the magic
of Sophocles, of Aristophanes, are but isolated exam-
ples of a wide-spread manner of life, in which, amid
many provincial peculiarities, the first, yet perhaps
the most costly and telling steps were made in all the
various departments of Greek culture. Even in the
days of Pausanias, Piraeus was still traceable as a dis-
tinct township, once the possible rival of Athens, with
its little old covered market by the seaside, and the
symbolical picture of the place, its Genius, visible on
HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 159
the wall. And that is but the type of what there had
been to know of threescore and more village commu-
nities, each having its own altars, its special worship
and place of civic assembly, its trade and crafts, its
name drawn from physical peculiarity or famous inci-
dent, its body of heroic tradition. Lingering on while
Athens, the great deme, gradually absorbed into itself
more and more of their achievements, and passing
away almost completely as political factors in the
Peloponnesian war, they were still felt, we can hardly
doubt, in the actual physiognomy of Greece. That
variety in unity, which its singular geographical forma-
tion secured to Greece as a whole, was at its utmost
in these minute reflexions of the national character,
with all the relish of local difference new art, new
poetry, fresh ventures in political combination, in the
conception of life, springing as if straight from the
soil, like the thorn-blossom of early spring in magic
lines over all that rocky land. On the other hand, it
was just here that ancient habits clung most tena-
ciously that old-fashioned, homely, delightful exist-
ence, to which the refugee, pent up in Athens in the
years of the Peloponnesian war, looked back so
fondly. If the impression of Greece generally is but
enhanced by the littleness of the physical scene of
events intellectually so great such a system of grand
160 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
lines, restrained within so narrow a compass, as in one
of its fine coins still more would this be true of those
centres of country life. Here, certainly, was that
assertion of seemingly small interests, which brings
into free play, and gives his utmost value to, the indi-
vidual ; making his warfare, equally with his more
peaceful rivalries, deme against deme, the mountain
against the plain, the sea-shore, (as in our own old Bor-
der life, but played out here by wonderfully gifted peo-
ple) tangible as a personal history, to the doubling of its
fascination for those whose business is with the survey
of the dramatic side of life.
As with civil matters, so it was also, we may fairly
suppose, with religion ; the deme-life was a manifesta-
tion of religious custom and sentiment, in all their
primitive local variety. As Athens, gradually drawing
into itself the various elements of provincial culture,
developed, with authority, the central religious posi-
tion, the demes-men did but add the worship of
Athene Polias, the goddess of the capital, to their own
pre-existent ritual uses. Of local and central religion
alike, time and circumstance had obliterated much
when Pausanias came. A devout spirit, with religion
for his chief interest, eager for the trace of a divine
footstep, anxious even in the days of Lucian to deal
seriously with what had counted for so much to serious
HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 161
men, he has, indeed, to lament that " Pan is dead : "
"They come no longer!" "These things happen
no longer ! " But the Greek his very name also,
Hellen, was the title of a priesthood had been relig-
ious abundantly, sanctifying every detail of his actual
life with the religious idea ; and as Pausanias goes on
his way he finds many a remnant of that earlier estate
of religion, when, as he fancied, it had been nearer
the gods, as it was certainly nearer the earth. It is
marked, even in decay, with varieties of place ; and
is not only continuous but in situ. At Phigaleia he
makes his offerings to Demeter, agreeably to the pater-
nal rites of the inhabitants, wax, fruit, undressed wool
" still full of the sordes of the sheep." A dream from
heaven cuts short his notice of the mysteries of Eleusis.
He sees the stone, " big enough for a little man," on
which Silenus was used to sit and rest ; at Athens, the
tombs of the Amazons, of the purple-haired Nisus, of
Deucalion; "it is a manifest token that he had
dwelt there." The worshippers of Poseidon, even at
his temple among the hills, might still feel the earth
fluctuating beneath their feet. And in care for divine
things, he tells us, the Athenians outdid all other
Greeks. Even in the days of Nero it revealed itself
oddly ; and it is natural to suppose that of this temper
the demes, as the proper home of conservatism, were
M
162 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
exceptionally expressive. Scattered in those remote,
romantic villages, among their olives or sea-weeds, lay
the heroic graves, the relics, the sacred images, often
rude enough amid the delicate tribute of later art;
this too oftentimes finding in such retirement its best
inspirations, as in some Attic Fiesole. Like a network
over the land of gracious poetic tradition, as also of
undisturbed ceremonial usage surviving late for those
who cared to seek it, the local religions had been never
wholly superseded by the worship of the great national
temples. They were, in truth, the most character-
istic developments of a faith essentially earth-born
or indigenous.
And how often must the student of fine art, again,
wish he had the same sort of knowledge about its
earlier growth in Greece, that he actually possesses in
the case of Italian art ! Given any development at
all in this matter, there must have been phases of art,
which, if immature, were also veritable expressions of
power to come, intermediate discoveries of beauty,
such as are by no means a mere anticipation, and of
service only as explaining historically larger subse-
quent achievements, but of permanent attractiveness
in themselves, being often, indeed, the true maturity of
certain amiable artistic qualities. And in regard to
Greek art at its best the Parthenon no less than
HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 163
to the art of the Renaissance at its best the Sistine
Chapel the more instructive light would be derived
rather from what precedes than what follows such
central success, from the determination to apprehend
the fulfilment of past effort rather than the eve of de-
cline, in the critical, central moment which partakes
of both. Of such early promise, early achievement,
we have in the case of Greek art little to compare with
what is extant of the youth of the arts in Italy. Over-
beck's careful gleanings of its history form indeed a
sorry relic as contrasted with Vasari's intimations of
the beginnings of the Renaissance. Fired by certain
fragments of its earlier days, of a beauty, in truth,
absolute, and vainly longing for more, the student of
Greek sculpture indulges the thought of an ideal of
youthful energy therein, yet withal of youthful self-
restraint ; and again, as with survivals of old religion,
the privileged home, he fancies, of that ideal must
have been in those venerable Attic townships, as to
a large extent it passed away with them.
The budding of new art, the survival of old religion,
at isolated centres of provincial life, where varieties
of human character also were keen, abundant, asserted
in correspondingly effective incident this is what
irresistible fancy superinduces on historic details,
themselves meagre enough. The sentiment of antiq-
164 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
uity is indeed a characteristic of all cultivated peo-
ple, even in what may seem the freshest ages, and not
exclusively a humour of our later world. In the
earliest notices about them, as we know, the people
of Attica appear already impressed by the immense
antiquity of their occupation of its soil, of which they
claim to be the very first flower. Some at least of
those old demes-men we may well fancy sentimentally
reluctant to change their habits, fearful of losing too
much of themselves in the larger stream of life, cling-
ing to what is antiquated as the work of centralisation
goes on, needful as that work was, with the great
" Eastern difficulty " already ever in the distance.
The fear of Asia, barbaric, splendid, hardly known,
yet haunting the curious imagination of those who had
borrowed thence the art in which they were rapidly
excelling it, developing, as we now see, in the interest
of Greek humanity, crafts begotten of tyrannic and
illiberal luxury, was finally to suppress the rivalries of
those primitive centres of activity, when the " invin-
cible armada " of the common foe came into sight.
At a later period civil strife was to destroy their last
traces. The old hoplite, from Rhamnus or Acharnae,
pent up in beleaguered Athens during that first summer
of the Peloponnesian war, occupying with his house-
hold a turret of the wall, as Thucydides describes
HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 165
one of many picturesque touches in that severe histo-
rian could well remember the ancient provincial life
which this conflict with Sparta was bringing to an end.
He could recall his boyish, half-scared curiosity con-
cerning those Persian ships, coming first as merchant-
men, or with pirates on occasion, in the half-savage,
wicked splendours of their decoration, the monstrous
figure-heads, their glittering freightage. Men would
hardly have trusted their women or children with that
suspicious crew, hovering through the dusk. There
were soothsayers, indeed, who had long foretold what
happened soon after, giving shape to vague, super-
natural terrors. And then he had crept from his hid-
ing-place with other lads to go view the enemies' slain
at Marathon, beside those belated Spartans, this new
war with whom seemed to be reviving the fierce local
feuds of his younger days. Paraloi and Diacrioi had
ever been rivals. Very distant it all seemed now, with
all the stories he could tell; for in those crumbling
little towns, as heroic life had lingered on into the
actual, so, at an earlier date, the supernatural into the
heroic. Like mist at dawn, the last traces of its divine
visitors had then vanished from the land, where, how-
ever, they had already begotten " our best and oldest
families."
It 'was Theseus, uncompromising young master of
166 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
the situation, in fearless application of "the modern
spirit " of his day to every phase of life where it was
applicable, who, at the expense of Attica, had given
Athens a people, reluctant enough, in truth, as Plutarch
suggests, to desert " their homes and religious usages
and many good and gracious kings of their own " for
this elect youth, who thus figures, passably, as a kind
of mythic shorthand for civilisation, making roads and
the like, facilitating travel, suppressing various forms
of violence, but many innocent things as well. So
it must needs be in a world where, even hand in hand
with a god-assisted hero, Justice goes blindfold. He
slays the bull of Marathon and many another local
tyrant, but also exterminates that delightful creature,
the Centaur. The Amazon, whom Plato will reinstate
as the type of improved womanhood, has no better
luck than Phaea, the sow-pig of Crommyon, foul old
landed-proprietress. They exerted, however, the pre-
rogative of poetic protest, and survive thereby. Cen-
taur and Amazon, as we see them in the fine art of
Greece, represent the regret of Athenians themselves
for something that could never be brought to life again,
and have their pathos. Those young heroes contend-
ing with Amazons on the frieze of the Mausoleum
had best make haste with their bloody work, if young
people's eyes can tell a true story. A type still of
HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 167
progress triumphant through injustice, set on improv-
ing things off the face of the earth, Theseus took
occasion to attack the Amazons in their mountain
home, not long after their ruinous conflict with Her-
cules, and hit them when they were down. That
greater bully had laboured off on the world's highway,
carrying with him the official girdle of Antiope, their
queen, gift of Ares, and therewith, it would seem,
the mystic secret of their strength. At sight of this
new foe, at any rate, she came to a strange submission.
The savage virgin had turned to very woman, and
was presently a willing slave, returning on the gaily
appointed ship in all haste to Athens, where in sup-
posed wedlock she bore King Theseus a son.
With their annual visit visit to the Gargareans !
for the purpose of maintaining their species, parting
with their boys early, these husbandless women could
hardly be supposed a very happy, certainly not a very
joyous people. They figure rather as a sorry measure
of the luck of the female sex in taking a hard natural
law into their own hands, and by abnegation of all
tender companionship making shift with bare inde-
pendence, as a kind of second-best the best practi-
cable by them in the imperfect actual condition of
things. But the heart- strings would ache still where
the breast had been cut away. The sisters of Antiope
168 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
had come, not immediately, but in careful array of
battle, to bring back the captive. All along the
weary roads from the Caucasus to Attica, their
traces had remained in the great graves of those
who died by the way. Against the little remnant,
carrying on the fight to the very midst of Athens,
Antiope herself had turned, all other thoughts trans-
formed now into wild idolatry of her hero. Super-
stitious, or in real regret, the Athenians never forgot
their tombs. As for Antiope, the consciousness of her
perfidy remained with her, adding the pang of remorse
to her own desertion, when King Theseus, with his
accustomed bad faith to women, set her, too, aside in
turn. Phaedra, the true wife, was there, peeping sus-
piciously at her rival ; and even as Antiope yielded
to her lord's embraces the thought had come that a
male child might be the instrument of her anger, and
one day judge her cause.
In one of these doomed, decaying villages, then,
King Theseus placed the woman and her babe,
hidden, yet secure, within the Attic border, as men
veil their mistakes or crimes. They might pass away,
they and their story, together with the memory of
other antiquated creatures of such places, who had
had connubial dealings with the stars. The white,
paved waggon-track, a by-path of the sacred way to
HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 169
Eleusis, zigzagged through sloping olive-yards, from
the plain of silvered blue, with Athens building in the
distance, and passed the door of the rude stone house,
furnished scantily, which no one had ventured to
inhabit of late years till they came there. On the
ledges of the grey cliffs above, the laurel groves, stem
and foliage of motionless bronze, had spread their
tents. Travellers bound northwards were glad to
repose themselves there, and take directions, or pro-
vision for their journey onwards, from the highland
people, who came down hither to sell their honey,
their cheese, and woollen stuff, in the tiny market-
place. At dawn the great stars seemed to halt a
while, burning as if for sacrifice to some pure deity,
on those distant, obscurely named heights, like
broken swords, the rim of the world. A little later
you could just see the newly opened quarries, like
streaks of snow on their russet-brown bosoms.
Thither in spring-time all eyes turned from Athens
devoutly, intent till the first shaft of lightning gave
signal for the departure of the sacred ship to Delos.
Racing over those rocky surfaces, the virgin air de-
scended hither with the secret of profound sleep, as
the child lay in its cubicle hewn in the stone, the
white fleeces heaped warmly round him. In the wild
Amazon's soul, to her surprise, and at first against
170 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
her will, the maternal sense had quickened from the
moment of his conception, and, (thatr burst of angry
tears with which she had received him into the world
once dried up) kindling more eagerly at every token
of manly growth, had at length driven out every other
feeling. And this animal sentiment, educating the
human hand and heart in her, had become a moral
one, when, King Theseus leaving her in anger, visibly
unkind, the child had crept to her side, and tracing
with small fingers the wrinkled lines of her woe-begone
brow, carved there as if by a thousand years of sorrow,
had sown between himself and her the seed of an un-
dying sympathy.
She was thus already on the watch for a host of
minute recognitions on his part, of the self-sacrifice
involved in her devotion to a career of which she must
needs drain out the sorrow, careful that he might taste
only the joy. So far, amid their spare living, the child,
as if looking up to the warm broad wing of her love
above him, seemed replete with comfort. Yet in his
moments of childish sickness, the first passing shadows
upon the deep joy of her motherhood, she teaches him
betimes to soothe or cheat pain little bodily pains
only, hitherto. She ventures sadly to assure him of
the harsh necessities of life : " Courage, child ! Every
one must take his share of suffering. Shift not thy
HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 171
body so vehemently. Pain, taken quietly, is easier
to bear."
Carefully inverting the habits of her own rude
childhood, she learned to spin the wools, white and
grey, to clothe and cover him pleasantly. The spec-
tacle of his unsuspicious happiness, though at present
a matter of purely physical conditions, awoke a strange
sense of poetry, a kind of artistic sense in her, watch-
ing, as her own long-deferred recreation in life, his
delight in the little delicacies she prepared to his
liking broiled kids' flesh, the red wine, the mush-
rooms sought through the early dew his hunger and
thirst so daintily satisfied, as he sat at table, like the
first-born of King Theseus, with two wax-lights and
a fire at dawn or nightfall dancing to the prattle and
laughter, a bright child, never stupidly weary. At
times his very happiness would seem to her like a
menace of misfortune to come. Was there not with
herself the curse of that unsisterly action? and not
far from him, the terrible danger of the father's, the
step-mother's jealousy, the mockery of those half-
brothers to come ? Ah ! how perilous for happiness
the sensibilities which make him so exquisitely happy
now ! Before they started on their dreadful visit to
the Minotaur, says Plutarch, the women told their
sons many tales and other things to encourage them ;
172 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
and, even as she had furnished the child betimes with
rules for the solace of bodily pain, so now she would
have brought her own sad experience into service in
precepts for the ejection of its festering power out of
any other trouble that might visit him. Already those
little disappointments which are as the shadow beside
all conscious enjoyment, were rio petty things to her,
but had for her their pathos, as children's troubles will
have, in spite of the longer chance before them. They
were as the first steps in a long story of deferred hopes,
or anticipations of death itself and the end of them.
The gift of Ares gone, the mystic girdle she would
fain have transferred to the child, that bloody god of
storm and battle, hereditary patron of her house,
faded from her thoughts together with the memory of
her past life the more completely, because another
familiar though somewhat forbidding deity, accepting
certainly a cruel and forbidding worship, was already
in possession, and reigning in the new home when she
came thither. Only, thanks to some kindly local
influence, (by grace, say, of its delicate air) Artemis,
this other god she had known in the Scythian wilds,
had put aside her fierce ways, as she paused awhile
on her heavenly course among these ancient abodes of
men, gliding softly, mainly through their dreams, with
abundance of salutary touches. Full, in truth, of
HIPFOLYTUS VEILED 173
grateful memory of some timely service at human
hands ! In these highland villages the tradition of
celestial visitants clung fondly, of god or hero, belated
or misled on long journeys, yet pleased to be among
the sons of men, as their way led them up the steep,
narrow, crooked street, condescending to rest a little,
as one, under some sudden stress not clearly ascer-
tained, had done here, in this very house, thereafter
for ever sacred. The place and its inhabitants, of
course, had been something bigger in the days of
those old mythic hospitalities, unless, indeed, divine
persons took kindly the will for the deed very
different, surely, from the present condition of things,
for there was little here to detain a delicate traveller,
even in the abode of Antiope and her son, though it
had been the residence of a king.
Hard by stood the chapel of the goddess, who had
thus adorned the place with her memories. The
priests, indeed, were already departed to Athens,
carrying with them the ancient image, the vehicle
of her actual presence, as the surest means of en-
riching the capital at the expense of. the country,
where she must now make poor shift of the occa-
sional worshipper on his way through these mountain
passes. But safely roofed beneath the sturdy tiles of
grey Hymettus marble, upon the walls of the little
174 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
square recess enclosing the deserted pedestal, a series
of crowded imageries, in the devout spirit of earlier
days, were eloquent concerning her. Here from scene
to scene, touched with silver among the wild and
human creatures in dun bronze, with the moon's disk
around her head, shrouded closely, the goddess of the
chase still glided mystically through all the varied
incidents of her story, in all the detail of a written
book.
A book for the delighted reading of a scholar, will-
ing to ponder at leisure, to make his way surely, and
understand. Very different, certainly, from the cruel-
featured little idol his mother had brought in her bun-
dle the old Scythian Artemis, hanging there on the
wall, side by side with the forgotten Ares, blood-red,
the goddess reveals herself to the lad, poring through
the dusk by taper-light, as at once a virgin, necessa-
rily therefore the creature of solitude, yet also as
the assiduous nurse of children, and patroness of the
young. Her friendly intervention at the act of birth
everywhere, her claim upon the nursling, among tame
and wild creatures equally, among men as among gods,
nay ! among the stars (upon the very star of dawn),
gave her a breadth of influence seemingly co-extensive
with the sum of things. Yes ! his great mother was
in touch with everything. Yet throughout he can but
H1PPOLYTUS VEILED 175
note her perpetual chastity, with pleasurable though
half- suspicious wonder at the mystery, he knows not
what, involved therein, as though he awoke suddenly
in some distant, unexplored region of her person and
activity. Why the lighted torch always, and that long
straight vesture rolled round so formally ? Was it only
against the cold of these northern heights ?
To her, nevertheless, her maternity, her solitude,
to this virgin mother, who, with no husband, no lover,
no fruit of her own, is so tender to the children of
others, in a full heart he devotes himself his im-
maculate body and soul. Dedicating himself thus, he
has the sense also that he becomes more entirely than
ever the chevalier of his mortal mother, of her sad
cause. The devout, diligent hands clear away care-
fully the dust, the faded relics of her former worship ;
a worship renewed once more as the sacred spring,
set free from encumbrance, in answer to his willing
ministries murmurs again under the dim vault in its
marble basin, work of primitive Titanic fingers flows
out through its rocky channel, filling the whole town-
ship with chaste thoughts of her.
Through much labour at length he comes to the
veritable story of her birth, like a gift direct from the
goddess herself to this loyal soul. There were those
in later times who, like ^Eschylus, knew Artemis as
176 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
the daughter not of Leto but of Demeter, according
to the version of her history now conveyed to the
young Hippolytus, together with some deepened
insight into her character. The goddess of Eleusis,
on a journey, in the old days when, as Plato says,
men lived nearer the gods, finding herself with child
by some starry inmate of those high places, had lain
down in the rock-hewn cubicle of the inner chamber,
and, certainly in sorrow, brought forth a daughter.
Here was the secret at once of the genial, all-embrac-
ing maternity of this new strange Artemis, and of
those more dubious tokens, the lighted torch, the
winding-sheet, the arrow of death on the string of
sudden death, truly, which may be thought after all
the kindest, as prevenient of all disgraceful sickness
or waste in the unsullied limbs. For the late birth
into the world of this so shadowy daughter was some-
how identified with the sudden passing into Hades
of her first-born, Persephone. As he scans those
scenes anew, an awful surmise comes to him ; his
divine patroness moves there as death, surely. Still,
however, gratefully putting away suspicion, he seized
even in these ambiguous imageries their happier sug-
gestions, satisfied in thinking of his new mother as but
the giver of sound sleep, of the benign night, whence
mystery of mysteries ! good things are born
HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 177
softly, from which he awakes betimes for his healthful
service to her. Either way, sister of Apollo or sister
of Persephone, to him she should be a power of sanity,
sweet as the flowers he offered her gathered at dawn,
setting daily their purple and white frost against her
ancient marbles. There was more certainly than the
first breath of day in them. Was there here some-
thing of her person, her sensible presence, by way of
direct response to him in his early devotion, astir for
her sake before the very birds, nesting here so freely,
the quail above all, in some privileged connexion with
her story still unfathomed by the learned youth?
Amid them he too found a voice, and sang articulately
the praises of the great goddess.
