by Will Durant
2. Sculpture
The Greek settlement of western Asia, and the opening of Egypt to Greek trade towards 660 B.C., allowed Near Eastern and Egyptian forms and methods of statuary to enter Ionia and European Greece. About 580 two Cretan sculptors, Dipoenus and Scyllis, accepted commissions at Sicyon and Argos, and left behind them there not only statues but pupils; from this period dates a vigorous school of sculpture in the Peloponnese. The art had many purposes: it commemorated the dead first with simple pillars, then with herms whose head alone was carved, then with forms completely chiseled in the round, or with funeral-stelae reliefs; it made statues of victorious athletes, first as types, later as individuals; and it was encouraged by the lively imagination of Greek faith to make countless images of the gods.
Until the sixth century its material was most frequently wood. We hear a great deal of the chest of Cypselus, dictator of Corinth. According to Pausanias, it was made of cedar, inlaid with ivory and gold, and adorned with complicated carvings. As wealth increased, wooden statues might be covered, in whole or part, by precious materials; indeed it was thus that Pheidias made his chryselephantine (i.e., gold and ivory) statues of Athene Parthenos and the Olympian Zeus. Bronze rivaled stone as sculptural material to the end of classical art. Few ancient bronzes have survived the temptation to melt them down, but we may judge from the perhaps too ministerial Charioteer of the Delphi Museum (ca. 490) how near to perfection the art of hollow casting had been carried since Rhoecus and Theodorus of Samos had introduced it into Greece. The most famous group in Athenian statuary, the Tyrannicides (Harmodius and Aristogeiton), was cast in bronze by Antenor at Athens shortly after the expulsion of Hippias. Many forms of soft stone were used before the sculptors of Greece undertook to mold harder varieties with hammer and chisel; but once they had learned the art they almost denuded Naxos and Paros of marble. In the archaic period (1100-490) the figures were often painted; but towards the end of that age it was found that a better effect could be secured, in representing the delicate skin of women, by leaving the polished marble without artificial tint.
The Greeks of Ionia were the first to discover the uses of drapery as a sculptural element. Egypt and the Near East had left the clothing rigid—a vast stone apron nullifying the living form; but in sixth-century Greece the sculptors introduced folds into the drapery, and used the garment to reveal that ultimate source and norm of beauty, the healthy human body. Nevertheless the Egypto-Asiatic influence remained so strong that in most archaic Greek sculpture the figure is heavy, graceless, and stiff; the legs are strained even, in repose; the arms hang helpless at the sides; the eyes have the almond form, and occasionally an Oriental slant; the face is stereotyped, immobile, passionless. Greek statuary, in this period, accepted the Egyptian rule of frontality—i.e., the figure was made to be seen only from the front, and so rigidly bisymmetrical that a vertical line would pass through the nose, mouth, navel, and genitals with never a right or left deviation, and no flexure of either motion or rest. Perhaps convention was responsible for this dull rigidity: the law of the Greek games forbade a victor to set up a portrait statue of himself unless he had won all contests in the pentathlon; only then, the Greeks argued, would he achieve the harmonious physical development that would merit individual modeling.57 For this reason, and perhaps because, as in Egypt, religious convention before the fifth century governed the representation of the gods, the Greek sculptor confined himself to a few poses and types, and devoted himself to their mastery.
Two types above all won his study: the youth, or kouros, nearly nude, slightly advancing the left leg, with arms at the side or partly extended, fists closed, countenance quiet and stern; and the kore, or maiden, carefully coiffured, modestly posed and draped, one hand gathering up the robe, the other offering some gift to the gods. History till lately called the kouroi “Apollos,” but they were more probably athletes or funerary monuments. The most famous of the type is the Apollo of Tenea; the largest, the Apollo of Sunium; the most pretentious, the Throne of Apollo at Amyclae, near Sparta. One of the finest is the small Strangford Apollo in the British Museum; finer still is the Choiseul-Gouffier Apollo, a Roman copy of an early fifth-century original.58 To at least the male eye the korai are more pleasing: their bodies are gracefully slender, their faces are softened with a Mona Lisa smile, their drapery begins to escape the stiffness of convention; some of them, like those in the Athens Museum would be called masterpieces in any other land;59 one of them, which we may call the Kore of Chios,* is a masterpiece even in Greece. In them the sensuous Ionian touch breaks through the Egyptian immobility and Dorian austerity of the “Apollos.” Archermus of Chios created another type, or followed lost models, in the Nike, or Victory, of Delos; out of this would come the lovely Nike of Paeonius at Olympia, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, and, in Christian art, the winged figures of cherubim.60 Near Miletus unknown sculptors carved a series of draped and seated females for the temple of the Branchidae, figures powerful but crude, dignified but ponderous, profound but dead.†
Sculpture in relief was so old that a pretty legend could undertake to describe its origin. A lass of Corinth drew upon a wall the outline of the shadow that the lamplight cast of her lover’s head. Her father Butades, a potter, filled in the outline with clay, pressed the form to hardness, took it down, and baked it; so, Pliny assures us, bas-relief was born.61 The art became even more important than sculpture in the adornment of temples and graves. Already in 520 Aristocles made a funeral relief of Aristion, which is one of the many treasures of the Athens Museum.
Since reliefs were nearly always painted, sculpture, relief, and painting were allied arts, usually handmaids to architecture; and most artists were skilled in all four forms. Temple moldings, friezes, metopes, and pediment backgrounds were usually painted, while the main structure was ordinarily left in the natural color of the stone. Of painting as a separate art we have only negligible remains from Greece; but we know through passages in the poets that panel painting, with colors mixed in melted wax, was already practiced in the days of Anacreon.62 Painting was the last great art to develop in Greece, and the last to die.
All in all, the sixth century failed to rise, in any Greek art except architecture, to the boldness of conception or the perfection of form attained in the same age by Greek philosophy and poetry. Perhaps artistic patronage was slow to develop in an aristocracy still rural and poor, or in a