Those more dubious traits, nevertheless, so lightly
disposed of by Hippolytus, (Hecate thus counting for
him as Artemis goddess of health,) became to his
mother, in the light of her sad experience, the sum of
the whole matter. While he drew only peaceful
inducements to sleep from that two-sided figure, she
reads there a volume of sinister intentions, and liked
little this seemingly dead goddess, who could but
move among the living banefully, stealing with her
night-shade into the day where she had no proper
right. The gods had ever had much to do with the
shaping of her fortunes and the fortunes of her kin-
178 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
dred ; and the mortal mother felt nothing less than
jealousy from the hour when the lad had first de-
lightedly called her to share his discoveries, and learn
the true story (if it were not rather the malicious
counterfeit) of the new divine mother to whom he
has thus absolutely entrusted himself. Was not this
absolute chastity itself a kind of death? She, too,
in secret makes her gruesome midnight offering with
averted eyes. She dreams one night he is in danger ;
creeps to his cubicle to see ; the face is covered, as he
lies, against the cold. She traces the motionless out-
line, raises the coverlet; with the nice black head
deep in the fleecy pillow he is sleeping quietly, he
dreams of that other mother gliding in upon the
moonbeam, and awaking turns sympathetically upon
the living woman, is subdued in a moment to the
expression of her troubled spirit, and understands.
And when the child departed from her for the first
time, springing from his white bed before the dawn,
to accompany the elders on their annual visit to the
Eleusinian goddess, the after-sense of his wonderful
happiness, tranquillising her in spite of herself by its
genial power over the actual moment, stirred neverthe-
less a new sort of anxiety for the future. Her work
in life henceforward was defined as a ministry to so
precious a gift, in full consciousness of its risk; it
HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 179
became her religion, the centre of her pieties. She
missed painfully his continual singing hovering about
the place, like the earth itself made audible in all
its humanities. Half-selfish for a moment, she prays
that he may remain for ever a child, to her solace ;
welcomes now the promise of his chastity (though
chastity were itself a kind of death) as the pledge of
his abiding always with her. And these thoughts
were but infixed more deeply by the sudden stroke
of joy at his return home in ceremonial trim and
grown more manly, with much increase of self-con-
fidence in that brief absence among his fellows.
For, from the first, the unwelcome child, the out-
cast, had been successful, with that special good
fortune which sometimes attends the outcast. His
happiness, his invincible happiness, had been found
engaging, perhaps by the gods, certainly by men ;
and when King Theseus came to take note how
things went in that rough life he had assigned them,
he felt a half liking for the boy, and bade him come
down to Athens and see the sights, partly by way of
proof to his already somewhat exacting wife of the
difference between the old love and the new as
measured by the present condition of their respective
offspring. The fine nature, fastidious by instinct, but
bred with frugality enough to find the charm of con-
180 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
tinual surprise in that delicate new Athens, draws, as
he goes, the full savour of its novelties ; the marbles,
the space and finish, the busy gaiety of its streets, the
elegance of life there, contrasting with while it adds
some mysterious endearment to the thought of his
own rude home. Without envy, in hope only one
day to share, to win them by kindness, he gazes
on the motley garden-plots, the soft bedding, the
showy toys, the delicate keep of the children of
Phsedra, who turn curiously to their half-brother,
venture to touch his long strange gown of homespun
grey, like the soft coat of some wild creature who
might let one stroke it. Close to their dainty existence
for a while, he regards it as from afar ; looks forward
all day to the lights, the prattle, the laughter, the
white bread, like sweet cake to him, of their ordinary
evening meal ; returns again and again, in spite of
himself, to watch, to admire, feeling a power within
him to merit the like ; finds his way back at last,
still light of heart, to his own poor fare, able to do
without what he would enjoy so much. As, grateful
for his scanty part in things for the make-believe of
a feast in the little white loaves she too has managed
to come by, sipping the thin white wine, he touches
her dearly, the mother is shocked with a sense of
something unearthly in his contentment, while he
HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 181
comes and goes, singing now more abundantly than
ever a new canticle to her divine rival. Were things,
after all, to go grudgingly with him ? Sensible of that
curse on herself, with her suspicions of his kinsfolk, of
this dubious goddess to whom he has devoted him-
self, she anticipates with more foreboding than ever
his path to be, with or without a wife her own soli-
tude, or his the painful heats and cold. She fears
even these late successes; it were best to veil their
heads. The strong as such had ever been against her
and hers. The father came again; noted the boy's
growth. Manliest of men, like Hercules in his cloak
of lion's skin, he has after all but scant liking, feels,
through a certain meanness of soul, scorn for the finer
likeness of himself. Might this creature of an already
vanishing world, who for all his hard rearing had a
manifest distinction of character, one day become his
rival, full of loyalty as he was already to the deserted
mother?
To charming Athens, nevertheless, he crept back,
as occasion served, to gaze peacefully on the delightful
good fortune of others, waiting for the opportunity to
take his own turn with the rest, driving down thither
at last in a chariot gallantly, when all the town was
assembled to celebrate the king's birthday. For the
goddess, herself turning ever kinder, and figuring more
182 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
and more exclusively as the tender nurse of all things,
had transformed her young votary from a hunter into
a charioteer, a rearer and driver of horses, after the
fashion of his Amazon mothers before him. There-
upon, all the lad's wholesome vanity had centred on
the fancy of the world-famous games then lately es-
tablished, as, smiling down his mother's terrors, and
grateful to his celestial mother for many a hair-
breadth escape, he practised day by day, fed the
animals, drove them out, amused though companion-
less, visited them affectionately in the deserted stone
stables of the ancient king. A chariot and horses, as
being the showiest outward thing the world afforded,
was like the pawn he moved to represent the big
demand he meant to make, honestly, generously, on
the ample fortunes of life. There was something of
his old miraculous kindred, alien from this busy new
world he came to, about the boyish driver with the
fame of a scholar, in his grey fleecy cloak and hood
of soft white woollen stuff, as he drove in that morning.
Men seemed to have seen a star flashing, and crowded
round to examine the little mountain-bred beasts, in
loud, friendly intercourse with the hero of the hour
even those usually somewhat unsympathetic half-broth-
ers now full of enthusiasm for the outcast and his good
fight for prosperity. Instinctively people admired his
HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 183
wonderful placidity, and would fain have shared its
secret, as it were the carelessness of some fair flower
upon his face. A victor in the day's race, he carried
home as his prize a glittering new harness in place of
the very old one he had come with. " My chariot and
horses ! " he says now, with his single touch of pride.
Yet at home, savouring to the full his old solitary
happiness, veiled again from time to time in that
ancient life, he is still the student, still ponders the old
writings which tell of his divine patroness. At Athens
strange stories are told in turn of him, his nights upon
the mountains, his dreamy sin, with that hypocritical
virgin goddess, stories which set the jealous suspicions
of Theseus at rest once more. For so " dream " not
those who have the tangible, appraiseable world in view.
Even Queen Phaedra looks with pleasure, as he comes,
on the once despised illegitimate creature, at home
now here too, singing always audaciously, so visibly
happy, occupied, popular.
Encompassed by the luxuries of Athens, far from
those peaceful mountain places, among people further
still in spirit from their peaceful light and shade, he
did not forget the kindly goddess, still sharing with
his earthly mother the prizes, or what they would buy,
for the adornment of their spare abode. The tombs
of the fallen Amazons, the spot where they had
184 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
breathed their last, he piously visited, informed him-
self of every circumstance of the event with devout
care, and, thinking on them amid the dainties of the
royal table, boldly brought them too their share of
the offerings to the heroic dead. Aphrodite, indeed
Aphrodite, of whom he had scarcely so much as
heard was just then the best-served deity in Athens,
with all its new wealth of colour and form, its gold
and ivory, the acting, the music, the fantastic women,
beneath the shadow of the great walls still rising
steadily. Hippolytus would have no part in her
worship ; instead did what was in him to revive the
neglected service of his own goddess, stirring an old
jealousy. For Aphrodite too had looked with delight
upon the youth, already the centre of a -hundred less
dangerous human rivalries among the maidens of
Greece, and was by no means indifferent to his indif-
ference, his instinctive distaste ; while the sterner,
almost forgotten Artemis found once more her great
moon-shaped cake, set about with starry tapers, at
the appointed seasons.
They know him now from afar, by his emphatic,
shooting, arrowy movements ; and on the day of the
great chariot races " he goes in and wins." To the
surprise of all he compounded his handsome prize for
the old wooden image taken from the chapel at home,
HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 185
lurking now in an obscure shrine in the meanest quar-
ter of the town. Sober amid the noisy feasting which
followed, unashamed, but travelling by night to hide
it from their mockery, warm at his bosom, he reached
the passes at twilight, and through the deep peace of
the glens bore it to the old resting-place, now more
worthy than ever of the presence of its mistress, his
mother and all the people of the village coming forth
to salute her, all doors set mystically open, as she
advances.
Phaedra too, his step-mother, a fiery soul with wild,
strange blood in her veins, forgetting her fears of this
illegitimate rival of her children, seemed now to have
seen him for the first time, loved at last the very touch
of his fleecy cloak, and would fain have had him of
her own religion. As though the once neglected
child had been another, she tries to win him as a
stranger in his manly perfection, growing more than
an affectionate mother to her husband's son. But
why thus intimate and congenial, she asks, always in
the wrong quarter? Why not compass two ends at
once? Why so squeamishly neglect the powerful,
any power at all, in a city so full of religion? He
might find the image of her sprightly goddess every-
where, to his liking, gold, silver, native or stranger,
new or old, graceful, or indeed, if he preferred it so,
186 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
in iron or stone. By the way, she explains the delights
of love, of marriage, the husband once out of the
way ; finds in him, with misgiving, a sort of forward-
ness, as she thinks, on this one matter, as if he under-
stood her craft and despised it. He met her questions
in truth with scarce so much as contempt, with laugh-
ing counter-queries, why people needed wedding at
all? They might have found the children in the tem-
ples, or bought them, as you could buy flowers in
Athens.
Meantime Phaedra's young children draw from the
seemingly unconscious finger the marriage-ring, set it
spinning on the floor at his feet, and the staid youth
places it for a moment on his own finger for safety.
As it settles there, his step-mother, aware all the
while, suddenly presses his hand over it. He found
the ring there that night as he lay; left his bed in
the darkness, and again, for safety, put it on the finger
of the image, wedding once for all that so kindly mys-
tical mother. And still, even amid his earthly mother's
terrible misgivings, he seems to foresee a charming
career marked out before him in friendly Athens, to
the height of his desire. Grateful that he is here at
all, sharing at last so freely life's banquet, he puts him-
self for a moment in his old place, recalling his old
enjoyment of the pleasure of others ; feels, just then,
HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 187
no different. Yet never had life seemed so sufficing
as at this moment the meat, the drink, the drives,
the popularity as he comes and goes, even his step-
mother's false, selfish, ostentatious gifts. But she, too,
begins to feel something of the jealousy of that other
divine, would-be mistress, and by way of a last effort
to bring him to a better mind in regard to them both,
conducts him (immeasurable privilege !) to her own
private chapel.
You could .hardly tell where the apartments of the
adulteress ended and that of the divine courtesan
began. Haunts of her long, indolent, self-pleasing
nights and days, they presented everywhere the im-
press of Phasdra's luxurious humour. A peculiar glow,
such as he had never before seen, like heady lamp-
light, or sunshine to some sleeper in a delirious dream,
hung upon, clung to, the bold, naked, shameful image-
ries, as his step-mother trimmed the lamps, drew forth
her sickly perfumes, clad afresh in piquant change of
raiment the almost formless goddess crouching there
in her unclean shrine or stye, set at last her foolish
wheel in motion to a low chant, holding him by the
wrist, keeping close all the while, as if to catch some
germ of consent in his indifferent words.
And little by little he perceives that all this is for
him the incense, the dizzy wheel, the shreds of stuif
188 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
cut secretly from his sleeve, the sweetened cup he
drank at her offer, unavailingly ; and yes ! his own
features surely, in pallid wax. With a gasp of flighty
laughter she ventures to point the thing out to him,
full as he is at last of visible, irrepressible dislike. Ah !
it was that very reluctance that chiefly stirred her.
Healthily white and red, he had a marvellous air of
discretion about him, as of one never to be caught
unaware, as if he never could be anything but like
water from the rock, or the wild flowers .of the morn-
ing, or the beams of the morning star turned to human
flesh. It was the self-possession of this happy mind,
the purity of this virgin body, she would fain have per-
turbed, as a pledge to herself of her own gaudy claim
to supremacy. King Theseus, as she knew, had had
at least two earlier loves ; for once she would be a first
love ; felt at moments that with this one passion once
indulged, it might be happiness thereafter to remain
chaste for ever. And then, by accident, yet surely
reading indifference in his manner of accepting her
gifts, she is ready again for contemptuous, open battle.
Is he indeed but a child still, this nursling of the for-
bidding Amazon, of that Amazonian goddess to be
a child always? or a wily priest rather, skilfully cir-
cumventing her sorceries, with mystic precautions of
his own? In truth, there is something of the priestly
HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 189
character in this impassible discretion, reminding her
of his alleged intimacy with the rival goddess, and
redoubling her curiosity, her fondness. Phsedra, love-
sick, feverish, in bodily sickness at last, raves of the
cool woods, the chase, the steeds of Hippolytus, her
thoughts running madly on what she fancies to be his
secret business ; with a storm of abject tears, foresee-
ing in one moment of recoil the weary tale of years to
come, star-stricken as she declares, she dared at last
to confess her longing to already half-suspicious attend-
ants; and, awake one morning to find Hippolytus
there kindly at her bidding, drove him openly forth
in a tempest of insulting speech. There was a mor-
dent there, like the menace of misfortune to come, in
which the injured goddess also was invited to concur.
What words ! what terrible words ! following, clinging
to him, like acrid fire upon his bare flesh, as he hasted
from Phaedra's house, thrust out at last, his vesture
remaining in her hands. The husband returning sud-
denly, she tells him a false story of violence to her
bed, and is believed.
King Theseus, all his accumulated store of suspi-
cion and dislike turning now to active hatred, flung
away readily upon him, bewildered, unheard, one of
three precious curses (some mystery of wasting sick-
ness therein) with which Poseidon had indulged him.
190 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
It seemed sad that one so young must call for justice,
precariously, upon the gods, the dead, the very walls !
Admiring youth dared hardly bid farewell to their late
comrade ; are generous, at most, in stolen, sympa-
thetic glances towards the fallen star. At home, veiled
once again in that ancient twilight world, his mother,
fearing solely for what he may suffer by the departure
of that so brief prosperity, enlarged as it had been,
even so, by his grateful taking of it, is reassured,
delighted, happy once more at the visible proof of
his happiness, his invincible happiness. Duly he
returned to Athens, early astir, for the last time, to
restore the forfeited gifts, drove back his gaily painted
chariot to leave there behind him, actually enjoying
the drive, going home on foot poorer than ever. He
takes again to his former modes of life, a little less to
the horses, a little more to the old studies, the strange,
secret history of his favourite goddess, wronged
surely ! somehow, she too, as powerless to help him ;
till he lay sick at last, battling one morning, unaware
of his mother's presence, with the feverish creations
of the brain ; the giddy, foolish wheel, the foolish
song, of Phaedra's chapel, spinning there with his heart
bound thereto. " The curses of my progenitors are
come upon me !" he cries. "And yet, why so? guilt-
less as I am of evil." His wholesome religion seem-
HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 191
ing to turn against him now, the trees, the streams,
the very rocks, swoon into living creatures, swarming
around the goddess who has lost her grave quietness.
He finds solicitation, and recoils, in the wind, in the
sounds of the rain ; till at length delirium itself finds
a note of returning health. The feverish wood-ways
of his fancy open unexpectedly upon wide currents
of air, lulling him to sleep ; and the conflict ending
suddenly altogether at its sharpest, he lay in the early
light motionless among the pillows, his mother stand-
ing by, as she thought, to see him die. As if for the
last time, she presses on him the things he had liked
best in that eating and drinking she had found so
beautiful. The eyes, the eyelids are big with sorrow ;
and, as he understands again, making an effort for
her sake, the healthy light returns into his ; a hand
seizes hers gratefully, and a slow convalescence be-
gins, the happiest period in the wild mother's life.
When he longed for flowers for the goddess, she went
a toilsome journey to seek them, growing close, after
long neglect, wholesome and firm on their tall stalks.
The singing she had longed for so despairingly hovers
gaily once more within the chapel and around the
house.
At the crisis of that strange illness she had sup-
posed her long forebodings about to be realised at
192 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
last ; but upon his recovery feared no more, assured
herself that the curses of the father, the step-mother,
the concurrent ill-will of that angry goddess, have
done their utmost; he will outlive her; a few years
hence put her to a rest surely welcome. Her mis-
givings, arising always out of the actual spectacle of
his profound happiness, seemed at an end in this
meek bliss, the more as she observed that it was
a shade less unconscious than of old. And almost
suddenly he found the strength, the heart, in him, to
try his fortune again with the old chariot ; and those
still unsatisfied curses, in truth, going on either side
of him like living creatures unseen, legend tells briefly
how, a competitor for pity with Adonis, and Icarus,
and Hyacinth, and other doomed creatures of imma-
ture radiance in all story to come, he set forth joyously
for the chariot- races, not of Athens, but of Trcezen,
her rival. Once more he wins the prize ; he says
good-bye to admiring friends anxious to entertain
him, and by night starts off homewards, as of old,
like a child, returning quickly through the solitude
in which he had never lacked company, and was now
to die. Through all the perils of darkness he had
guided the chariot safely along the curved shore ; the
dawn was come, and a little breeze astir, as the grey
level spaces parted delicately into white and blue,
HIPPOLYTUS VEILED 193
when in a moment an earthquake, or Poseidon the
earth-shaker himself, or angry Aphrodite awake from
the deep betimes, rent the tranquil surface ; a great
wave leapt suddenly into the placid distance of the
Attic shore, and was surging here to the very necks
of the plunging horses, a moment since enjoying so
pleasantly with him the caress of the morning air, but
now, wholly forgetful of their old affectionate habit
of obedience, dragging their leader headlong over the
rough pavements. Evening and the dawn might seem
to have met on that hapless day through which they
drew him home entangled in the trappings of the
chariot that had been his ruin, till he lay at length,
grey and haggard, at the rest he had longed for dimly
amid the buffeting of those murderous stones, his
mother watching impassibly, sunk at once into the
condition she had so long anticipated.
Later legend breaks a supernatural light over that
great desolation, and would fain relieve the reader
by introducing the kindly Asclepius, who presently
restores the youth to life, not, however, in the old
form or under familiar conditions. To her, surely,
counting the wounds, the disfigurements, telling over
the pains which had shot through that dear head
now insensible to her touch among the pillows under
194 HIPPOLYTUS VEILED
the harsh broad daylight, that would have been no
more of a solace than if, according to the fancy of
Ovid, he flourished still, a little deity, but under a new
name and veiled now in old age, in the haunted grove
of Aricia, far from his old Attic home, in a land which
had never seen him as he was.
THE BEGINNINGS OF GREEK
SCULPTURE
I. THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART
THE extant remains of Greek sculpture, though but
a fragment of what the Greek sculptors produced, are,
both in number and in excellence, in their fitness,
therefore, to represent the whole of which they were
a part, quite out of proportion to what has come
down to us of Greek painting, and all those minor
crafts which, in the Greek workshop, as at all
periods when the arts have been really vigorous,
were closely connected with the highest imaginative
work. Greek painting is represented to us only by
its distant reflexion on the walls of the buried
houses of Pompeii, and the designs of subordinate
though exquisite craftsmen on the vases. Of wrought
metal, partly through the inherent usefulness of its
material, tempting ignorant persons into whose hands
it may fall to re-fashion it, we have comparatively
195
196 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
little; while, in consequence of the perishableness
of their material, nothing remains of the curious
wood-work, the carved "ivory, the embroidery and
coloured stuffs, on which the Greeks set much store
of that whole system of refined artisanship, dif-
fused, like a general atmosphere of beauty and rich-
ness, around the more exalted creations of Greek
sculpture. What we possess, then, of that highest
Greek sculpture is presented to us in a sort of three-
fold isolation; isolation, first of all, from the con-
comitant arts the frieze of the Parthenon without
the metal bridles on the horses, for which the holes
in the marble remain; isolation, secondly, from the
architectural group of which, with most careful esti-
mate of distance and point of observation, that frieze,
for instance, was designed to be a part; isolation,
thirdly, from the clear Greek skies, the poetical
Greek life, in our modern galleries. And if one
here or there, in looking at these things, bethinks
himself of the required substitution; if he endeav-
ours mentally to throw them back into that proper
atmosphere, through which alone they can exercise
over us all the magic by which they charmed their
original spectators, the effort is not always a suc-
cessful one, within the grey walls of the Louvre or
the British Museum.
THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 197
And the circumstance that Greek sculpture is
presented to us in such falsifying isolation from the
work of the weaver, the carpenter, and the gold-
smith, has encouraged a manner of regarding it too
little sensuous. Approaching it with full informa-
tion concerning what may be called the inner life of
the Greeks, their modes of thought and sentiment
amply recorded in the writings of the Greek poets
and philosophers, but with no lively impressions of
that mere craftsman's world of which so little has
remained, students of antiquity have for the most
part interpreted the creations of Greek sculpture,
rather as elements in a sequence of abstract ideas,
as embodiments, in a sort of petrified language, of
pure thoughts, and as interesting mainly in con-
nexion with the development of Greek intellect,
than as elements of a sequence in the material order,
as results of a designed and skilful dealing of accom-
plished fingers with precious forms of matter for the
delight of the eyes. Greek sculpture has come to be
regarded as the product of a peculiarly limited art,
dealing with a specially abstracted range of subjects;
and the Greek sculptor as a workman almost exclu-
sively intellectual, having only a sort of accidental
connexion with the material in which his thought
was expressed. He is fancied to have been dis-
198 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
dainful of such matters as the mere tone, the fibre
or texture, of his marble or cedar- wood, of that just
perceptible yellowness, for instance, in the ivory-like
surface of the Venus of Melos; as being occupied
only with forms as abstract almost as the conceptions
of philosophy, and translateable it might be supposed
into any material a habit of regarding him still
further encouraged by the modern sculptor's usage
of employing merely mechanical labour in the actual
working of the stone.
The works of the highest Greek sculpture are
indeed intellectualised, if we may say so, to the
utmost degree ; the human figures which they present
to us seem actually to conceive thoughts; in them,
that profoundly reasonable spirit of design which is
traceable in Greek art, continuously and increasingly,
upwards from its simplest products, the oil-vessel
or the urn, reaches its perfection. Yet, though the
most abstract and intellectualised of sensuous objects,
they are still sensuous and material, addressing them-
selves, in the first instance, not to the purely reflec-
tive faculty, but to the eye; and a complete criticism
must have approached them from both sides from
the side of the intelligence indeed, towards which
they rank as great thoughts come down into the
stone; but from the sensuous side also, towards
THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 199
which they rank as the most perfect results of that
pure skill of hand, of which the Venus of Melos,
we may say, is the highest example, and the little
polished pitcher or lamp, also perfect in its way,
perhaps the lowest.
To pass by the purely visible side of these things,
then, is not only to miss a refining pleasure, but to
mistake altogether the medium in which the most
intellectual of the creations of Greek art, the ^Egi-
netan or the Elgin marbles, for instance, were actually
produced; even these having, in their origin, de-
pended for much of their charm on the mere mate-
rial in which they were executed; and the whole
black and grey world of extant antique sculpture
needing to be translated back into ivory and gold,
if we would feel the excitement which the Greek
seems to have felt in the presence of these objects.
To have this really Greek sense of Greek sculpture,
it is necessary to connect it, indeed, with the inner
life of the Greek world, its thought and sentiment,
on the one hand; but on the other hand to connect
it, also, with the minor works of price, intaglios,
coins, vases; with that whole system of material
refinement and beauty in the outer Greek life, which
these minor works represent to us; and it is with
these, as far as possible, that we must seek to relieve
200 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
the air of our galleries and museums of their too
intellectual greyness. Greek sculpture could not
have been precisely a cold thing; and, whatever a
colour-blind school may say, pure thoughts have
their coldness, a coldness which has sometimes
repelled from Greek sculpture, with its unsuspected
fund of passion and energy in material form, those
who cared much, and with much insight, for a
similar passion and energy in the coloured world of
Italian painting.
Theoretically, then, we need that world of the
minor arts as a complementary background for the
higher and more austere Greek sculpture; and, as
matter of fact, it is just with such a world with a
period of refined and exquisite tectonics, (as the
Greeks called all crafts strictly subordinate to archi-
tecture,) that Greek art actually begins, in what is
called the Heroic Age, that earliest, undefined period
of Greek civilisation, the beginning of which cannot
be dated, and which reaches down to the first
Olympiad, about the year 776 B.C. Of this period
we possess, indeed, no direct history, and but few
actual monuments, great or small; but as to its
whole character and outward local colouring, for its
art, as for its politics and religion, Homer may be
regarded as an authority. The Iliad and the
THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 201
Odyssey, the earliest pictures of that heroic life,
represent it as already delighting itself in the
application of precious material and skilful handi-
work to personal and domestic adornment, to the
refining and beautifying of the entire outward
aspect of life; above all, in the lavish application
of very graceful metal-work to such purposes. And
this representation is borne out by what little we
possess of its actual remains, and by all we can
infer. Mixed, of course, with mere fable, as a
description of the heroic age, the picture which
Homer presents to us, deprived of its supernatural
adjuncts, becomes continuously more and more realis-
able as the actual condition of early art, when we
emerge gradually into historical time, and find our-
selves at last among dateable works and real schools
or masters.
The history of Greek art, then, begins, as some
have fancied general history to begin, in a golden
age, but in an age, so to speak, of real gold, the
period of those first twisters and hammerers of the
precious metals men who had already discovered
the flexibility of silver and the ductility of gold, the
capacity of both for infinite delicacy of handling,
and who enjoyed, with complete freshness, a sense
of beauty and fitness in their work a period of
202 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
which that flower of gold on a silver stalk, picked
up lately in one of the graves at Mycenae, or the
legendary golden honeycomb of Daedalus, might
serve as the symbol. The heroic age of Greek art
is the age of the hero as smith.
There are in Homer two famous descriptive
passages in which this delight in curious metal-work
is very prominent; the description in the Iliad of
the shield of Achilles, 1 and the description of the
house of Alcinous in the Odyssey. 2 The shield of
Achilles is part of the suit of armour which
Hephaestus makes for him at the request of Thetis;
and it is wrought of variously coloured metals,
woven into a great circular composition in relief,
representing the world and the life in it. The
various activities of man are recorded in this descrip-
tion in a series of idyllic incidents with such com-
plete freshness, liveliness, and variety, that the reader
from time to time may well forget himself, and fancy
he is reading a mere description of the incidents
of actual life. We peep into a little Greek town,
and see in dainty miniature the bride coming from
her chamber with torch-bearers and dancers, the
people gazing from their doors, a quarrel between
l//. xviii. 468-608. 2 Od. vii. 37-132.
THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 203
two persons in the market-place, the assembly of the
elders to decide upon it. In another quartering is
the spectacle of a city besieged, the walls defended
by the old men, while the soldiers have stolen out
and are lying in ambush. There is a fight on the
river-bank; Ares and Athene, conspicuous in gold,
and marked as divine persons by a scale larger than
that of their followers, lead the host. The strange,
mythical images of Ker, Eris, and Kudoimos mingle
in the crowd. A third space upon the shield depicts
the incidents of peaceful labour the ploughshare
passing through the field, of enamelled black metal
behind it, and golden before; the cup of mead held
out to the ploughman when he reaches the end of
the furrow; the reapers with their sheaves; the king
standing in silent pleasure among them, intent upon
his staff. There are the labourers in the vineyard
in minutest detail; stakes of silver on which the
vines hang; the dark trench about it, and one path-
way through the midst;, the whole complete and
distinct, in variously coloured metal. All things
and living creatures are in their places the cattle
coming to water to the sound of the herdsman's
pipe, various music, the rushes by the water-side,
a lion-hunt with dogs, the pastures among the hills,
a dance, the fair dresses of the male and female
204 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
dancers, the former adorned with swords, the latter
with crowns. It is an image of ancient life, its
pleasure and business. For the centre, as in some
quaint chart of the heavens, are the earth and the
sun, the moon and constellations; and to close in
all, right round, like a frame to the picture, the
great river Oceanus, forming the rim of the shield,
in some metal of dark blue.
Still more fascinating, perhaps, because more com-
pletely realisable by the fancy as an actual thing
realisable as a delightful place to pass time in is
the description of the palace of Alcinous in the
little island town of the Phasacians, to which we are
introduced in all the liveliness and sparkle of the
morning, as real as something seen last summer on
the sea-coast; although, appropriately, Ulysses meets
a goddess, like a young girl carrying a pitcher, on
his way up from the sea. Below the steep walls
of the town, two projecting jetties allow a narrow
passage into a haven of stone for the ships, into
which the passer-by may look down, as they lie
moored below the roadway. In the midst is the
king's house, all glittering, again, with curiously
wrought metal; its brightness is "as the brightness
of the sun or of the moon." The heart of Ulysses
beats quickly when he sees it standing amid planta-
THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 205
tions ingeniously watered, its floor and walls of
brass throughout, with continuous cornice of dark
iron; the doors are of gold, the door-posts and
lintels of silver, the handles, again, of gold
"The walls were massy brass; the cornice high
Blue metals crowned in colours of the sky;
Rich plates of gold the folding-doors incase;
The pillars silver on a brazen base;
Silver the lintels deep-projecting o'er;
And gold the ringlets that command the door."
Dogs of the same precious metals keep watch on
either side, like the lions over the old gateway of
Mycenae, or the gigantic, human-headed bulls at the
entrance of an Assyrian palace. Within doors the
burning lights at supper-time are supported in
the hands of golden images of boys, while the guests
recline on a couch running all along the wall,
covered with peculiarly sumptuous women's work.
From these two glittering descriptions manifestly
something must be deducted; we are in wonder-
land, and among supernatural or magical conditions.
But the forging of the shield and the wonderful
house of Alcinous are no merely incongruous episodes
in Homer, but the consummation of what is always
characteristic of him, a constant preoccupation,
namely, with every form of lovely craftsmanship,
206 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
resting on all things, as he says, like the shining of
the sun. We seem to pass, in reading him, through
the treasures of some royal collection; in him the
presentation of almost every aspect of life is beau-
tified by the work of cunning hands. The thrones,
coffers, couches of curious carpentry, are studded
with bossy ornaments of precious metal effectively
disposed, or inlaid with stained ivory, or blue cyanus,
or amber, or pale amber-like gold; the surfaces of
the stone conduits, the sea-walls, the public washing-
troughs, the ramparts on which the weary soldiers
rest themselves when returned to Troy, are fair and
smooth; all the fine qualities, in colour and texture,
of woven stuff are carefully noted the fineness,
closeness, softness, pliancy, gloss, the whiteness or
nectar-like tints in which the weaver delights to
work; to weave the sea-purple threads is the appro-
priate function of queens and noble women. All
the Homeric shields are more or less ornamented
with variously coloured metal, terrible sometimes,
like Leonardo's, with some monster or grotesque.
The numerous sorts of cups are bossed with golden
studs, or have handles wrought with figures, of doves,
for instance. The great brazen cauldrons bear an
epithet which means flowery. The trappings of the
horses, the various parts of the chariots, are formed
THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 207
of various metals. The women's ornaments and the
instruments of their toilet are described
ir6piras re yvaiAirrds ffi \IKCIS, icd\VKds re ical
the golden vials for unguents. Use and beauty
are still undivided; all that men's hands are set to
make has still a fascination alike for workmen and
spectators. For such dainty splendour Troy, indeed,
is especially conspicuous. But then Homer's Trojans
are essentially Greeks Greeks of Asia; and Troy,
though more advanced in all elements of civilisation,
is no real contrast to the western shore of the
^Egean. It is no barbaric world that we see, but
the sort of world, we may think, that would have
charmed alsp our comparatively jaded sensibilities,
with just that quaint simplicity which we too enjoy
in its productions; above all, in its wrought metal,
which loses perhaps more than any other sort of work
by becoming mechanical. The metal-work which
Homer describes in such variety* is all hammer-work,
all the joinings being effected by pins or riveting.
That is just the sort of metal- work which, in a certain
naivete and vigour, is still of all work the most ex-
pressive of actual contact with dexterous fingers; one
seems to trace in it, on every particle of the partially
resisting material, the touch and play of the shaping
208 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
instruments, in highly trained hands, under the guid-
ance of exquisitely disciplined senses that cachet,
or seal of nearness to the workman's hand, which is
the special charm of all good metal-work, of early
metal-work in particular.
Such descriptions, however, it may be said, are
mere poetical ornament, of no value in helping us
to define the character of an age. But what is
peculiar in these Homeric descriptions, what dis-
tinguishes them . from others at first sight similar,
is a sort of internal evidence they present of a certain
degree of reality, signs in them of an imagination
stirred by surprise at the spectacle of real works
of art. Such minute, delighted, loving description
of details of ornament, such following out of the
ways in which brass, gold, silver, or paler gold,
go into the chariots and armour and women's dress,
or cling to the walls the enthusiasm of the manner
is the warrant of a certain amount of truth in all
that. The .Greek poet describes these things with
the same vividness and freshness, the same kind of
fondness, with which other poets speak of flowers;
speaking of them poetically, indeed, but with that
higher sort of poetry which seems full of the lively
impression of delightful things recently seen. Genu-
ine poetry, it is true, is always naturally sympathetic
THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 209
with all beautiful sensible things and qualities. But
with how many poets would not this constant intru-
sion of material ornament have produced a tawdry
effect! The metal would all be tarnished and the
edges blurred. And this is because it is not always
that the products of even exquisite tectonics can ex-
cite or refine the aesthetic sense. Now it is proba-
ble that the objects of oriental art, the imitations of
it at home, in which for Homer this actual world of
art must have consisted, reached him in a quantity,
and with a novelty, just sufficient to warm and stim-
ulate without surfeiting the imagination; it is an
exotic thing of which he sees just enough and not too
much. The shield of Achilles, the house of Alcinous,
are like dreams indeed, but this sort of dreaming
winds continuously through the entire Iliad and
Odyssey a child's dream after a day of real, fresh
impressions from things themselves, in which all
those floating impressions re-set themselves. He is
as pleased in touching and looking at those objects
as his own heroes; their gleaming aspect brightens
all he says, and has taken hold, one might think, of
his language, his very vocabulary becoming chrys-
elephantine. Homer's artistic descriptions, though
enlarged by fancy, are not wholly imaginary, and the
extant remains of monuments of the earliest histori-
210 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
cal age are like lingering relics of that dream in a
tamer but real world.
The art of the heroic age, then, as represented in
Homer, connects itself, on the one side, with those
fabulous jewels so prominent in mythological story,
and entwined sometimes so oddly in its representa-
tion of human fortunes the necklace of Eriphyle,
the necklace of Helen, which Menelaus, it was said,
offered at Delphi to Athene Pronoea on the eve of
his expedition against Troy mythical objects,
indeed, but which yet bear witness even thus early
to the aesthetic susceptibility of the Greek temper.
But, on the other hand, the art of the heroic age
connects itself also' with the actual early beginnings
of artistic production. There are touches of reality,
for instance, in Homer's incidental notices of its
instruments and processes; especially as regards the
working of metal. He goes already to the potter's
wheel for familiar, life-like illustration. In describ-
ing artistic wood-work he distinguishes various stages
of work; we see clearly the instruments for turning
and boring, such as the old-fashioned drill-borer,
whirled round with a string; he mentions the names
of two artists, the one of an actual workman, the
other of a craft turned into a proper name stray
relics, accidentally reserved, of a world, as we may
THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 211
believe, of such wide and varied activity. The forge
of Hephaestus is a true forge ; the magic tripods on
which he is at work are really put together by con-
ceivable processes, known in early times. Composi-
tions in relief similar to those which he describes
were actually made out of thin metal plates cut into
a convenient shape, and then beaten into the designed
form by the hammer over a wooden model. These
reliefs were then fastened to a differently coloured
metal background or base, with nails or rivets, for
there is no soldering of metals as yet. To this pro-
cess the ancients gave the name of empcestik, such
embossing being still, in our own time, a beautiful
form of metal-work.
Even in the marvellous shield there are other and
indirect notes of reality. In speaking of the shield
of Achilles, I departed intentionally from the order
in which the subjects of the relief are actually intro-
duced in the Iliad, because, just then, I wished the
reader to receive the full effect of the variety and
elaborateness of the composition, as a representation
or picture of the whole of ancient life embraced
within the circumference of a shield. But in the
order in which Homer actually describes those epi-
sodes he is following the method of a very practicable
form of composition, and is throughout much closer
212 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
than we might at first sight suppose to the ancient
armourer's proceedings. The shield is formed of
five superimposed plates of different metals, each
plate of smaller diameter than the one immediately
below it, their flat margins showing thus as four con-
centric stripes or rings of metal, around a sort of boss
in the centre, five metals thick, and the outermost
circle or ring being the thinnest. To this arrange-
ment the order of Homer's description corresponds.
The earth and the heavenly bodies are upon this boss
in the centre, like a little distant heaven hung above
the broad world, and from this Homer works out,
round and round, to the river Oceanus, which forms
the border of the whole; the subjects answering to,
or supporting each other, in a, sort of heraldic order
the city at peace set over against the city besieged
spring, summer, and autumn balancing each other
quite congruously with a certain heraldic turn
common in contemporary Assyrian art, which de-
lights in this sort of conventional spacing out of its
various subjects, and especially with some extant
metal chargers of Assyrian work, which, like some
of the earliest Greek vases with their painted plants
and flowers conventionally arranged, illustrate in
their humble measure such heraldic grouping.
The description of the shield of Hercules, attrib-
THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 213
uted to Hesiod, is probably an imitation of Homer,
and, notwithstanding some fine mythological imper-
sonations which it contains, an imitation less admi-
rable than the original. Of painting there are in
Homer no certain indications, and it is consistent
with the later date of the imitator that we may per-
haps discern in his composition a sign that what he
had actually seen was a painted shield, in the pre-
dominance in it, as compared with the Homeric
description, of effects of colour over effects of form;
Homer delighting in ingenious devices for fastening
the metal, and the supposed Hesiod rather in what
seem like triumphs of heraldic colouring; though the
latter also delights in effects of mingled metals, of
mingled gold and silver especially silver figures
with dresses of gold, silver centaurs with pine-trees .
of gold for staves in their hands. Still, like the
shield of Achilles, this too we mus-t conceive as
formed of concentric plates of metal ; and here again
the spacing is still more elaborately carried out, nar-
rower intermediate rings being apparently introduced
between the broader ones, with figures in rapid, hori-
zontal, unbroken motion, carrying the eye right round
the shield, in contrast with the repose of the down-
ward or inward movement of the subjects which
divide the larger spaces; here too with certain analo-
214 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
gies in the rows of animals to the designs on the
earliest vases.
In Hesiod then, as in Homer, there are undesigned
notes of correspondence between the partly mythical
ornaments imaginatively enlarged of the heroic age,
and a world of actual handicrafts. In the shield of
Hercules another marvellous detail is added in the
image of Perseus, very daintily described as hovering
in some wonderful way, as if really borne up by
wings, above the surface. And that curious, haunt-
ing sense of magic in art, which comes out over and
over again in Homer in the golden maids, for in-
stance, who assist Hephaestus in his work, and simi-
lar details which seem at first sight to destroy the
credibility of the whole picture, and make of it a
mere wonder-land is itself also, rightly understood,
a testimony to a real excellence in the art of Homer's
time. It is sometimes said that works of art held to
be miraculous are always of an inferior kind; but at
least it was not among those who thought them infe-
rior that the belief in their miraculous power began.
If the golden images move like living creatures, and
the armour of Achilles, so wonderfully made, lifts
him like wings, this again is because the imagination
of Homer is really under the stimulus of delightful
artistic objects actually seen. Only those to whom
THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 215
such artistic objects manifest themselves through real
and powerful impressions of their wonderful qualities,
can invest them with properties magical or miracu-
lous.
I said that the inherent usefulness of the material
of metal-work makes the destruction of its acquired
form almost certain, if it comes into the possession
of people either barbarous or careless of the work of
a past time. Greek art is for us, in all its stages, a
fragment only; in each of them it is necessary, in a
somewhat visionary manner, to fill up empty spaces,
and more or less make substitution; and of the finer
work of the heroic age, thus dimly discerned as an
actual thing, we had at least till recently almost noth-
ing. Two plates of bronze, a few rusty nails, and
certain rows of holes in the inner surface of the walls
of the " treasury " of Mycenae, were the sole repre-
sentatives of that favourite device of primitive Greek
art, the lining of stone walls with burnished metal,
of which the house of Alcinous in the Odyssey is the
ideal picture, and the temple of Pallas of the Brazen
House at Sparta, adorned in the interior with a coat-
ing of reliefs in metal, a later, historical example.
Of the heroic or so-called Cyclopean architecture,
that "treasury," a building so imposing that Pausa-
nias thought it worthy to rank with the Pyramids,
216 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
is a sufficient illustration. Treasury, or tomb, or
both, (the selfish dead, perhaps, being supposed still
to find enjoyment in the costly armour, goblets, and
mirrors laid up there,) this dome-shaped building,
formed of concentric rings of stones gradually dimin-
ishing to a coping-stone at the top, may stand as the
representative of some similar buildings in other
parts of Greece, and of many others in a similar kind
of architecture elsewhere, constructed of large many-
sided blocks of stone, fitted carefully together with-
out the aid of cement, and remaining in their places
by reciprocal resistance. Characteristic of it is the
general tendency to use vast blocks of stone for the
jambs and lintels of doors, for instance, and in the
construction of gable-shaped passages; two rows of
such stones being made to rest against each other at
an acute angle, within the thickness of the walls.
So vast and rude, fretted by the action of nearly
three thousand years, the fragments of this architect-
ure may often seem, at first sight, like works of
nature. At Argos, Tiryns, Mycenae, the skeleton of
the old architecture is more complete. At Mycenae
the gateway of the acropolis is still standing with its
two well-known sculptured lions immemorial and
almost unique monument of primitive Greek sculpt-
ure supporting, herald-wise, a symbolical pillar on
THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 217
the vast, triangular, pedimental stone above. The
heads are gone, having been fashioned possibly in
metal by workmen from the East. On what may be
called the facade, remains are still discernible of
inlaid work in coloured stone, and within the gate-
way, on the smooth slabs of the pavement, the wheel-
ruts are still visible. Connect them with those metal
war-chariots in Homer, and you may see in fancy
the whole grandiose character of the place, as it may
really have been. Shut within the narrow enclosure
of these shadowy citadels were the palaces of the
kings, with all that intimacy which we may some-
times suppose to have been alien from the open-air
Greek life, admitting, doubtless, below the cover of
their rough walls, many of those refinements of
princely life which the middle age found possible
in such places, and of which the impression is so
fascinating in Homer's description, for instance, of
the house of Ulysses, or of Menelaus at Sparta.
Rough and frowning without, these old chdteaux of
the Argive kings were delicate within with a decora-
tion almost as dainty and fine as the network of weed
and flower that now covers their ruins, and of the
delicacy of which, as I said, that golden flower on
its silver stalk, or the golden honeycomb of Daedalus,
might be taken as representative. In these metal-
218 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
like structures of self-supporting polygons, locked so
firmly and impenetrably together, with the whole
mystery of the reasonableness of the arch implicitly
within them, there is evidence of a complete artistic
command over weight in stone, 'and an understanding
of the "law of weight." But over weight only; the
ornament still seems to be not strictly architectural,
but, according to the notices of Homer, tectonic,
borrowed from the sister arts, above all from the art
of the metal-workers, to whom those spaces of the
building are left which a later age fills with painting,
or relief in stone. The skill of the Asiatic comes
to adorn this rough native building; and it is a late,
elaborate, somewhat voluptuous skill, we may under-
stand, illustrated by the luxury of that Asiatic cham-
ber of Paris, less like that of a warrior than of one
going to the dance. Coupled with the vastness of
the architectural works which actually remain, such
descriptions as that in Homer of the chamber of
Paris and the house of Alcinous furnish forth a pict-
ure of that early period the tyrants' age, the age
of the acropoleis, the period of great dynasties with
claims to "divine right," and in many instances at
least with all the culture of their time. The vast
buildings make us sigh at the thought of wasted
human labour, though there is a public usefulness
THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 219
too in some of these designs, such as the draining of
the Copaic lake, to which the backs of the people are
bent whether they will or not. For the princes there
is much of that selfish personal luxury which is a con-
stant trait of feudalism in all ages. For the people,
scattered over the country, at their agricultural labour,
or gathered in small hamlets, there is some enjoy-
ment, perhaps, of the aspect of that splendour, of
the bright warriors on the heights a certain share
of the nobler pride of the tyrants themselves in those
tombs and dwellings. Some surmise, also, there
seems to have been, of the "curse" of gold, with a
dim, lurking suspicion of curious facilities for cruelty
in the command over those skilful artificers in metal
some ingenious rack or bull "to pinch and peel "
the tradition of which, not unlike the modern
Jacques Bonhomme's shudder at the old ruined French
donjon or bastille, haunts, generations afterwards,
the ruins of those "labyrinths" of stone, where the
old tyrants had their pleasures. For it is a mistake
to suppose that that wistful sense of eeriness in ruined
buildings, to which most of us are susceptible, is an
exclusively modern feeling. The name Cyclopean,
attached to those desolate remains of buildings which
were older than Greek history itself, attests their
romantic influence over the fancy of the people who
220
thus attributed them to a superhuman strength and
skill. And the Cyclopes, like all the early mythical
names of artists, have this note of reality, that they
are names not of individuals but of classes, the
guilds or companies of workmen in which a certain
craft was imparted and transmitted. The Dactyli,
the Fingers, are the first workers in iron; the savage
Chalybes in Scythia the first smelters; actual names
are given to the old, fabled Telchines Chalkon,
Argyron, Chryson workers in brass, silver, and
gold, respectively. The tradition of their activity
haunts the several regions where those metals were
found. They make the trident of Poseidon; but
then Poseidon's trident is a real fisherman's instru-
ment, the tunny-fork. They are credited, notwith-
standing, with an evil sorcery, unfriendly to men, as
poor humanity remembered the makers of chains,
locks, Procrustean beds; and, as becomes this dark,
recondite mine and metal work, the traditions about
them are gloomy and grotesque, confusing mortal
workmen with demon guilds.
To this view of the heroic age of Greek art as
being, so to speak, an age of real gold, an age de-
lighting itself in precious material and exquisite
handiwork in all tectonic crafts, the recent extraordi-
nary discoveries at Troy and Mycenae are, on any
THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 221
plausible theory of their date and origin, a witness.
The aesthetic critic needs always to be on his guard
against the confusion of mere curiosity or antiquity
with beauty in art. Among the objects discovered
at Troy mere curiosities, some of them, however
interesting and instructive the so-called royal cup
of Priam, in solid gold, two-handled and double-
lipped, (the smaller lip designed for the host and his
libation, the larger for the guest,) has, in the very
simplicity of its design, the grace of the economy
with which it exactly fulfils its purpose, a positive
beauty, an absolute value for the aesthetic sense,
while strange and new enough, if it really settles at
last a much-debated expression of Homer; while the
"diadem," with its twisted chains and flowers of pale
gold, shows that those profuse golden fringes, waving
so comely as he moved, which Hephaestus wrought
for the helmet of Achilles, were really within the
compass of early Greek art.
And the story of the excavations at Mycenae reads
more like some well-devised chapter of fiction than
a record of sober facts. Here, those sanguine, half-
childish dreams of buried treasure discovered in
dead men's graves, which seem to have a charm for
every one, are more than fulfilled in the spectacle of
those antique kings, lying in the splendour of their
222 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
crowns and breast-plates of embossed plate of gold;
their swords, studded with golden imagery, at their
sides, as in some feudal monument; their very faces
covered up most strangely in golden masks. The
very floor of one tomb, we read, was thick with
gold-dust the heavy gilding fallen from some per-
ished kingly vestment; in another was a downfall of
golden leaves and flowers; and, amid this profusion
of thin fine fragments, were rings, bracelets, smaller
crowns as if for children, dainty butterflies for orna-
ments of dresses, and that golden flower on a silver
stalk all of pure, soft gold, unhardened by alloy,
the delicate films of which one must touch but lightly,
yet twisted and beaten, by hand and hammer, into
wavy, spiral relief, the cuttle-fish with its long undu-
lating arms appearing frequently.
It is the very image of the old luxurious life of the
princes of the heroic age, as Homer describes it,
with the arts in service to its kingly pride. Among
the other costly objects was one representing the
head of a cow, grandly designed in gold with horns
of silver, like the horns of the moon, supposed to be
symbolical of Here, the great object of worship at
Argos. One of the interests of the study of mythol-
ogy is that it reflects the ways of life and thought of
the people who conceived it; and this religion of
THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 223
Here, the special religion of Argos, is congruous
with what has been here said as to the place of art
in the civilisation of the Argives; it is a reflexion of
that splendid and wanton old feudal life. For Here
is, in her original essence and meaning, equivalent
to Demeter the one living spirit of the earth,
divined behind the veil of all its manifold visible
energies. But in the development of a common
mythological motive the various peoples are subject
to the general limitations of their life and thought;
they can but work outward what is within them; and
the religious conceptions and usages, ultimately de-
rivable from one and the same rudimentary instinct,
are sometimes most diverse. Out of the visible,
physical energies of the earth and its system of annual
change, the old Pelasgian mind developed the person
of Demeter, mystical and profoundly aweful, yet pro-
foundly pathetic, also, in her appeal to human sym-
pathies. Out of the same original elements, the
civilisation of Argos, on the other hand, develops
the religion of Queen Here, a mere Demeter, at best,
of gaudy flower-beds, whose toilet Homer describes
with all its delicate fineries; though, characteristi-
cally, he may still allow us to detect, perhaps, some
traces of the mystical person of the earth, in the all-
pervading scent of the ambrosial unguent with which
224 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
she anoints herself, in the abundant tresses of her
hair, and in the curious variegation of her ornaments.
She has become, though with some reminiscence of
the mystical earth, a very limited human person,
wicked, angry, jealous the lady of Zeus in her
castle-sanctuary at Mycenae, in wanton dalliance
with the king, coaxing him for cruel purposes in
sweet sleep, adding artificial charms to her beauty.
Such are some of the characteristics with which
Greek art is discernible in that earliest age. Of
themselves, they almost answer the question which
next arises Whence did art come to Greece? or
was it a thing of absolutely native growth there ? So
some have decidedly maintained. Others, who lived
in an age possessing little or no knowledge of Greek
monuments anterior to the full development of art
under Pheidias, and who, in regard to the Greek
sculpture of the age of Pheidias, were like people
criticising Michelangelo, without knowledge of the
earlier Tuscan school of the works of Donatello
and Mino da Fiesole easily satisfied themselves
with theories of its importation ready-made from
other countries. Critics in the last century, espe-
cially, noticing some characteristics which early Greek
work has in common, indeed, with Egyptian art,
but which are common also to all such early work
THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 225
everywhere, supposed, as a matter of course, that it
came, as the Greek religion also, from Egypt that
old, immemorial, half-known birthplace of all won-
derful things. There are, it is true, authorities for
this derivation among the Greeks themselves, dazzled
as they were by the marvels of the ancient civilisa-
tion of Egypt, a civilisation so different from their
own, on the first opening of Egypt to Greek visitors.
But, in fact, that opening did not take place till the
reign of Psammetichus, about the middle of the
seventh century B.C., a relatively late date. Psam-
metichus introduced and settled Greek mercenaries
in Egypt, and, for a time, the Greeks came very close
to Egyptian life. They can hardly fail to have been
stimulated by that display of every kind of artistic
workmanship gleaming over the whole of life; they
may in turn 1 have freshened it with new motives.
And we may remark, that but for the peculiar usage
of Egypt concerning the tombs of the dead, but for
their habit of investing the last abodes of the dead
with all the appurtenances of active life, out of that
whole world of art, so various and elaborate, nothing
but the great, monumental works in stone would have
remained to ourselves. We should have experienced
in regard to it, what we actually experience too much
in our knowledge of Greek art the lack of a fitting
Q
226 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
background, in the smaller tectonic work, for its
great works in architecture, and the bolder sort of
sculpture.
But, one by one, at last, as in the medieval par-
allel, monuments illustrative of the earlier growth of
Greek art before the time of Pheidias have come to
light, and to a just appreciation. They show that
the development of Greek art had already proceeded
some way before the opening of Egypt to the Greeks,
and point, if to a foreign source at all, to oriental
rather than Egyptian influences; and the theory
which derived Greek art, with many other Greek
things, from Egypt, now hardly finds supporters. In
Greece all things are at once old and new. As, in
physical organisms, the actual particles of matter
have existed long before in other combinations; and
what is really new in a new organism is the new co-
hering force the mode of life so, in the products
of Greek civilisation, the actual elements are tracea-
ble elsewhere by antiquarians who care to trace them;
the elements, for instance, of its peculiar national
architecture. Yet all is also emphatically autochtho-
nous, as the Greeks said, new-born at home, by right
of a new, informing, combining spirit playing over
those mere elements, and touching them, above all,
with a wonderful sense of the nature and destiny of
THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 227
man the dignity of his soul and of his body so
that in all things the Greeks are as discoverers. Still,
the original and primary motive seems, in matters
of art, to have come from without; and the view to
which actual discovery and all true analogies more
and more point is that of a connexion of the origin
of Greek art, ultimately with Assyria, proximately
with Phoenicia, partly through Asia Minor, and chiefly
through Cyprus an original connexion again and
again reasserted, like a surviving trick of inheritance,
as in later times it came in contact with the civilisa-
tion of Caria and Lycia, old affinities being here
linked anew; and with a certain Asiatic tradition,
of which one representative is the Ionic style of
architecture, traceable all through Greek art an
Asiatic curiousness, or TrotKiXta, strongest in that
heroic age of which I have been speaking, and dis-
tinguishing some schools and masters in Greece more
than others; and always in appreciable distinction
from the more clearly defined and self-asserted Hel-
lenic influence. Homer himself witnesses to the
intercourse, through early, adventurous commerce,
as in the bright and animated picture with which the
history of Herodotus begins, between the Greeks and
Eastern countries. We may, perhaps, forget some-
times, thinking over the greatness of its place in the
228 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
history of civilisation, how small a country Greece
really was; how short the distances onwards, from
island to island, to the coast of Asia, so that we can
hardly make a sharp separation between Asia and
Greece, nor deny, besides great and palpable acts of
importation, all sorts of impalpable Asiatic influ-
ences, by way alike of attraction and repulsion, upon
Greek manners and taste. Homer, as we saw, was
right in making Troy essentially a Greek city, with
inhabitants superior in all culture to their kinsmen
on the Western shore, and perhaps proportionally
weaker on the practical or moral side, and with an
element of languid Ionian voluptuousness in them,
typified by the cedar and gold of the chamber of
Paris an element which the austere, more strictly
European influence of the Dorian Apollo will one
day correct in all genuine Greeks. The ^Egean,
with its islands, is, then, a bond of union, not a bar-
rier; and we must think of Greece, as has been
rightly said, as its whole continuous shore.
The characteristics of Greek art, indeed, in the
heroic age, so far as we can discern them, are those
also of Phoenician art, its delight in metal among the
rest, of metal especially as an element in architect-
ure, the covering of everything with plates of metal.
It was from Phoenicia that the costly material in
THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 229
which early Greek art delighted actually came
ivory, amber, much of the precious metals. These
the adventurous Phoenician traders brought in return
for the mussel which contained the famous purple,
in quest of which they penetrated far into all the
Greek havens. Recent discoveries present the island
of Cyprus, the great source of copper and copper-
work in ancient times, as the special mediator be-
tween the art of Phoenicia and Greece; and in some
archaic figures of Aphrodite with her dove, brought
from Cyprus and now in the British Museum ob-
jects you might think, at first sight, taken from the
niches of a French Gothic cathedral are some of
the beginnings, at least, of Greek sculpture mani-
festly under the influence of Phoenician masters.
And, again, mythology is the reflex of characteristic
facts. It is through Cyprus that the religion of
Aphrodite comes from Phoenicia to Greece. Here,
in Cyprus, she is connected with some other kindred
elements of mythological tradition, above all with
the beautiful old story of Pygmalion, in which the
thoughts of art and love are connected so closely
together. First of all, on the prows of the Phoeni-
cian ships, the tutelary image of Aphrodite Euplosa,
the protectress of sailors, comes to Cyprus to
Cythera; it is in this simplest sense that she is,
230 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
primarily, Anadyomene. And her connexion with
the arts is always an intimate one. In Cyprus her
worship is connected with an architecture, not colos-
sal, but full of dainty splendour the art of the
shrine-maker, the maker of reliquaries; the art of
the toilet, the toilet of Aphrodite; the Homeric
hymn to Aphrodite is full of all that; delight in
which we have seen to be characteristic of the true
Homer.
And now we see why Hephaestus, that crook-backed
and uncomely god, is the husband of Aphrodite.
Hephaestus is the god of fire, indeed; as fire he is
flung from heaven by Zeus; and in the marvellous
contest between Achilles and the river Xanthus in
the twenty-first book of the Iliad, he intervenes in
favour of the hero, as mere fire against water. But
he soon ceases to be thus generally representative of
the functions of fire, and becomes almost exclusively
representative of one only of its aspects, its function,
namely, in regard to early art; he becomes the patron
of smiths, bent with his labour at the forge, as people
had seen such real workers; he is the most perfectly
developed of all the Daedali, Mulcibers, or Cabeiri.
That the god of fire becomes the god of all art, archi-
tecture included, so that he makes the houses of the
gods, and is also the husband of Aphrodite, marks a
THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 231
threefold group of facts; the prominence, first, of a
peculiar kind of art in early Greece, that beautiful
metal-work, with which he is bound and bent;
secondly, the connexion of this, through Aphrodite,
with an almost wanton personal splendour; the con-
nexion, thirdly, of all this with Cyprus and Phoenicia,
whence, literally, Aphrodite comes. Hephaestus is
the " spiritual form " of the Asiatic element in Greek
art.
This, then, is the situation which the first period
of Greek art comprehends; a people whose civilisa-
tion is still young, delighting, as the young do, in
ornament, in the sensuous beauty of ivory and gold,
in all the lovely productions of skilled fingers. They
receive all this, together with the worship of Aphro-
dite, by way of Cyprus, from Phoenicia, from the
older, decrepit Eastern civilisation, itself long since
surfeited with that splendour; and they receive it in
frugal quantity, so frugal that their thoughts always
go back to the East, where there is the fulness of it,
as to a wonder-land of art. Received thus in frugal
quantity, through many generations, that world of
Asiatic tectonics stimulates the sensuous capacity in
them, accustoms the hand to produce and the eye to
appreciate the more delicately enjoyable qualities of
material things. But nowhere in all this various and
232 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
exquisite world of design is there as yet any adequate
sense of man himself, nowhere is there an insight
into or power over human form as the expression of
human soul. Yet those arts of design in which that
younger people delights have in them already, as
designed work, that spirit of reasonable order, that
expressive congruity in the adaptation of means to
ends, of which the fully developed admirableness of
human form is but the consummation a consum-
mation already anticipated in the grand and animated
figures of -epic poetry, their power of thought, their
laughter and tears. Under the hands of that younger
people, as they imitate and pass largely and freely
beyond those older craftsmen, the fire of the reasona-
ble soul will kindle, little by little, up to the Theseus
of the Parthenon and the Venus of Melos.
The ideal aim of Greek sculpture, as of all other
art, is to deal, indeed, with the deepest elements of
man's nature and destiny, to command and express
these, but to deal with them in a manner, and with
a kind of expression, as clear and graceful and sim-
ple, if it may be, as that of the Japanese flower-
painter. And what the student of Greek sculpture
has to cultivate generally in himself is the capacity
for appreciating the expression of thought in outward
form, the constant habit of associating sense with
THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 233
soul, of tracing what we call expression to its sources.
But, concurrently with this, he must also cultivate,
all along, a not less equally constant appreciation of
intelligent workmanship in work, and of design in
things designed, of the rational control of matter
everywhere. From many sources he may feed this
sense of intelligence and design in the productions
of the minor crafts, above all in the various and
exquisite art of Japan. Carrying a delicacy like that
of nature itself into every form of imitation, repro-
duction and combination leaf and flower, fish and
bird, reed and water and failing only when it
touches the sacred human form, that art of Japan is
not so unlike the earliest stages of Greek art as might
at first sight be supposed. We have here, and in no
mere fragments, the spectacle of a universal applica-
tion to the instruments of daily life of fitness and
beauty, in a temper still unsophisticated, as also un-
elevated, by the divination of the spirit of man.
And at least the student must always remember that
Greek art was throughout a much richer and warmer
thing, at once with more shadows, and more of a
dim magnificence in its surroundings, than the illus-
trations of a classical dictionary might induce him
to think. Some of the ancient temples of Greece
were as rich in aesthetic curiosities as a famous
234 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
modern museum. That Asiatic woiKiXia, that spirit
of minute and curious loveliness, follows the bolder
imaginative efforts of Greek art all through its his-
tory, and one can hardly be too careful in keeping
up the sense of this daintiness of execution through
the entire course of its development. It is not only
that the minute object of art, the tiny vase-painting,
intaglio, coin, or cameo, often reduces into the palm
of the hand lines grander than those of many a life-
sized or colossal figure; but there is also a sense in
which it may be said that the Venus of Melos, for
instance, is but a supremely well- executed object of
vertu, in the most limited sense of the term. Those
solemn images of the temple of Theseus are a perfect
embodiment of the human ideal, of the reasonable
soul and of a spiritual world; they are also the best
made things of their kind, as an urn or a cup is well
made.
A perfect, many-sided development of tectonic
crafts, a state such as the art of some nations has
ended in, becomes for the Greeks a mere opportu-
nity, a mere starting-ground for their imaginative
presentment of man, moral and inspired. A world
of material splendour, moulded clay, beaten gold,
polished stone ; the informing, reasonable soul
entering into that, reclaiming the metal and stone
THE HEROIC AGE OF GREEK ART 235
and clay, till they are as full of living breath as the
real warm body itself; the presence of those two ele-
ments is continuous throughout the fortunes of Greek
art after the heroic age, and the constant right esti-
mate of their action and reaction, from period to
period, its true philosophy.
236 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
II. THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES
Critics of Greek sculpture have often spoken of it
as if it had been always work in colourless stone,
against an almost colourless background. Its real
background, as I have tried to show, was a world of
exquisite craftsmanship, touching the minutest de-
tails of daily life with splendour and skill, in close
correspondence with a peculiarly animated develop-
ment of human existence the energetic movement
and stir of typically noble human forms, quite worth-
ily clothed amid scenery as poetic as Titian's. If
shapes of colourless stone did come into that back-
ground, it was as the undraped human form comes
into some of Titian's pictures, only to cool and sol-
emnise its splendour; the work of the Greek sculp-
tor being seldom in quite colourless stone, nor always
or chiefly in fastidiously selected marble even, but
often in richly toned metal, (this or that sculptor
preferring some special variety of the bronze he
worked in, such as the hepatizon or liver-coloured
bronze, or the bright golden alloy of Corinth,) and
in its consummate products chryselephantine, work
in gold and ivory, on a core of cedar. Pheidias, in
THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES 237
the Olympian Zeus, in the Athene of the Parthenon,
fulfils what that primitive, heroic goldsmiths' age,
dimly discerned in Homer, already delighted in;
and the celebrated work of which I have first to speak
now, and with which Greek sculpture emerges from
that half-mythical age and becomes in a certain sense
historical, is a link in that goldsmiths' or chrysele-
phantine tradition, carrying us forwards to the work
of Pheidias, backwards to the elaborate Asiatic fur-
niture of the chamber of Paris.
When Pausanias visited Olympia, towards the end
of the second century after Christ, he beheld, among
other precious objects in the temple of Here, a
splendidly wrought treasure-chest of cedar-wood, in
which, according to a legend, quick as usual with
the true human colouring, the mother of Cypselus
had hidden him, when a child, from the enmity of
her family, the Bacchiadce, then the nobility of Cor-
inth. The child, named Cypselus after this incident,
(Cypsele being a Corinthian word for chest,) became
tyrant of Corinth, and his grateful descendants, as it
was said, offered the beautiful old chest to the temple
of Here, as a memorial of his preservation. That
would have been not long after the year 625 B.C.
So much for the story which Pausanias heard but
inherent probability, and some points of detail in
238 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
his description, tend to fix the origin of the chest at
a date at least somewhat later; and as Herodotus,
telling the story of the concealment of Cypselus, does
not mention the dedication of the chest at Olympia
at all, it may perhaps have been only one of many
later imitations of antique art. But, whatever its
date, Pausanias certainly saw the thing, and has left
a long description of it, and we may trust his judg-
ment at least as to its archaic style. We have here,
then, something plainly visible at a comparatively
recent date, something quite different from those
perhaps wholly mythical objects described in Homer,
an object which seemed to so experienced an ob-
server as Pausanias an actual work of earliest Greek
art. Relatively to later Greek art, it may have
seemed to him, what the ancient bronze doors with
their Scripture histories, which we may still see in
the south transept of the cathedral of Pisa, are to
later Italian art.
Pausanias tells us nothing as to its size, nor di-
rectly as to its shape. It may, for anything he says,
have been oval, but it was probably rectangular, with
a broad front and two narrow sides, standing, as the
maker of it had designed, against the wall; for, in
enumerating the various subjects wrought upon it, in
five rows one above another, he seems to proceed,
THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES 239
beginning at the bottom on the right-hand side, along
the front from right to left, and then back again,
through the second row from left to right, and, alter-
nating thus, upwards to the last subject, at the top,
on the left-hand side.
The subjects represented, most of which had their
legends attached in difficult archaic writing, were
taken freely, though probably with a leading idea,
out of various poetic cycles, as treated in the works
of those so-called cyclic poets, who continued the
Homeric tradition. Pausanias speaks, as Homer
does in his description of the shield of Achilles, of
a kind and amount of expression in feature and
gesture certainly beyond the compass of any early
art, and we may believe we have in these touches only
what the visitor heard from enthusiastic exegetce, the
interpreters or sacristans; though any one who has
seen the Bayeux tapestry, for instance, must recog-
nise the pathos and energy of which, when really
prompted by genius, even the earliest hand is capa-
ble. Some ingenious attempts have been made to
restore the grouping of the scenes, with a certain
formal expansion or balancing of subjects, their fig-
ures and dimensions, in true Assyrian manner, on the
front and sides. We notice some fine emblematic
figures, the germs of great artistic motives in after
240 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
times, already playing their parts there, Death, and
Sleep, and Night. "There was a woman supporting
on her right arm a white child sleeping; and on the
other arm she held a dark child, as if asleep; and
they lay with their feet crossed. And the inscrip-
tion shows, what might be understood without it,
that they are Death and Sleep, and Night, the nurse
of both of them."
But what is most noticeable is, as I have already
said, that this work, like the chamber of Paris, like
the Zeus of Pheidias, is chryselephantine, its main
fabric cedar, and the figures upon it partly of ivory,
partly of gold, 1 but (and this is the most peculiar
characteristic of its style) partly wrought out of the
wood of the chest itself. And, as we read the de-
scription, we can hardly -help distributing in fancy
gold and ivory, respectively, to their appropriate
functions in the representation. The cup of Diony-
sus, and the wings of certain horses there, Pausanias
himself tells us were golden. Were not the apples
of the Hesperides, the necklace of Eriphyle, the
bridles, the armour, the unsheathed sword in the hand
of Amphiaraus, also of gold? Were not the other
children, like the white image of Sleep, especially
l Xpvo-oCi/ is the word Pausanias uses, of the cup in the hand of
Dionysus the wood w&sp/ated with gold.
THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES 241
the naked child Alcmseon, of ivory? with Alcestis
and Helen, and that one of the Dioscuri whose beard
was still ungrown? Were not ivory and gold, again,
combined in the throne of Hercules, and in the
three goddesses conducted before Paris?
The " chest of Cypselus " fitly introduces the first
historical period of Greek art, a period coming
down to about the year 560 B.C., and the government
of Pisistratus at Athens; a period of tyrants like
Cypselus and Pisistratus himself, men of strong,
sometimes unscrupulous individuality, but often also
acute and cultivated patrons of the arts. It begins
with a series of inventions, one here and another
there, inventions still for the most part technical,
but which are attached to single names; for, with the
growth of art, the influence of individuals, gifted for
the opening of new ways, more and more defines
itself; and the school, open to all comers, from
which in turn the disciples may pass to all parts of
Greece, takes the place of the family, in which the
knowledge of art descends as a tradition from father
to son, or of the mere trade-guild. Of these early
industries we know little but the stray notices of
Pausanias, often ambiguous, always of doubtful credi-
bility. What we do see, through these imperfect
notices, is a real period of animated artistic activity,
242 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
richly rewarded. Byzes of Naxos, for instance, is
recorded as having first adopted the plan of sawing
marble into thin plates for use on the roofs of tem-
ples instead of tiles; and that his name has come
down to us at all, testifies to the impression this fair
white surface made on its first spectators. Various
islands of the ^Egean become each the source of
some new artistic device. It is a period still under
the reign of Hephaestus, delighting, above all, in
magnificent metal-work. "The Samians," says He-
rodotus, " out of a tenth part of their profits a sum
of six talents caused a mixing vessel of bronze to
be made, after the Argolic fashion; around it are
projections of griffins' heads; and they dedicated it
in the temple of Here, placing beneath it three
colossal figures of bronze, seven cubits in height,
leaning upon their knees." That was in the thirty-
seventh Olympiad, and may be regarded as character-
istic of the age. For the popular imagination, a
kind of glamour, some mysterious connexion of the
thing with human fortunes, still attaches to the curi-
ous product of artistic hands, to the ring of Poly-
crates, for instance, with its early specimen of
engraved smaragdus, as to the mythical necklace of
Harmonia. Pheidon of Argos first makes coined
money, and the obelisci the old nail-shaped iron
THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES 243
money, now disused are hung up in the temple of
Here; for, even thus early, the temples are in the
way of becoming museums. Names like those of
Eucheir and Eugrammus, who were said to have
taken the art of baking clay vases from Samos to
Etruria, have still a legendary air, yet may be real
surnames; as in the case of Smilis, whose name is
derived from a graver's tool, and who made the an-
cient image of Here at Samos. Corinth mater
statuaries becomes a great nursery of art at an
early time. Some time before the twenty-ninth
Olympiad, Butades of Sicyon, the potter, settled
there. The record of early inventions in Greece is
sometimes fondly coloured with human sentiment or
incident. It is on the butterfly wing of such an
incident the love-sick daughter of the artist, who
outlines on the wall the profile of her lover as he
sleeps in the lamplight, to keep by her in absence
that the name of Butades the potter has come
down to us. The father fills up the outline, long
preserved, it was believed, in the Nymphaum at Cor-
inth, and hence the art of modelling from the life
in clay. He learns, further, a way of colouring his
clay red, and fixes his masks along the temple eaves.
The temple of Athene Chalcioecus Athene of the
brazen house at Sparta, the work of Gitiades, cele-
244 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
brated about this time as architect, statuary, and
poet; who made, besides the image in her shrine,
and besides other Dorian songs, a hymn to the god-
dess was so called from its crust or lining of bronze
plates, setting forth, in richly embossed imagery,
various subjects of ancient legend. What Pausanias,
who saw it, describes, is like an elaborate develop-
ment of that method of covering the interiors of
stone buildings with metal plates, of which the
"Treasury" at Mycenae is the earliest historical, and
the house of Alcinous the heroic, type. In the pages
of Pausanias, that glitter, "as of the moon or the
sun," which Ulysses stood still to wonder at, may
still be felt. And on the right hand of this " brazen
house," he tells us, stood an image of Zeus, also of
bronze, the most ancient of all images of bronze.
This had not been cast, nor wrought out of a single
mass of metal, but, the various parts having been
finished separately (probably beaten to shape with
the hammer over a wooden mould), had been fitted
together with nails or rivets. That was the earliest
method of uniting the various parts of a work in
metal image, or vessel, or breastplate a method
allowing of much dainty handling of the cunning
pins and rivets, and one which has its place still, in
perfectly accomplished metal-work, as in the eques-
THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES 245
trian statue of Bartolommeo Coleoni, by Andrea Ver-
rocchio, in the piazza of St. John and St. Paul at
Venice. In the British Museum there is a very early
specimen of it, a large egg-shaped vessel, fitted
together of several pieces, the projecting pins or
rivets, forming a sort of diadem round the middle,
being still sharp in form and heavily gilt. That
method gave place in time to a defter means of join-
ing the parts together, with more perfect unity and
smoothness of surface, the art of soldering; and the
invention of this art of soldering iron, in the first
instance is coupled with the name of Glaucus of
Chios, a name which, in connexion with this and
other devices for facilitating the mechanical pro-
cesses of art, for perfecting artistic effect with
economy of labour, became proverbial, the "art of
Glaucus " being attributed to those who work well
with rapidity and ease.
Far more fruitful still was the invention of casting,
of casting hollow figures especially, attributed to
Rhoecus and Theodorus, architects of the great tem-
ple at Samos. Such hollow figures, able, in conse-
quence of their lightness, to rest, almost like an
inflated bladder, on a single point the entire bulk
of a heroic rider, for instance, on the point of his
horse's tail admit of a much freer distribution of
246 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
the whole weight or mass required, than is possible
in any other mode of statuary; and the invention of
the art of casting is really the discovery of liberty in
composition. 1
And, at last, about the year 576 B.C., we come to
the first true school of sculptors, the first clear exam-
ple, as we seem to discern, of a communicable style,
reflecting and interpreting some real individuality
(the double personality, in this case, of two brothers)
in the masters who evolved it, conveyed to disciples
who came to acquire it from distant places, and tak-
ing root through them at various centres, where the
names of the masters became attached, of course, to
many fair works really by the hands of the pupils.
Dipcenus and Scyllis, these first true masters, were
born in Crete; but their work is connected mainly
with Sicyon, at that time the chief seat of Greek
1 Pausanias, in recording the invention of casting, uses the word
e\<avfv<7avTo l but does not tell us whether the model was of wax, as
in the later process; which, however, is believed to have been the
case. For an animated account of the modern process : the core
of plaister roughly presenting the designed form ; the modelling of
the waxen surface thereon, like the skin upon the muscles, with all
its delicate touches vein and eyebrow; the hardening of the
plaister envelope, layer over layer, upon this delicately finished
model ; the melting of the wax by heat, leaving behind it in its
place the finished design in vacua, which the molten stream of
metal subsequently fills ; released finally, after cooling, from core
and envelope see Fortnum's Handbook of Bronzes, Chapter II.
THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES 247
art. "In consequence of some injury done them,"
it is said, "while employed there upon certain sacred
images, they departed to another place, leaving their
work unfinished; and, not long afterwards, a grievous
famine fell upon Sicyon. Thereupon, the people of
Sicyon, inquiring of the Pythian Apollo how they
might be relieved, it was answered them, ' if Dipoenus
and Scyllis should finish those images of the gods; '
which thing the Sicyonians obtained from them,
humbly, at a great price." That story too, as we
shall see, illustrates the spirit of the age. For their
sculpture they used the white marble of Paros, being
workers in marble especially, though they worked
also in ebony and in ivory, and made use of gilding.
" Figures of cedar-wood, partly incruste with gold "
xeSpov w8ta x/)vcra> Si^i/^tcr/xeW Pausanias says
exquisitely, describing a certain work of their pupil,
Dontas of Lacedaemon. It is to that that we have
definitely come at last, in the school of Dipoenus and
Scyllis.
Dry and brief as these details may seem, they are
the witness to an active, eager, animated period of
inventions and beginnings, in which the Greek
workman triumphs over the first rough mechanical
difficulties which beset him in the endeavour to
record what his soul conceived of the form of priest
248 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
or athlete then alive upon the earth, or of the ever-
living gods, then already more seldom seen upon it.
Our own fancy must fill up the story of the unre-
corded patience of the work-shop, into which we
seem to peep through these scanty notices the
fatigue, the disappointments, the steps repeated,
ending at last in that moment of success, which is all
Pausanias records, somewhat uncertainly.
And as this period begins with the chest of Cypse-
lus, so it ends with a work in some respects similar,
also seen and described by Pausanias the throne,
as he calls it, of the Amycltzan Apollo. It was the
work of a well-known artist, Bathycles of Magnesia,
who, probably about the year 550 B.C., with a com-
pany of workmen, came to the little ancient town of
Amyclae, near Sparta, a place full of traditions of the
heroic age. He had been invited thither to perform
a peculiar task the construction of a throne ; not
like the throne of the Olympian Zeus, and others
numerous in after times, for a seated figure, but for
the image of the local Apollo; no other than a rude
and very ancient pillar of bronze, thirty cubits high,
to which, Hermes-wise, head, arms and feet were
attached. The thing stood upright, as on a base,
upon a kind of tomb or reliquary, in which, accord-
ing to tradition, lay the remains of the young prince
THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES 249
Hyacinth, son of the founder of that place, beloved
by Apollo for his beauty, and accidentally struck
dead by him in play, with a quoit. From the drops
of the lad's blood had sprung up the purple flower
of his name, which bears on its petals the letters of
the ejaculation of woe; and in his memory the fa-
mous games of Amyclae were celebrated, beginning
about the time of the longest day, when the flowers
are stricken by the sun and begin to fade a festival
marked, amid all its splendour, with some real mel-
ancholy, and serious thought of the dead. In the
midst of the " throne " of Bathycles, this sacred re-
ceptacle, with the strange, half-humanised pillar
above it, was to stand, probably in the open air,
within a consecrated enclosure. Like the chest of
Cypselus, the throne was decorated with reliefs of
subjects taken from epic poetry, and it had support-
ing figures. Unfortunately, what Pausanias tells us
of this monument hardly enables one to present it to
the imagination with any completeness or certainty;
its dimensions he himself was unable exactly to ascer-
tain, and he does not tell us its material. There are
reasons, however, for supposing that it was of metal;
and amid these ambiguities, the decorations of its
base, the grave or altar-tomb of Hyacinth, shine out
clearly, and are also, for the most part, clear in their
significance.
250 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
" There are wrought upon the altar figures, on the
one side of Biris, on the other of Amphitrite and
Poseidon. Near Zeus and Hermes, in speech with
each other, stand Dionysus and Semele, and, beside
her, Ino. Demeter, Kore, and Pluto are also wrought
upon it, the Fates and the Seasons above them, and
with them Aphrodite, Athene, and Artemis. They
are conducting Hyacinthus to heaven, with Polybrea,
the sister of Hyacinthus, who died, as is told, while
yet a virgin. . . . Hercules also is figured on the
tomb; he too carried to heaven by Athene and the
other gods. The daughters of Thestius also are upon
the altar, and the Seasons again, and the Muses."
It was as if many lines of solemn thought had been
meant to unite, about the resting-place of this local
Adonis, in imageries full of some dim promise of
immortal life.
But it was not so much in care for old idols as in
the making of new ones that Greek art was at this
time engaged. This whole first period of Greek art
might, indeed, be called the period of graven images,
and all its workmen sons of Daedalus; for Daedalus
is the mythical, or all but mythical, representative of
all those arts which are combined in the making of
lovelier idols than had heretofore been seen. The
old Greek word which is at the root of the name
THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES 251
Daedalus, the name of a craft rather than a proper
name, probably means to work curiously all curi-
ously beautiful wood- work is Daedal work; the main
point about the curiously beautiful chamber in which
Nausicaa sleeps, in the Odyssey, being that, like
some exquisite Swiss chalet, it is wrought in wood.
But it came about that those workers in wood, whom
Daedalus represents, the early craftsmen of Crete
especially, were chiefly concerned with the making
of religious images, like the carvers of Berchtesgaden
and Oberammergau, the sort of daintily finished
images of the objects of public or private devotion
which such workmen would turn out. Wherever
there was a wooden idol in any way fairer than
others, finished, perhaps, sometimes, with colour and
gilding, and appropriate real dress, there the hand
of Daedalus had been. That such images were quite
detached from pillar or wall, that they stood free,
and were statues in the proper sense, showed that
Greek art was already liberated from its earlier East-
ern associations; such free-standing being apparently
unknown in Assyrian art. And then, the effect of
this Daedal skill in them was, that they came nearer
to the proper form of humanity. It is the wonderful
life-likeness of these early images which tradition
celebrates in many anecdotes, showing a very early
252 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
instinctive turn for, and delight in naturalism, in the
Greek temper. As Cimabue, in his day, was able to
charm men, almost as with illusion, by the simple
device of half-closing the eyelids of his personages,
and giving them, instead of round eyes, eyes that
seemed to be in some degree sentient, and to feel the
lights; so the marvellous progress in those Daedal
wooden images was, that the eyes were open, so that
they seemed to look, the feet separated, so that
they seemed to walk. Greek art is thus, almost from
the first, essentially distinguished from the art of
Egypt, by an energetic striving after truth in organic
form. In representing the human figure, Egyptian
art had held by mathematical or mechanical propor-
tions exclusively. The Greek apprehends of it, as
the main truth, that it is a living organism, with
freedom of movement, and hence the infinite possi-
bilities of motion, and of expression by motion, with
which the imagination credits the higher sort of
Greek sculpture; while the figures of Egyptian art,
graceful as they often are, seem absolutely incapable
of any motion or gesture, other than the one actually
designed. The work of the Greek sculptor, together
with its more real anatomy, becomes full also of
human soul.
That old, primitive, mystical, first period of Greek
THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES 253
religion, with its profound, though half-conscious,
intuitions of spiritual powers in the natural world,
attaching itself not to the worship of visible human
forms, but to relics, to natural or half-natural objects
the roughly hewn tree, the unwrought stone, the
pillar, the holy cone of Aphrodite in her dimly
lighted cell at Paphos had passed away. The
second stage in the development of Greek religion
had come; a period in which poet and artist were
busily engaged in the work of incorporating all that
might be retained of the vague divinations of that
earlier visionary time, in definite and intelligible
human image and human story. The vague belief,
the mysterious custom and tradition, develope them-
selves into an elaborately ordered ritual into per-
sonal gods, imaged in ivory and gold, sitting on
beautiful thrones. Always, wherever a shrine or
temple, great or small, is mentioned, there, we may
conclude, was a visible idol, there was conceived to
be the actual dwelling-place of a god. And this
understanding became not less but more definite, as
the temple became larger and more splendid, full of
ceremony and servants, like the abode of an earthly
king, and as the sacred presence itself assumed, little
by little, the last beauties and refinements of the visi-
ble human form and expression.
254 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
In what we have seen of this first period of Greek
art, in all its curious essays and inventions, we may
observe this demand for beautiful idols increasing
in Greece for sacred images, at first still rude, and
in some degree the holier for their rudeness, but
which yet constitute the beginnings of the religious
style, consummate in the work of Pheidias, uniting
the veritable image of man in the full possession of
his reasonable soul, with the true religious mysticity,
the signature there of something from afar. One by
one these new gods of bronze, or marble, or flesh-
like ivory, take their thrones, at this or that famous
shrine, like the images of this period which Pausanias
saw in the temple of Here at Olympia the throned
Seasons, with Themis as the mother of the Seasons
(divine rectitude being still blended, in men's fan-
cies, with the unchanging physical order of things)
and Fortune, and Victory "having wings," and Kore
and Demeter and Dionysus, already visibly there,
around the image of Here herself, seated on a throne ;
and all chryselephantine, all in gold and ivory.
Novel as these things are, they still undergo consecra-
tion at their first erecting. The figure of Athene, in
her brazen temple at Sparta, the work of Gitiades,
who makes also the image and the hymn, in triple
service to the goddess; and again, that curious story
THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES 255
of Dipoenus and Scyllis, brought back with so much
awe to remove the public curse by completing their
sacred task upon the images, show how simply relig-
ious the age still was that this wide-spread artistic
activity was a religious enthusiasm also; those early
sculptors have still, for their contemporaries, a divine
mission, with some kind of hieratic or sacred quality
in their gift, distinctly felt.
The development of the artist, in the proper sense,
out of the mere craftsman, effected in the first divis-
ion of this period, is now complete; and, in close
connexion with that busy graving of religious images,
which occupies its second division, we come to some-
thing like real personalities, to men with individual
characteristics such men as Ageladas of Argos,
Gallon and Onatas of ^Egina, and Canachus of Sicyon.
Mere fragment as our information concerning these
early masters is at the best, it is at least unmistakea-
bly information about men with personal differences
of temper and talent, of their motives, of what we
call style. We have come to a sort of art which is
no longer broadly characteristic of a general period,
one whose products we might have looked at without
its occurring to us to- ask concerning the artist, his
antecedents, and his school. We have to do now
with types of art, fully impressed with the subjec-
tivity, the intimacies of the artist.
256 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
Among these freer and stronger personalities
emerging thus about the beginning of the fifth cen-
tury before Christ about the period of the Persian
war the name to which most of this sort of personal
quality attaches, and which is therefore very interest-
ing, is the name of Canachus of Sicyon, who seems
to have comprehended in himself all the various
attainments in art which had been gradually developed
in the schools of his native city carver in wood,
sculptor, brass-cutter, and toreutes ; by toreutict be-
ing meant the whole art of statuary in metals, and in
their combination with other materials. At last we
seem to see an actual person at work, and to some
degree can follow, with natural curiosity, the motions
of his spirit and his hand. We seem to discern in
all we know of his productions the results of indi-
vidual apprehension the results, as well as the limi-
tations, of an individual talent.
It is impossible to date exactly the chief period of
the activity of Canachus. That the great image of
Apollo, which he made for the Milesians, was carried
away to Ecbatana by the Persian army, is stated by
Pausanias; but there is a doubt whether this was
under Xerxes, as Pausanias says-, in the year 479 B.C.,
or twenty years earlier, under Darius. So important
a work as this colossal image of Apollo, for so great
THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES 257
a shrine as the Didymaum, was probably the task
of his maturity; and his career may, therefore, be
regarded as having begun, at any rate, prior to the
year 479 B.C., and the end of the Persian invasion
the event which may be said to close this period of
art. On the whole, the chief period of his activity
is thought to have fallen earlier, and to have occu-
pied the last forty years of the previous century; and
he would thus have flourished, as we say, about fifty
years before the manhood of Pheidias, as Mino of
Fiesole fifty years before the manhood of Michel-
angelo.
His chief works were an Aphrodite, wrought for
the Sicyonians in ivory and gold; that Apollo of
bronze carried away by the Persians, and restored to
its place about the year B.C. 350; and a reproduc-
tion of the same work in cedar-wood, for the sanctu-
ary of Apollo of the Ismenus, at Thebes. The primi-
tive Greek worship, as we may trace it in Homer,
presents already, on a minor scale, all the essential
characteristics of the most elaborate Greek worship
of after times the sacred enclosure, the incense
and other offerings, the prayer of the priest, the shrine
itself a small one, roofed in by the priest with
green boughs, not unlike a wayside chapel in modern
times, and understood to be the dwelling-place of
258 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
the divine person within, almost certainly, an idol,
with its own sacred apparel, a visible form, little
more than symbolical perhaps, like the sacred pillar
for which Bathycles made his throne at Amyclae, but,
if an actual image, certainly a rude one.
That primitive worship, traceable in almost all
these particulars, even in the first book of the Iliad,
had given place, before the time of Canachus at
Sicyon, to a more elaborate ritual and a more com-
pletely designed image-work; and a little bronze
statue, discovered on the site of Tenea, where
Apollo was the chief object of worship, 1 the best
representative of many similar marble figures those
of Thera and Orchomenus, for instance is sup-
posed to represent Apollo as this still early age con-
ceived him youthful, naked, muscular, and with
the germ of the Greek profile, but formally smiling,
and with a formal diadem or fillet, over the long
hair which shows him to be no mortal athlete. The
hands, like the feet, excellently modelled, are here
extended downwards at the sides; but in some simi-
lar figures the hands are lifted, and held straight
outwards, with the palms upturned. The Apollo of
Canachus also had the hands thus raised, and on the
open palm of the right hand was placed a stag, while
1 Now preserved at Munich.
THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES 259
with the left he grasped the bow. Pliny says that
the stag was an automaton, with a mechanical device
for setting it in motion, a detail which hints, at least,
at the subtlety of workmanship with which those
ancient critics, who had opportunity of knowing,
credited this early artist. Of this work itself noth-
ing remains, but we possess perhaps some imitations
of it. It is probably this most sacred possession of
the place which the coins of Miletus display from
various points of view, though, of course, only on
the smallest scale. But a little bronze figure in the
British Museum, with the stag in the right hand, and
in the closed left hand the hollow where the bow has
passed, is thought to have been derived from it; and
its points of style are still further illustrated by a
marble head of similar character, also preserved in
the British Museum, which has many marks of having
been copied in marble from an original in bronze.
A really ancient work, or only archaic, it certainly
expresses, together with all that careful patience and
hardness of workmanship which is characteristic of
an early age, a certain Apolline strength a pride
and dignity in the features, so steadily composed,
below the stiff, archaic arrangement of the long,
fillet-bound locks. It is the exact expression of that
midway position, between an involved, archaic stiff-
260 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
ness and the free play of individual talent, which is
attributed to Canachus by the ancients.
His Apollo of cedar-wood, which inhabited a tem-
ple near the gates of Thebes, on a rising ground,
below which flowed the river Ismenus, had, accord-
ing to Pausanias, so close a resemblance to that at
Miletus that it required little skill in one who had
seen either of them to tell what master had designed
the other. Still, though of the same dimensions,
while one was of cedar the other was of bronze a
reproduction one of the other we may believe, but
with the modifications, according to the use of good
workmen even so early as Canachus, due to the differ-
ence of the material. For the likeness between the
two statues, it is to be observed, is not the mechani-
cal likeness of those earlier images represented by
the statuette of Tenea, which spoke, not of the style
of one master, but only of the manufacture of one
workshop. In those two images of Canachus the
Milesian Apollo and the Apollo of the Ismenus
there were resemblances amid differences; resem-
blances, as we may understand, in what was neverthe-
less peculiar, novel, and even innovating in the
precise conception of the god therein set forth; re-
semblances which spoke directly of a single workman,
though working freely, of one hand and one fancy, a
THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES 261
likeness in that which could by no means be truly
copied by another; it was the beginning of what we
mean by the style of a master. Together with all the
novelty, the innovating and improving skill, which
has made Canachus remembered, an attractive, old-
world, deeply-felt mysticity seems still to cling about
what we read of these early works. That piety, that
religiousness of temper, of which the people of Sicyon
had given proof so oddly in their dealings with those
old carvers, Scyllis and Dipcenus, still survives in
the master who was chosen to embody his own nov-
elty of idea and execution in so sacred a place as
the shrine of Apollo at Miletus. Something still
conventional, combined, in these images, with the
effect of great artistic skill, with a palpable beauty
and power, seems to have given them a really impos-
ing religious character. Escaping from the rigid
uniformities of the stricter archaic style, he is still
obedient to certain hieratic influences and tradi-
tions; he is still reserved, self-controlled, composed
or even mannered a little, as in some sacred presence,
with the severity and strength of the early style.
But there are certain notices which seem to show
that he had his purely poetical motives also, as be-
fitted his age; motives which prompted works of
mere fancy, like his Muse -with the Lyre, symbolis-
262 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
ing the chromatic style of music ; Aristocles his
brother, and Ageladas of Argos executing each an-
other statue to symbolise the two other orders of
music. The Riding Boys, of which Pliny speaks,
like the mechanical stag on the hand of Apollo,
which he also describes, were perhaps mechanical
toys, as Benvenuto Cellini made toys. In the Beard-
less sEsculapius, again the image of the god of
healing, not merely as the son of Apollo, but as
one ever young it is the Poetry of sculpture that
we see.
This poetic feeling, and the piety of temper so
deeply impressed upon his images of Apollo, seem
to have been combined in his chryselephantine
Aphrodite, as we see it very distinctly in Pausanias,
enthroned with an apple in one hand and a poppy in
the other, and with the sphere, or polos, about the
head, in its quaint little temple or chapel at Sicyon,
with the hierokepis, or holy garden, about it. This is
what Canachus has to give us instead of the strange,
symbolical cone, with the lights burning around it,
in its dark cell the form under which Aphrodite
was worshipped at her famous shrine of Paphos.
"A woman to keep it fair," Pausanias tells us,
"who may go in to no man, and a virgin called the
water-bearer, who holds her priesthood for a year,
THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES 263
are alone permitted to enter the sacred place. All
others may gaze upon the goddess and offer their
prayers from the doorway. The seated image is the
work of Canachus of Sicyon. It is wrought in ivory
and gold, bearing a sphere on the head, and having
in the one hand a poppy and in the other an apple.
They offer to her the thighs of all victims excepting
swine, burning them upon sticks of juniper, together
with leaves of lad's-love, a herb found in the enclos-
ure without, and nowhere else in the world. Its
leaves are smaller than those of the beech and larger
than the ilex; in form they are like an oak-leaf, and
in colour resemble most the leaves of the poplar, one
side dusky, the other white."
That is a place one would certainly have liked to
see. So real it seems ! the seated image, the peo-
ple gazing through the doorway, the fragrant odour.
Must it not still be in secret keeping somewhere ?
we are almost tempted to ask; maintained by some
few solitary worshippers, surviving from age to age,
among the villagers of Achaia.
In spite of many obscurities, it may be said that
what we know, and what we do not know, of Cana-
chus illustrates the amount and sort of knowledge we
possess about the artists of the period which he best
represents. A naivete a freshness, an early-aged
264 BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCULPTURE
simplicity and sincerity that, we may believe, had
we their works before us, would be for us their chief
aesthetic charm. Cicero remarked that, in contrast
with the works of the next generation of sculptors,
there was a stiffness in the statues of Canachus which
made them seem untrue to nature " Canachi signa
rigidiora esse quam ut imitentur veritatem." But
Cicero belongs to an age surfeited with artistic li-
cence, and likely enough to undervalue the severity
of the early masters, the great motive struggling still
with the minute and rigid hand. So the critics of
the last century ignored, or underrated, the works of
the earlier Tuscan sculptors. In what Cicero calls
"rigidity" of Canachus, combined with what we
seem to see of his poetry of conception, his fresh-
ness, his solemnity, we may understand no really
repellent hardness, but only that earnest patience of
labour, the expression of which is constant in all the
best work of an early time, in the David of Ver-
rocchio, for instance, and in the early Flemish paint-
ers, as it is natural and becoming in youth itself.
The very touch of the struggling hand was upon the
work; but with the interest, the half -repressed ani-
mation of a great promise, fulfilled, as we now see,
in the magnificent growth of Greek sculpture in the
succeeding age; which, however, for those earlier
THE AGE OF GRAVEN IMAGES 265
workmen, meant the loins girt and the half-folded
wings not yet quite at home in the air, with a gravity,
a discretion and reserve, the charm of which, if felt
in quiet, is hardly less than that of the wealth and
fulness of final mastery.
THE MARBLES OF
I HAVE dwelt the more emphatically upon the
purely sensuous aspects of early Greek art, on the
beauty and charm of its mere material and workman-
ship, the grace of hand in it, its chryselephantine char-
acter, because the direction of all the more general
criticism since Lessing has been, somewhat one-
sidedly, towards the ideal or abstract element in
Greek art, towards what we may call its philosophi-
cal aspect. And, indeed, this philosophical element,
a tendency to the realisation of a certain inward,
abstract, intellectual ideal, is also at work in Greek
art a tendency which, if that chryselephantine in-
fluence is called Ionian, may rightly be called the
Dorian, or, in reference to its broader scope, the
European influence; and this European influence or
tendency is really towards the impression of an order,
a sanity, a proportion in all work, which shall reflect
the inward order of human reason, now fully con-
266
THE MARBLES OF ^GINA 267
scious of itself, towards a sort of art in which the
record and delineation of humanity, as active in the
wide, inward world of its passion and thought, has
become more or less definitely the aim of all artistic
handicraft.
In undergoing the action of these two opposing
influences, and by harmonising in itself their antag-
onism, Greek sculpture does but reflect the larger
movements of more general Greek history. All
through Greek history we may trace, in every sphere
of the activity of the Greek mind, the action of these
two opposing tendencies, the centrifugal and cen-
tripetal tendencies, as we may perhaps not too fanci-
fully call them. There is the centrifugal, the Ionian,
the Asiatic tendency, flying from the centre, working
with little forethought straight before it, in the devel-
opment of every thought and fancy; throwing itself
forth in endless play of undirected imagination; de-
lighting in brightness and colour, in beautiful mate-
rial, in changeful form everywhere, in poetry, in
philosophy, even in architecture and its subordinate
crafts. In the social and political order it rejoices
in the freest action of local and personal influences;
its restless versatility drives it towards the assertion
of the principles of separatism, of individualism,
the separation of state from state, the maintenance
268 THE MARBLES OF yGINA
of local religions, the development of the individual
in that which is most peculiar and individual in
him. Its claim is in its grace, its freedom and hap-
piness, its lively interest, the variety of its gifts to
civilisation; its weakness is self-evident, and was
what made the unity of Greece impossible. It is
this centrifugal tendency which Plato is desirous to
cure, by maintaining, over against it, the Dorian
influence of a severe simplification everywhere, in
society, in culture, in the very physical nature of
man. An enemy everywhere to Variegation, to what
is cunning or "myriad-minded," he sets himself,
in mythology, in music, in poetry, in every kind of
art, to enforce the ideal of a sort of Parmenidean
abstractness and calm.
This exaggerated ideal of Plato's is, however, only
the exaggeration of that salutary European tendency,
which, finding human mind the most absolutely real
and precious thing in the world, enforces everywhere
the impress of its sanity, its profound reflexions upon
things as they really are, its sense of proportion. It
is the centripetal tendency, which links individuals
to each other, states to states, one period of organic
growth to another, under the reign of a composed,
rational, self-conscious order, in the universal light
of the understanding.
THE MARBLES OF ^EGINA 269
Whether or not this temper, so clearly traceable as
a distinct influence in the course of Greek develop-
ment, was indeed the peculiar gift of the Dorian
race, certainly that race is the best illustration of it,
in its love of order, of that severe composition every-
where, of which the Dorian style of architecture is,
as it were, a material symbol in its constant aspi-
ration after what is earnest and dignified, as exempli-
fied most evidently in the religion of its predilection,
the religion of Apollo.
For as that Ionian influence, the chryselephantine
influence, had its patron in Hephaestus, belonged to
the religion of Hephaestus, husband of Aphrodite, the
representation of exquisite workmanship, of fine art
in metal, coming from the East in close connexion
with the artificial furtherance, through dress and
personal ornament, of the beauty of the body; so
that Dorian or European influence embodied itself
in the religion of Apollo. For the development of
this or that mythological conception, from its root
in fact or law of the physical world, is very various
in its course. Thus, Demeter, the spirit of life in
grass, and Dionysus, the "spiritual form " of life in
the green sap, remain, to the end of men's thoughts
and fancies about them, almost wholly physical.
But Apollo, the " spiritual form " of sunbeams, early
270 THE MARBLES OF yEGINA
becomes (the merely physical element in his consti-
tution being almost wholly suppressed) exclusively
ethical, the " spiritual form " of inward or intellect-
ual light, in all its manifestations. He represents all
those specially European ideas, of a reasonable, per-
sonal freedom, as understood in Greece; of a rea-
sonable polity; of the sanity of soul and body, through
the cure of disease and of the sense of sin; of the
perfecting of both by reasonable exercise or ascesis ;
his religion is a sort of embodied equity, its aim the
realisation of fair reason and just consideration of
the truth of things everywhere.
I cannot dwell on the general aspects of this sub-
ject further, but I would remark that in art also the
religion of Apollo was a sanction of, and an encour-
agement towards the true valuation of humanity, in
its sanity, its proportion, its knowledge of itself.
Following after this, Greek art attained, in its repro-
ductions of human form, not merely to the profound
expression of the highest indwelling spirit of human
intelligence, but to the expression also of the great
human passions, of the powerful movements as well
as of the calm and peaceful order of the soul, as find-
ing in the affections of the body a language, the
elements of which the artist might analyse, and then
combine, order, and recompose. In relation to
THE MARBLES OF ^GINA 271
music, to art, to all those matters over which the
Muses preside, Apollo, as distinct from Hermes,
seems to be the representative and patron of what I
may call reasonable music, of a great intelligence at
work in art, of beauty attained through the conscious
realisation of ideas. They were the cities of the
Dorian affinity which early brought to perfection that
most characteristic of Greek institutions, the sacred
dance, with the whole gymnastic system which was
its natural accompaniment. And it was the familiar
spectacle of that living sculpture which developed,
perhaps, beyond everything else in the Greek mind,
at its best, a sense of the beauty and significance of
the human form.
Into that bewildered, dazzling world of minute and
dainty handicraft the chamber of Paris, the house
of Alcinous in which the form of man alone had
no adequate place, and as yet, properly, was not, this
Dorian, European, Apolline influence introduced the
intelligent and spiritual human presence, and gave
it its true value, a value consistently maintained to
the end of Greek art, by a steady hold upon and pre-
occupation with the inward harmony and system of
human personality.
In. the works of the Asiatic tradition the marbles
of Nineveh, for instance and, so far as we can see,
272 THE MARBLES OF
in the early Greek art, which derives from it, as, for
example, in the archaic remains from Cyprus, the
form of man is inadequate, and below the measure
of perfection attained there in the representation of
the lower forms of life; just as in the little reflective
art of Japan, so lovely in its reproduction of flower
or bird, the human form alone comes almost as a
caricature, or is at least untouched by any higher
ideal. To that Asiatic tradition, then, with its per-
fect craftsmanship, its consummate skill in design,
its power of hand, the Dorian, the European, the
true Hellenic influence brought a revelation of the
soul and body of man.
And we come at last in the marbles of ALgina. to
a monument, which bears upon it the full expres-
sion of this humanism, to a work, in which the
presence of man, realised with complete mastery
of hand, and with clear apprehension of how he
actually is and moves and looks, is touched with the
freshest sense of that new-found, inward value; the
energy of worthy passions purifying, the light of his
reason shining through, bodily forms and motions,
solemnised, attractive, pathetic. We have reached
an extant work, real and visible, of an importance
out of all proportion to anything actually remaining
of earlier art, and justifying, by its direct interest and
THE MARBLES OF ^GINA 273
charm, our long prelude on the beginnings of Greek
sculpture, while there was still almost nothing actu-
ally to see.
These fifteen figures of Parian marble, of about
two-thirds the size of life, forming, with some defi-
ciencies, the east and west gables of a temple of
Athene, the ruins of which still stand on a hill-side
by the sea-shore, in a remote part of the island of
^Egina, were discovered in the year 1811, and hav-
ing been purchased by the Crown Prince, afterwards
King Louis I., of Bavaria, are now the great orna-
ment of the Glyptothek, or Museum of Sculpture, at
Munich. The group in each gable consisted of
eleven figures; and of the fifteen larger figures dis-
covered, five belong to the eastern, ten to the western
gable, so that the western gable is complete with the
exception of one figure, which should stand in the
place to which, as the groups are arranged at Munich,
the beautiful figure, bending down towards the fallen
leader, has been actually transferred from the eastern
gable; certain fragments showing that the lost figure
corresponded essentially to this, which has therefore
been removed hither from its place in the less com-
plete group to which it properly belongs. For there
are two legitimate views or motives in the restora-
tion of ancient sculpture, the antiquarian and the
T
274 THE MARBLES OF
aesthetic, as they may be termed, respectively; the
former limiting itself to the bare presentation of what
actually remains of the ancient work, braving all
shock to living eyes from the mutilated nose or chin;
while the latter, the aesthetic method, requires that,
with the least possible addition or interference, by
the most skilful living hand procurable, the object
shall be made to please, or at least content the living
eye, seeking efljoyment and not a bare fact of science,
in the spectacle of ancient art. This latter way of
restoration, the aesthetic way, followed by the
famous connoisseurs of the Renaissance, has been
followed here; and the visitor to Munich actually sees
the marbles of ^Egina, as restored after a model by
the tasteful hand of Thorwaldsen.
Different views have, however, been maintained as
to the right grouping of the figures; but the compo-
sition of the two groups was apparently similar, not
only in general character but in a certain degree of
correspondence of all the figures, each to each. And
in both the subject is a combat, a combat between
Greeks and Asiatics concerning the body of a Greek
hero, fallen among the foemen, an incident so
characteristic of the poetry of the heroic wars. In
both cases, Athene, whose temple this sculpture was
designed to decorate, intervenes, her image being
THE MARBLES OF ^GINA 275
complete in the western gable, the head and some
other fragments remaining of that in the eastern.
The incidents represented were probably chosen with
reference to the traditions of ^Egina in connexion
with the Trojan war. Greek legend is ever deeply
coloured by local interest and sentiment, and this
monument probably celebrates Telamon, and Ajax
his son, the heroes who established the fame of
ygina, and whom the united Greeks, on the morn-
ing of the battle of Salamis, in which the ^Eginetans
were distinguished above all other Greeks in bravery,
invited as their "peculiar, spiritual allies from that
island.
Accordingly, antiquarians are, for the most part,
of opinion that the eastern gable represents the com-
bat of Hercules (Hercules being the only figure among
the warriors certainly to be identified), and of his
comrade Telamon, against Laomedon of Troy, in
which, properly, Hercules was leader, but here, as
squire and archer, is made to give the first place to
Telamon, as the titular hero of the place. Opinion
is not so definite regarding the subject of the western
gable, which, however, probably represents the com-
bat between the Greeks and Trojans over the body of
Patroclus. In both cases an yEginetan hero, in the
eastern gable Telamon, in the western his son Ajax,
276 THE MARBLES OF
is represented in the extreme crisis of battle, such a
crisis as, according to the deep religiousness of the
Greeks of that age, was a motive for the visible inter-
vention of the goddess in favour of her chosen
people.
Opinion as to the date of the work, based mainly
on the characteristics of the work itself, has varied
within a period ranging from the middle of the six-
tieth to the middle of the seventieth Olympiad, in-
clining on the whole to the later date, in the period
of the Ionian revolt against Persia, and a few years
earlier than the battle of Marathon.
In this monument, then, we have a revelation in
the sphere of art, of the temper which made the
victories of Marathon and Salamis possible, of the
true spirit of Greek chivalry as displayed in the Per-
sian war, and in the highly ideal conception of its
events, expressed in Herodotus and approving itself
minutely to the minds of the Greeks, as a series of
affairs in which the gods and heroes of old time
personally intervened, and that not as mere shadows.
It was natural that the high-pitched temper, the stress
of thought and feeling, which ended in the final con-
flict of Greek liberty with Asiatic barbarism, should
stimulate quite a new interest in the poetic legends
of the earlier conflict between them in the heroic
THE MARBLES OF yEGINA 277
age. As the events of the Crusades and the chival-
rous spirit of that period, leading men's minds back
to ponder over the deeds of Charlemagne and his
paladins, gave birth to the composition of the Song
of Roland, just so this yEginetan sculpture displays
the Greeks of a later age feeding their enthusiasm
on the legend of a distant past, and is a link between
Herodotus and Homer. In those ideal figures, pen-
sive a little from the first, we may suppose, with the
shadowiness of a past age, we may yet see how Greeks
of the time of Themistocles really conceived of
Homeric knight and squire.
Some other fragments of art, also discovered in
^Egina, and supposed to be contemporary with the
temple of Athene, tend, by their roughness and im-
maturity, to show that this small building, so united
in its effect, so complete in its simplicity, in the
symmetry of its two main groups of sculpture, was
the perfect artistic flower of its time and place. Yet
within the limits of this simple unity, so important
an element in the charm and impressiveness of the
place, a certain inequality of design and execution
may be detected; the hand of a slightly earlier
master, probably, having worked in the western
gable, while the master of the eastern gable has gone
some steps farther than he in fineness and power of
278 THE MARBLES OF
expression; the stooping figure of the supposed
Ajax, belonging to the western group in the present
arrangement, but really borrowed, as I said, from the
eastern, which has in it something above the type
of the figures grouped round it, being this later sculp-
tor's work. Yet Overbeck, who has elaborated the
points of this distinction of styles, commends with-
out reserve the technical excellence of the whole
work, executed, as he says, " with an application of
all known instruments of sculpture; the delicate cal-
culation of weight in the composition of the several
parts, allowing the artist to dispense with all artificial
supports, and to set his figures, with all their complex
motions, and yet with plinths only three inches thick,
into the basis of the gable; the bold use of the chisel,
which wrought the shield, on the freely-held arm,
down to a thickness of scarcely three inches; the
fineness of the execution, even in parts of the work
invisible to an ordinary spectator, in the diligent
finishing of which the only motive of the artist was
to satisfy his own conviction as to the nature of
good sculpture."
It was the Dorian cities, Plato tells us, which first
shook off the false Asiatic shame, and stripped off
their clothing for purposes of exercise and training
in the gymnasium ; and it was part of the Dorian or
THE MARBLES OF ^GINA 279
European influence to assert the value in art of the
unveiled and healthy human form. And here the
artists of ^gina, notwithstanding Homer's descrip-
tion of Greek armour, glowing like the sun itself, have
displayed the Greek warriors Greek and Trojan
alike not in the equipments they would really
have worn, but naked, flesh fairer than that golden
armour, though more subdued and tranquil in effect
on the spectator, the undraped form of man coming
like an embodiment of the Hellenic spirit, and as
an element of temperance, into the somewhat gaudy
spectacle of Asiatic, or archaic art. Paris alone
bears his dainty trappings, characteristically, a
coat of golden scale-work, the scales set on a lining
of canvas or leather, shifting deftly over the delicate
body beneath, and represented on the gable by the
gilding, or perhaps by real gilt metal.
It was characteristic also of that more truly Hel-
lenic art another element of its temperance to
adopt the use of marble in its works; and the ma-
terial of these figures is the white marble of Paros.
Traces of colour have, however, been found on cer-
tain parts of them. The outer surfaces of the shields
and helmets have been blue; their inner parts and
the crests of the helmets, red; the hem of the drapery
of Athene, the edges of her sandals, the plinths on
280 THE MARBLES OF
which the figures stand, also red; one quiver red,
another blue; the eyes and lips, too, coloured; per-
haps, the hair. There was just a limited and conven-
tionalised use of colour, in effect, upon the marble.
And although the actual material of these figures
is marble, its coolness and massiveness suiting the
growing severity of Greek thought, yet they have their
reminiscences of work in bronze, in a certain slim-
ness and tenuity, a certain dainty lightness of poise
in their grouping, which remains in the memory as a
peculiar note of their style; the possibility of such
easy and graceful balancing being one of the privi-
leges or opportunities of statuary in cast metal, of
that hollow casting in which the whole weight of the
work is so much less than that of a work of equal
size in marble, and which permits so much wider and
freer a disposition of the parts about its centre of
gravity. In ^Egina the tradition of metal work seems
to have been strong, and Onatas, whose name is
closely connected with ^Egina, and who is contem-
porary with the presumably later portion of this mon-
ument, was above all a worker in bronze. Here
again, in this lurking spirit of metal work, we have
a new element of complexity in the character of these
precious remains. And then, to compass the whole
work in our imagination, we must conceive yet an-
THE MARBLES OF ^EGINA 281
other element in the conjoint effect ; metal being
actually mingled with the marble, brought thus to its
daintiest point of refinement, as the little holes indi-
cate, bored into the marble figures for the attachment
of certain accessories in bronze, lances, swords,
bows, the Medusa 1 s head on the eegis of Athene, and
its fringe of little snakes.
And as there was no adequate consciousness and
recognition of the essentials of man's nature in the
older, oriental art, so there is no pathos, no human-
ity in the more special sense, but a kind of hardness
and cruelty rather, in those oft-repeated, long, matter-
of-fact processions, on the marbles of Nineveh, of
slave-like soldiers on their way to battle mechani-
cally, or of captives on their way to slavery or death,
for the satisfaction of the Great King. These Greek
marbles, on the contrary, with that figure yearning
forward so graciously to the fallen leader, are deeply
impressed with a natural pathetic effect the true
reflexion again of the temper of Homer in speaking
of war. Ares, the god of war himself, we must re-
member, is, according to his original import, the god
of storms, of winter raging among the forests of the
Thracian mountains, a brother of the north wind.
It is only afterwards that, surviving many minor gods
of war, he becomes a leader of hosts, a sort of divine
282 THE MARBLES OF
knight and patron of knighthood; and, through the
old intricate connexion of love and war, and that
amorousness which is the universally conceded privi-
lege of the soldier's life, he comes to be very near
Aphrodite, the paramour of the goddess of physical
beauty. So that the idea of a sort of soft dalliance
mingles, in his character, so unlike that of the Chris-
tian leader, Saint George, with the idea of savage,
warlike impulses ; the fair, soft creature suddenly
raging like a storm, to which, in its various wild
incidents, war is constantly likened in Homer; the
effects of delicate youth and of tempest blending, in
Ares, into one expression, not without that cruelty
which mingles also, like the influence of some malign
fate upon him, with the finer characteristics of
Achilles, who is a kind of merely human double of
Ares. And in Homer's impressions of war the same
elements are blent, the delicacy, the beauty of
youth, especially, which makes it so fit for purposes
of love, spoiled and wasted by the random flood and
fire of a violent tempest; the glittering beauty of the
Greek "war-men," expressed in so many brilliant
figures, and the splendour of their equipments, in
collision with the miserable accidents of battle, and
the grotesque indignities of death in it, brought home
to our fancy by a hundred pathetic incidents, the
THE MARBLES OF ^EGINA 283
sword hot with slaughter, the stifling blood in the
throat, the spoiling of the body in every member
severally. He thinks of, and records, at his early
ending, the distant home from which the boy came,
who goes stumbling now, just stricken so wretchedly,
his bowels in his hands. He pushes the expression
of this contrast to the macabre even, suggesting the
approach of those lower forms of life which await
to-morrow the fair bodies of the heroes, who strive and
fall to-day like these in the ^Eginetan gables. For
it is just that twofold sentiment which this sculpture
has embodied. The seemingly stronger hand which
wrought the eastern gable has shown itself strongest
in the rigid expression of the truth of pain, in the
mouth of the famous recumbent figure on the extreme
left, the lips just open at the corner, and in the hard-
shut lips of Hercules. Otherwise, these figures all
smile faintly, almost like the monumental effigies oi
the Middle Age, with a smile which, even if it be
but a result of the mere conventionality of an art still
somewhat immature, has just the pathetic effect of
Homer's conventional epithet "tender," when he
speaks of the flesh of his heroes.
And together with this touching power there is also
in this work the effect of an early simplicity, the
charm of its limitations. For as art which has passed
284 THE MARBLES OF
its prime has sometimes the charm of an absolute
refinement in taste and workmanship, so immature
art also, as we now see, has its own attractiveness in
the naivete, the freshness of spirit, which finds
power and interest in simple motives of feeling, and
in the freshness of hand, which has a sense of enjoy-
ment in mechanical processes still performed unme-
chanically, in the spending of care and intelligence
on every touch. As regards Italian art, the sculpture
and paintings of the earlier Renaissance, the aesthetic
value of this naivete is now well understood; but it
has its value in Greek sculpture also. There, too,
is a succession of phases through which the artistic
power and purpose grew to maturity, with the endur-
ing charm of an unconventional, unsophisticated
freshness, in that very early stage of it illustrated by
these marbles of ^gina, not less than in the work of
Verrocchio and Mino of Fiesole. Effects of this we
may note in that sculpture of ^Egina, not merely in
the simplicity, or monotony even, of the whole com-
position, and in the exact and formal correspondence
of one gable to the other, but in the simple readiness
with which the designer makes the two second spear-
men kneel, against the probability of the thing, so
as just to fill the space he has to compose in. The
profiles are still not yet of the fully developed Greek
THE MARBLES OF ^GINA 285
type, but have a somewhat sharp prominence of nose
and chin, as in Etrurian design, in the early sculpture
of Cyprus, and in the earlier Greek vases; and the
general proportions of the body in relation to the
shoulders are still somewhat archaically slim. But
then the workman is at work in dry earnestness, with
a sort of hard strength in detail, a scrupulousness
verging on stiffness, like that of an early Flemish
painter; he communicates to us his still youthful
sense of pleasure in the experience of the first rudi-
mentary difficulties of his art overcome. And withal,
these figures have in them a true expression of life,
of animation. In this monument of Greek chivalry,
pensive and visionary as it may seem, those old
Greek knights live with a truth like that of Homer
or Chaucer. In a sort of stiff grace, combined with
a sense of things bright or sorrowful directly felt, the
u^Eginetan workman is as it were the Chaucer of
Greek sculpture.
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC
PRIZEMEN
A CHAPTER IN GREEK ART
IT is pleasant when, looking at medieval sculpture,
we are reminded of that of Greece; pleasant like-
wise, conversely, in the study of Greek work to be
put on thoughts of the Middle Age. To the refined
intelligence, it would seem, there is something attrac-
tive in complex expression as such. The Marbles
of sEgina, then, may remind us of the Middle Age
where it passes into the early Renaissance, of its
most tenderly finished warrior-tombs at Westminster
or in Florence. A less mature phase of medieval art
is recalled to our fancy by a primitive Greek work in
the Museum of Athens, Hermes, bearing a ram, a
little one, upon his shoulders. He bears it thus,
had borne it round the walls of Tanagra, as its citi-
zens told, by way of purifying that place from the
286
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 287
plague, and brings to mind, of course, later images
of the "Good Shepherd." It is not the subject of
the work, however, but its style, that sets us down in
thought before some gothic cathedral front. Suppose
the Hermes Kriophorus lifted into one of those empty
niches, and the archaeologist will inform you rightly,
as at Auxerre or Wells, of Italian influence, perhaps
of Italian workmen, and along with them indirect old
Greek influence corning northwards; while the con-
noisseur assures us that all good art, at its respective
stages of development, is in essential qualities every-
where alike. It is observed, as a note of imperfect
skill, that in that carved block of stone the animal
is insufficiently detached from the shoulders of its
bearer. Again, how precisely gothic is the effect!
Its very limitation as sculpture emphasises the func-
tion of the thing as an architectural ornament. And
the student of the Middle Age, if it came within his
range, would be right in so esteeming it. Hieratic,
stiff and formal, if you will, there is a knowledge of
the human body in it nevertheless, of the body, and
of the purely animal soul therein, full of the promise
of what is coming in that chapter of Greek art which
may properly be entitled, "The Age of Athletic
Prizemen."
That rude image, a work perhaps of Calamis of
288 THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN
shadowy fame, belongs to a phase of art still in grave-
clothes or swaddling-bands, still strictly subordinate
to religious or other purposes not immediately its
own. It had scarcely to wait for the next genera-
tion to be superseded, and we need not wonder that
but little of it remains. But that it was a widely
active phase of art, with all the vigour of local varie-
ties, is attested by another famous archaic monument,
too full of a kind of sacred poetry to be passed by.
The reader does not need to be reminded that the
Greeks, vivid as was their consciousness of this life,
cared much always for the graves of the dead; that
to be cared for, to be honoured, in one's grave, to
have Tv/t/3os d|u.<i7roAos, a frequented tomb, as Pindar
says, was a considerable motive with them, even
among the young. In the study of its funeral monu-
ments we might indeed follow closely enough the
general development of art in Greece from beginning
to end. The carved slab of the ancient shepherd of
Orchomenus, with his dog and rustic staff, the stele
of the ancient man-at-arms signed "Aristocles," rich
originally with colour and gold and fittings of bronze,
are among the few still visible pictures, or portraits,
it maybe, of the earliest Greek life. Compare them,
compare their expression, for a moment, with the
deeply incised tombstones of the Brethren of St.
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 289
Francis and their clients, which still roughen the
pavement of Santa Croce at Florence, and recall the
varnished polychrome decoration of those Greek
monuments in connexion with the worn-out blazonry
of the funeral brasses of England and Flanders. The
Shepherd, the Hoplite, begin a series continuous to
the era of full Attic mastery in its gentlest mood,
with a large and varied store of memorials of the
dead, which, not so strangely as it may seem at first
sight, are like selected pages from daily domestic
life. See, for instance, at the British Museum,
Trypho, "the son of Eutychus," one of the very
pleasantest human likenesses there, though it came
from a cemetery a son it was hard to leave in it
at nineteen or twenty. With all the suppleness, the
delicate muscularity, of the flower of his youth, his
handsome face sweetened by a kind and simple heart,
in motion, surely, he steps forth from some shadowy
chamber, strigil in hand, as of old, and with his
coarse towel or cloak of monumental drapery over
one shoulder. But whither precisely, you may ask,
and as what, is he moving there in the doorway?
Well! in effect, certainly, it is the memory of the
dead lad, emerging thus from his tomb, the still
active soul, or permanent thought, of him, as he most
liked to be.
u
290 THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN
The Harpy Tomb, so called from its mysterious
winged creatures with human faces, carrying the little
shrouded souls of the dead, is a work many genera-
tions earlier than that graceful monument of Trypho.
It was from an ancient cemetery at Xanthus in Lycia
that it came to the British Museum. The Lycians
were not a Greek people; but, as happened even
with "barbarians" dwelling on the coast of Asia
Minor, they became lovers of the Hellenic culture,
and Xanthus, their capital, as may be judged from
the beauty of its ruins, managed to have a considera-
ble portion in Greek art, though infusing it with a
certain Asiatic colour. The frugally designed frieze
of the Harpy Tomb, in the lowest possible relief,
might fairly be placed between the monuments of
Assyria and those primitive Greek works among
which it now actually stands. The stiffly ranged
figures in any other than strictly archaic work would
seem affected. But what an undercurrent of refined
sentiment, presumably not Asiatic, not "barbaric,"
lifting those who felt thus about death so early into
the main stream of Greek humanity, and to a level
of visible refinement in execution duly expressive
of it!
In that old burial-place of Xanthus, then, a now
nameless family, or a single bereaved member of it,
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 291
represented there as a diminutive figure crouching
on the earth in sorrow, erected this monument, so
full of family sentiment, and of so much value as
illustrating what is for us a somewhat empty period
in the history of Greek art, strictly so called. Like
the less conspicuously adorned tombs around it, like
the tombs in Homer, it had the form of a tower a
square tower about twenty-four feet high, hollowed
at the top into a small chamber, for the reception,
through a little doorway, of the urned ashes of the
dead. Four sculptured slabs were placed at this
level on the four sides of the tower in the manner
of a frieze. I said that the winged creatures with
human faces carry the little souls of the dead. The
interpretation of these mystic imageries is, in truth,
debated. But in face of them, and remembering
how the sculptors and glass-painters of the Middle
Age constantly represented the souls of the dead as
tiny bodies, one can hardly doubt as to the meaning
of these particular details which, repeated on every
side, seem to give the key-note of the whole compo-
sition. 1 Those infernal, or celestial, birds, indeed,
1 In some fine reliefs of the thirteenth century, Jesus himself
draws near to the deathbed of his Mother. The soul has already
quitted her body, and is seated, a tiny crowned figure, on his left
arm (as she had carried Him) to be taken to heaven. In the
beautiful early fourteenth century monument of Aymer de Valence
292 THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN
are not true to what is understood to be the harpy
form. Call them sirens, rather. People, and not
only old people, as you know, appear sometimes to
have been quite charmed away by what dismays most
of us. The tiny shrouded figures which the sirens
carry are carried very tenderly, and seem to yearn in
their turn towards those kindly nurses as they pass on
their way to a new world. Their small stature, as I
said, does not prove them infants, but only new-born
into that other life, and contrasts their helplessness
with the powers, the great presences, now around
them. A cow, far enough from Myron's famous
illusive animal, suckles her calf. She is one of
almost any number of artistic symbols of new-birth,
of the renewal of life, drawn from a world which is,
after all, so full of it. On one side sits enthroned,
as some have thought, the Goddess of Death; on the
opposite side the Goddess of Life, with her flowers
and fruit. Towards her three young maidens are
advancing were they still alive thus, graceful, vir-
at Westminster, the soul of the deceased, " a small figure wrapped
in a mantle," is supported by two angels at the head of the tomb.
Among many similar instances may be mentioned the soul of the
beggar, Lazarus, on a carved capital at VezSlay; and the same
subject in a coloured window at Bourges. The clean, white little
creature seems glad to escape from the body, tattooed all over with
its sores in a regular pattern.
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 293
ginal, with their long, plaited hair, and long, deli-
cately-folded tunics, looking forward to carry on
their race into the future? Presented severally, on
the other sides of the dark hollow within, three male
persons a young man, an old man, and a boy
seem to be bringing home, somewhat wearily, to their
"long home," the young man, his armour, the boy,
and the old man, like old Socrates, the mortuary
cock, as they approach some shadowy, ancient deity
of the tomb, or it may be the throned impersonation
of their " fathers of old." The marble surface was
coloured, at least in part, with fixtures of metal here
and there. The designer, whoever he may have
been, was possessed certainly of some tranquillising
second thoughts concerning death, which may well
have had their value for mourners; and he has ex-
pressed those thoughts, if lispingly, yet with no faults
of commission, with a befitting grace, and, in truth,
at some points, with something already of a really
Hellenic definition and vigour. He really speaks
to us in his work, through his symbolic and imitative
figures, speaks to our intelligence persuasively.
The surviving thought of the lad Trypho, returning
from his tomb to the living, was of athletic character;
how he was and looked when in the flower of his
strength. And it is not of the dead but of the living,
294 THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN
who look and are as he, that the artistic genius of
this period is full. It is a period, truly, not of bat-
tles, such as those commemorated in the Marbles of
sEgina, but of more peaceful contests at Olympia,
at the Isthmus, at Delphi the glories of which Pin-
dar sang in language suggestive of a sort of metallic
beauty, firmly cut and embossed, like crowns of wild
olive, of parsley and bay, in crisp gold. First, how-
ever, it had been necessary that Greece should win
its liberty, political standing-ground, and a really
social air to breathe in, with development of the
youthful limbs. Of this process Athens was the
chief scene; and the earliest notable presentment of
humanity by Athenian art was in celebration of those
who had vindicated liberty with their lives two
youths again, in a real incident, which had, however,
the quality of a poetic invention, turning, as it did,
on that ideal or romantic friendship which was char-
acteristic of the Greeks.
With something, perhaps, of hieratic convention,
yet presented as they really were, as friends and
admirers loved to think of them, Harmodius and
Aristogeiton stood, then, soon after their heroic
death, side by side in bronze, the work of Antenor,
in a way not to be forgotten, when, thirty years after-
wards, a foreign tyrant, Xerxes, carried them away to
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 295
Persia. Kritios and Nesistes were, therefore, em-
ployed for a reproduction of them, which would
naturally be somewhat more advanced in style. In
its turn this also disappeared. The more curious
student, however, would still fancy he saw the trace
of it of that copy, or of the original, afterwards
restored to Athens here or there, on vase or coin.
But in fact the very images of the heroic youths were
become but ghosts, haunting the story of Greek art,
till they found or seemed to find a body once more
when, not many years since, an acute observer de-
tected, as he thought, in a remarkable pair of statues
in the Museum of Naples, if freed from incorrect
restorations and rightly set together, a veritable de-
scendant from the original work of Antenor. With
all their truth to physical form and movement, with
a conscious mastery of delineation, they were, never-
theless, in certain details, in the hair, for instance,
archaic, or rather archaistic designedly archaic, as
from the hand of a workman, for whom, in this sub-
ject, archaism, the very touch of the ancient master,
had a sentimental or even a religious value. And
unmistakeably they were young assassins, moving,
with more than fraternal unity, the younger in ad-
vance of and covering the elder, according to the
account given by Herodotus, straight to their pur-
296 THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN
pose ; against two wicked brothers, as you remem-
ber, two good friends, on behalf of the dishonoured
sister of one of them.
Archaeologists have loved to adjust them tenta-
tively, with various hypotheses as to the precise
manner in which they thus went together. Mean-
time they have figured plausibly as representative of
Attic sculpture at the end of its first period, still
immature indeed, but with a just claim to take
breath, so to speak, having now accomplished some
stades of the journey. Those young heroes of Athe-
nian democracy, then, indicate already what place
Athens and Attica will occupy in the supreme age of
art soon to come; indicate also the subject from
which that age will draw the main stream of its in-
spiration living youth, "iconic " in its exact por-
traiture, or "heroic " as idealised in various degrees
under the influence of great thoughts about it
youth in its self-denying contention towards great
effects; great intrinsically, as at Marathon or when
Harmodius and Aristogeiton fell, or magnified by
the force and splendour of Greek imagination with
the stimulus of the national games. For the most
part, indeed, it is not with youth taxed spasmodi-
cally, like that of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, and
the "necessity" that was upon it, that the Athenian
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 297
mind and heart are now busied; but with youth in
its voluntary labours, its habitual and measured dis-
cipline, labour for its own sake, or in wholly friendly
contest for prizes which in reality borrow all their
value from the quality of the receiver.
We are with Pindar, you see, in this athletic age
of Greek sculpture. It is the period no longer of
battle against a foreign foe, recalling the Homeric
ideal, nor against the tyrant at home, fixing a dubi-
ous ideal for the future, but of peaceful combat as a
fine art pulvis Olympicus. Anticipating the arts,
poetry, a generation before Myron and Polycleitus,
had drawn already from the youthful combatants in
the great national games the motives of those Odes,
the bracing words of which, as I said, are like work
in fine bronze, or, as Pindar himself suggests, in
ivory and gold. Sung in the victor's supper- room,
or at the door of his abode, or with the lyre and the
pipe as they took him home in procession through
the streets, or commemorated the happy day, or in a
temple where he laid up his crown, Pindar's songs
bear witness to the pride of family or township in the
physical perfection of son or citizen, and his conse-
quent success in the long or the short foot-race, or
the foot-race in armour, or the pentathlon, or any
part of it. "Now on one, now on another," as the
298 THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN
poet tells, "doth the grace that quickeneth (quick-
eneth, literally, on the race-course) look favourably."
"A-pia-rov vSup he declares indeed, and the actual
prize, as we know, was in itself of little or no worth
a cloak, in the Athenian games, but at the greater
games a mere handful of parsley, a few sprigs of
pine or wild olive. The prize has, so to say, only
an intellectual or moral value. Yet actually Pindar's
own verse is all of gold and wine and flowers, is
itself avowedly a flower, or "liquid nectar," or "the
sweet fruit of his soul to men that are winners in the
games." "As when from a wealthy hand one lifting
a cup, made glad within with the dew of the vine,
maketh gift thereof to a youth : " the keynote of
Pindar's verse is there! This brilliant living youth
of his day, of the actual time, for whom, as he says,
he " awakes the clear-toned gale of song " eVeW
oipov Xiyw that song mingles sometimes with the
splendours of a recorded ancient lineage, or with the
legendary greatness of a remoter past, its gods and
heroes, patrons or ancestors, it might be, of the
famous young man of the hour, or with the glory and
solemnity of the immortals themselves taking a share
in mortal contests. On such pretext he will tell a
new story, or bring to its last perfection by his man-
ner of telling it, his pregnancy and studied beauty of
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 299
expression, an old one. The tale of Castor and
Polydeukes, the appropriate patrons of virginal yet
virile youth, starred and mounted, he tells in all its
human interest.
"Ample is the glory stored up for Olympian win-
ners." And what Pindar's contemporaries asked of
him for the due appreciation, the consciousness, of
it, by way of song, that the next generation sought,
by way of sculptural memorial in marble, and above
all, as it seems, in bronze. The keen demand for
athletic statuary, the honour attached to the artist
employed to make his statue at Olympia, or at home,
bear witness again to the pride with which a Greek
town, the pathos, it might be, with which a family,
looked back to the victory of one of its members.
In the courts of Olympia a whole population in
marble and bronze gathered quickly, a world of
portraits, out of which, as the purged and perfected
essence, the ideal soul, of them, emerged the Diadu-
menus, for instance, the Discobolus, the so-called
Jason of the Louvre. Olympia was in truth, as
Pindar says again, a mother of gold-crowned contests,
the mother of a large offspring. All over Greece the
enthusiasm for gymnastic, for the life of the gymna-
sia, prevailed. It was a gymnastic which, under the
happy conditions of that time, was already surely
300 THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN
what Plato pleads for, already one half music,
a matter, partly, of character and of the soul, of the
fair proportion between soul and body, of the soul
with itself. Who can doubt it who sees and con-
siders the still irresistible grace, the contagious
pleasantness, of the Discobolus, the Diadumenus, and
a few other precious survivals from the athletic age
which immediately preceded the manhood of Phei-
dias, between the Persian and the Peloponnesian
wars?
Now, this predominance of youth, of the youthful
form, in art, of bodily gymnastic promoting natural
advantages to the utmost, of the physical perfection
developed thereby, is a sign that essential mastery
has been achieved by the artist the power, that is
to say, of a full and free realisation. For such
youth, in its very essence, is a matter properly within
the limits of the visible, the empirical, world; and in
the presentment of it there will be no place for sym-
bolic hint, none of that reliance on the helpful im-
agination of the spectator, the legitimate scope of
which is a large one, when art is dealing with relig-
ious objects, with what in the fulness of its own nat-
ure is not really expressible at all. In any passable
representation of the Greek discobolus, as in any
passable representation of an English cricketer, there
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 301
can be no successful evasion of the natural difficulties
of the thing to be done the difficulties of compet-
ing with nature itself, or its maker, in that marvel-
lous combination of motion and rest, of inward
mechanism with the so smoothly finished surface and
outline finished ad unguem which enfold it.
Of the gradual development of such mastery of
natural detail, a veritable counterfeit of nature, the
veritable rhythmus of the runner, for example
twinkling heel and ivory shoulder we have hints
and traces in the historians of art. One had attained
the very turn and texture of the crisp locks, another
the very feel of the tense nerve and full-flushed vein,
while with another you saw the bosom of Ladas ex-
pand, the lips part, as if for a last breath ere he
reached the goal. It was like a child finding little
by little the use of its limbs, the testimony of its
senses, at a definite moment. With all its poetic
impulse, it is an age clearly of faithful observation,
of what we call realism, alike in its iconic and heroic
work; alike in portraiture, that is to say, and in the
presentment of divine or abstract types. Its work-
men are close students now of the living form as
such; aim with success at an ever larger and more
various expression of its details; or replace a con-
ventional statement of them by a real and lively one.
302 THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN
That it was thus is attested indirectly by the fact that
they busied themselves, seemingly by way of a tour
de force, and with no essential interest in such sub-
ject, alien as it was from the pride of health which
is characteristic of the gymnastic life, with the ex-
pression of physical pain, in Philoctetes, for instance.
The adroit, the swift, the strong, in full and free
exercise of their gifts, to the delight of others and
of themselves, though their sculptural record has for
the most part perished, are specified in ancient lit-
erary notices as the sculptor's favourite subjects,
repeated, remodelled, over and over again, for the
adornment of the actual scene of athletic success, or
the market-place at home of the distant Northern or
Sicilian town whence the prizeman had come. A
countless series of popular illustrations to Pindar's
Odes ! And if art was still to minister to the relig-
ious sense, it could only be by clothing celestial
spirits also as nearly as possible in the bodily sem-
blance of the various athletic combatants, whose
patrons respectively they were supposed to be.
The age to which we are come in the story of
Greek art presents to us indeed only a chapter of
scattered fragments, of names that are little more,
with but surmise of their original significance, and
mere reasonings as to the sort of art that may have
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 303
occupied what are really empty spaces. Two names,
however, connect themselves gloriously with certain
extant works of art; copies, it is true, at various
removes, yet copies of what is still found delightful
through them, and by copyists who for the most part
were themselves masters. Through the variations of
the copyist, the restorer, the mere imitator, these
works are reducible to two famous original types
the Discobolus or quoit-player, of Myron, the beau
ideal (we may use that term for once justly) of ath-
letic motion; and the Diadumenus of Polycleitus,
as, binding the fillet or crown of victory upon his
head, he presents the beau ideal of athletic repose,
and almost begins to think.
Myron was a native of Eleutherae, and a pupil of
Ageladas of Argos. There is nothing more to tell by
way of positive detail of this so famous artist, save
that the main scene of his activity was Athens, now
become the centre of the artistic as of all other modes
of life in Greece. Multiplicasse veritatem videtur,
says Pliny. He was in fact an earnest realist or
naturalist, and rose to central perfection in the por-
traiture, the idealised portraiture, of athletic youth,
from amastery first of all in the delineation of infe-
rior objects, of little lifeless or living things. Think,
however, for a moment, how winning such objects
304 THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN
are still, as presented on Greek coins; the ear of
corn, for instance, on those of Metapontum; the
microscopic cockle-shell, the dolphins, on the coins
of Syracuse. Myron, then, passes from pleasant
truth of that kind to the delineation of the worthier
sorts of animal life, the ox, the dog to nothing
short of illusion in the treatment of them, as ancient
connoisseurs would have you understand. It is said
that there are thirty-six extant epigrams on his brazen
cow. That animal has her gentle place in Greek art,
from the Siren tomb, suckling her young there, as
the type of eternal rejuvenescence, onwards to the
procession of the Elgin frieze, where, still breathing
deliciously of the distant pastures, she is led to the
altar. We feel sorry for her, as we look, so lifelike
is the carved marble. The sculptor who worked
there, whoever he may have been, had profited doubt-
less by the study of Myron's famous work. For what
purpose he made it, does not appear; as an archi-
tectural ornament; or a votive offering; perhaps only
because he liked making it. In hyperbolic epigram,
at any rate, the animal breathes, explaining suffi-
ciently the point of Pliny's phrase regarding Myron
Corporum curiosus. And when he came to his
main business with the quoit-player, the wrestler, the
runner, he did not for a moment forget that they too
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 305
were animals, young animals, delighting in natural
motion, in free course through the yielding air, over
uninterrupted space, according to Aristotle's defini-
tion of pleasure : " the unhindered exercise of one's
natural force." Corporum tenus curiosus : he was a
" curious workman " as far as the living body is con-
cerned. Pliny goes on to qualify that phrase by
saying that he did not express the sensations of the
mind animi sensus. But just there, in fact, pre-
cisely in such limitation, we find what authenticates
Myron's peculiar value in the evolution of Greek art.
It is of the essence of the athletic prizeman, involved
in the very ideal of the quoit- player, the cricketer,
not to give expression to mind, in any antagonism to,
or invasion of, the body ; to mind as anything more
than a function of the body, whose healthful balance
of functions it may so easily perturb ; to disavow
that insidious enemy of the fairness of the bodily soul
as such.
Yet if the art of Myron was but little occupied with
the reasonable soul (animus), with those mental situ-
ations the expression of which, though it may have a
pathos and a beauty of its own, is for the most part
adverse to the proper expression of youth, to the
beauty of youth, by causing it to be no longer youth-
ful, he was certainly a master of the animal or physi-
306 THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN
cal soul there (anima); how it is, how it displays
itself, as illustrated, for instance, in the Discobolus.
Of voluntary animal motion the very soul is undoubt-
edly there. We have but translations into marble of
the original in bronze. In that, it was as if a blast
of cool wind had congealed the metal, or the living
youth, fixed him imperishably in that moment of rest
which lies between two opposed motions, the back-
ward swing of the right arm, the movement forwards
on which the left foot is in the very act of starting.
The matter of the thing, the stately bronze or marble,
thus rests indeed; but the artistic form of it, in
truth, scarcely more, even to the eye, than the roll-
ing ball or disk, may be said to rest, at every moment
of its course, just metaphysically, you know.
This mystery of combined motion and rest, of rest
in motion, had involved, of course, on the part of
the sculptor who had mastered its secret, long and
intricate consideration. Archaic as it is, primitive
still in some respects, full of the primitive youth it
celebrates, it is, in fact, a learned work, and sug-
gested to a great analyst of literary style, singular as
it may seem, the "elaborate " or "contorted " manner
in literature of the later Latin writers, which, how-
ever, he finds " laudable " for its purpose. Yet with
all its learned involution, thus so oddly characterised
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 307
by Quintilian, so entirely is this quality subordinated
to the proper purpose of the Discobolus as a work of
art, a thing to be looked at rather than to think
about, that it makes one exclaim still, with the poet
of athletes, "The natural is ever best! " TO Se <ua
O.TTO.V KPO.TLO-TOV. Perhaps that triumphant, unim-
peachable naturalness is after all the reason why, on
seeing it for the first time, it suggests no new view
of the beauty of human form, or point of view for
the regarding of it; is acceptable rather as embody-
ing (say, in one perfect flower) all one has ever fan-
cied or seen, in old Greece or on Thames' side, of
the unspoiled body of youth, thus delighting itself
and others, at that perfect, because unconscious,
point of good-fortune, as it moves or rests just there
for a moment, between the animal and spiritual
worlds. "Grant them," you pray in Pindar's own
words, "grant them with feet so light to pass through
life!"
The face of the young man, as you see him in the
British Museum for instance, with fittingly inexpres-
sive expression, (look into, look at the curves of, the
blossomlike cavity of the opened mouth) is beautiful,
but not altogether virile. The eyes, the facial lines
which they gather into one, seem ready to follow the
coming motion of the discus as those of an onlooker
308 THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN
might be ; but that head does not really belong to the
discobolus. To be assured of this you have but to
compare with that version in the British Museum the
most authentic of all derivations from the original,
preserved till lately at the Palazzo Massimi in Rome.
Here, the vigorous head also, with the face, smooth
enough, but spare, and tightly drawn over muscle
and bone, is sympathetic with, yields itself to, the
concentration, in the most literal sense, of all beside;
is itself, in very truth, the steady centre of the
discus, which begins to spin; as the source of will,
the source of the motion with which the discus is
already on the wing, that, and the entire form.
The Discobolus of the Massimi Palace presents, more-
over, in the hair, for instance, those survivals of
primitive manner which would mark legitimately
Myron's actual pre-Pheidiac stand-point; as they are
congruous also with a certain archaic, a more than
merely athletic, spareness of form generally de-
lightful touches of unreality in this realist of a great
time, and of a sort of conventionalism that has an
attraction in itself.
Was it a portrait? That one can so much as ask
the question is a proof how far the master, in spite
of his lingering archaism, is come already from the
antique marbles of ^Egina. Was it the portrait of
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 309
one much-admired youth, or rather the type, the
rectified essence, of many such, at the most pregnant,
the essential, moment, of the exercise of their natu-
ral powers, of what they really were ? Have we here,
in short, the sculptor Myron's reasoned memory of
many a quoit-player, of a long flight of quoit-players;
as, were he here, he might have given us the crick-
eter, the passing generation of cricketers, sub specie
eternitatis, under the eternal form of art?
Was it in that case a commemorative or votive
statue, such as Pausanias found scattered throughout
Greece ? Was it, again, designed to be part only of
some larger decorative scheme, as some have sup-
posed of the Venus of Melos, or a work of genre as
we say, a thing intended merely to interest, to gratify
the taste, with no further purpose? In either case it
may have represented some legendary quoit-player
Perseus at play with Acrisius fatally, as one has
suggested; or Apollo with Hyacinthus, as Ovid de-
scribes him in a work of poetic genre.
And if the Discobolus is, after all, a work of genre
a work merely imitative of the detail of actual life
for the adornment of a room in a private house, it
would be only one of many such produced in Myron's
day. It would be, in fact, one of the pristce directly
attributed to him by Pliny, little congruous as they
310 THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN
may seem with the grandiose motions of his more
characteristic work. The pristce, the sawyers, a
celebrated creation of the kind, is supposed to
have given its name to the whole class of like things.
No age, indeed, since the rudiments of art were
mastered, can have been without such reproductions
of the pedestrian incidents of every day, for the mere
pleasant exercise at once of the curiosity of the spec-
tator and the imitative instinct of the producer. The
Terra- Cotta Rooms of the Louvre and the British
Museum are a proof of it. One such work indeed
there is, delightful in itself, technically exquisite,
most interesting by its history, which properly finds
its place beside the larger, the full-grown, physical
perfection of the Discobolus, one of whose alert
younger brethren he may be, the Spinario namely,
the boy drawing a thorn from his foot, preserved in
the so rare, veritable antique bronze at Rome, in the
Museum of the Capitol, and well known in a host of
ancient and modern reproductions.
There, or elsewhere in Rome, tolerated in the gen-
eral destruction of ancient sculpture like the "Wolf
of the Capitol," allowed by way of heraldic sign, as
in modern Siena, or like the equestrian figure of
Marcus Aurelius doing duty as Charlemagne, like
those, but like very few other works of the kind.
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 311
the Spinario remained, well-known and in honour,
throughout the Middle Age. Stories like that of
Ladas the famous runner, who died as he reached
the goal in a glorious foot-race of boys, the subject
of a famous work by Myron himself, (the "last
breath," as you saw, was on the boy's lips) were told
of the half-grown bronze lad at the Capitol. Of
necessity, but fatally, he must pause for a few
moments in his course; or the course is at length
over, or the breathless journey with some all-
important tidings; and now, not till now, he thinks
of resting to draw from the sole of his foot the cruel
thorn, driven into it as he ran. In any case, there
he still sits for a moment, for ever, amid the smiling
admiration of centuries, in the agility, in the perfect
naivete also as thus occupied, of his sixteenth year, to
which the somewhat lengthy or attenuated structure
of the limbs is conformable. And then, in this
attenuation, in the almost Egyptian proportions, in
the shallowness of the chest and shoulders especially,
in the Phoenician or old Greek sharpness and length
of profile, and the long, conventional, wire-drawn
hair of the boy, arching formally over the forehead
and round the neck, there is something of archaism,
of that archaism which survives, truly, in Myron's
own work, blending with the grace and power of
312 THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN
well-nigh the maturity of Greek art. The blending
of interests, of artistic alliances, is certainly de-
lightful.
Polycleitus, the other famous name of this period,
and with a fame justified by work we may still study,
at least in its immediate derivatives, had also tried
his hand with success in such subjects. In the
Astragalizontes, for instance, well-known to antiquity
in countless reproductions, he had treated an inci-
dent of the every-day life of every age, which Plato
sketches by the way.
Myron, by patience of genius, had mastered the
secret of the expression of movement, had plucked
out the very heart of its mystery. Polycleitus, on
the other hand, is above all the master of rest, of the
expression of rest after toil, in the victorious and
crowned athlete, Diadumenus. In many slightly
varying forms, marble versions of the original in
bronze of Delos, the Diadumenus, indifferently,
mechanically, is binding round his head a ribbon
or fillet. In the Vaison copy at the British Museum
it was of silver. That simple fillet is, in fact, a
diadem, a crown, and he assumes it as a victor; but,
as I said, mechanically, and, prize in hand, might
be asking himself whether after all it had been worth
while. For the active beauty of the Agonistes of
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 313
which Myron's art is full, we have here, then, the
passive beauty of the victor. But the later incident,
the realisation of rest, is actually in affinity with a
certain earliness, so to call it, in the temper and
work of Polycleitus. He is already something of a
reactionary; or pauses, rather, to enjoy, to convey
enjoyably to others, the full savour of a particular
moment in the development of his craft, the moment
of the perfecting of restful form, before the mere
consciousness of technical mastery in delineation
urges forward the art of sculpture to a bewildering
infinitude of motion. In opposition to the ease, the
freedom, of others, his aim is, by a voluntary re-
straint in the exercise of such technical mastery, to
achieve nothing less than the impeccable, within
certain narrow limits. He still hesitates, is self-
exacting, seems even to have checked a growing
readiness of hand in the artists about him. He was
renowned as a graver, found much to do with the
chisel, introducing many a fine after- thought, when
the rough-casting of his work was over. He studied
human form under such conditions as would bring
out its natural features, its static laws, in their en-
tirety, their harmony; and in an academic work, so
to speak, no longer to be clearly identified in what
may be derivations from it, he claimed to have fixed
314 THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN
the canon, the common measure, of perfect man.
Yet with Polycleitus certainly the measure of man
was not yet "the measure of an angel," but still only
that of mortal youth; of youth, however, in that
scrupulous and uncontaminate purity of form which
recommended itself even to the Greeks as befitting
messengers from the gods, if such messengers should
come.
And yet a large part of Myron's contemporary
fame depended on his religious work on his statue
of Here, for instance, in ivory and gold that too,
doubtless, expressive, as appropriately to its subject
as to himself, of a passive beauty. We see it still,
perhaps, in the coins of Argos. And has not the
crowned victor, too, in that mechanic action, in his
demure attitude, something which reminds us of the
religious significance of the Greek athletic service?
It was a sort of worship, you know that department
of public life; such worship as Greece, still in its
superficial youth, found itself best capable of. At
least those solemn contests began and ended with
prayer and sacrifice. Their most honoured prizes
were a kind of religiously symbolical objects. The
athletic life certainly breathes of abstinence, of rule,
and the keeping under of one's self. And here in
the Diadumenus we have one of its priests, a priest
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 315
of the religion whose central motive was what has
been called "the worship of the body," its modest
priest.
The so-called Jason at the Louvre, the Apoxyo-
menus, and a certain number of others you will meet
with from time to time whatever be the age and
derivation of the actual marble which reproduced
for Rome, for Africa, or Gaul, types that can have
had their first origin in one only time and place
belong, at least aesthetically, to this group, together
with the Adorante of Berlin, Winckelmann's antique
favourite, who with uplifted face and hands seems
to be indeed in prayer, looks immaculate enough to
be interceding for others. As to the Jason of the
Louvre, one asks at first sight of him, as he stoops to
make fast the sandal on his foot, whether the young
man can be already so marked a personage. Is he
already the approved hero, bent on some great act
of his famous epopee ; or mere youth only, again,
arraying itself mechanically, but alert in eye and
soul, prompt to be roused to any great action what-
ever? The vaguely opened lips certainly suggest the
latter view; if indeed the body and the head (in a
different sort of marble) really belong to one another.
Ah ! the more closely you consider the fragments of
antiquity, those stray letters of the old Greek aes-
316 THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN
thetic alphabet, the less positive will your conclusions
become, because less conclusive the data regarding
artistic origin and purpose. Set here also, however,
to the end that in a congruous atmosphere, in a real
perspective, they may assume their full moral and
aesthetic expression, whatever of like spirit you may
come upon in Greek or any other work, remembering
that in England also, in Oxford, we have still, for any
master of such art that may be given us, subjects
truly "made to his hand."
As with these, so with their prototypes at Olympia,
or at the Isthmus, above all perhaps in the Diadu-
ntenus of Polycleitus, a certain melancholy (a pagan
melancholy, it may be rightly called, even when we
detect it in our English youth) is blent with the final
impression we retain of them. They are at play
indeed, in the sun; but a little cloud passes over it
now and then; and just because of them, because
they are there, the whole aspect of the place is chilled
suddenly, beyond what one could have thought possi-
ble, into what seems, nevertheless, to be the proper
and permanent light of day. For though they pass
on from age to age the type of what is pleasantest
to look on, which, as type, is indeed eternal, it is, of
course, but for an hour that it rests with any one of
them individually. Assuredly they have no maladies
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 317
of soul any more than of the body Animi sensus
non expressit. But if they are not yet thinking, there
is the capacity of thought, of painful thought, in
them, as they seem to be aware wistfully. In the
Diadumenus of Polycleitus this expression allies it-
self to the long-drawn facial type of his preference,
to be found also in another very different subject, the
ideal of which he fixed in Greek sculpture the
would-be virile Amazon, in exquisite pain, alike of
body and soul the "Wounded Amazon." We may
be reminded that in the first mention of athletic
contests in Greek literature in the twenty-third
book of the Iliad they form part of the funeral rites
of the hero Patroclus.
It is thus, though but in the faintest degree, even
with the veritable prince of that world of antique
bronze and marble, the Discobolus at Rest of the
Vatican, which might well be set where Winckelmann
set the Adorante, representing as it probably does,
the original of Alcamenes, in whom, a generation
after Pheidias, an earlier and more earnest spirit still
survived. Although the crisply trimmed head may
seem a little too small to our, perhaps not quite
rightful, eyes, we might accept him for that canon,
or measure, of the perfect human form, which Poly-
cleitus had proposed. He is neither the victor at
318 THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN
rest, as with Polycleitus, nor the combatant already
in motion, as with Myron; but, as if stepping back-
ward from Myron's precise point of interest, and with
the heavy discus still in the left hand, he is preparing
for his venture, taking stand carefully on the right
foot. Eye and mind concentre, loyally, entirely,
upon the business in hand. The very finger is reck-
oning while he watches, intent upon the cast of an-
other, as the metal glides to the goal. Take him, to
lead you forth quite out of the narrow limits of the
Greek world. You have pure humanity there, with
a glowing, yet restrained joy and delight in itself,
but without vanity; and it is pure. There is nothing
certainly supersensual in that fair, round head, any
more than in the long, agile limbs; but also no im-
pediment, natural or acquired. To have achieved
just that, was the Greek's truest claim for furtherance
in the main line of human development. He had
been faithful, we cannot help saying, as we pass from
that youthful company, in what comparatively is
perhaps little in the culture, the administration,
of the visible world; and he merited, so we might
go on to say he merited Revelation, something
which should solace his heart in the inevitable fading
of that. We are reminded of those strange pro-
phetic words of the Wisdom, the Logos, by whom
THE AGE OF ATHLETIC PRIZEMEN 319
God made the world, in one of the sapiential, half-
Platonic books of the Hebrew Scriptures : "I was
by him, as one brought up with him; rejoicing in
the habitable parts of the earth. My delights were
with the sons of men."
THE END
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PLATO AND PLATONISM.
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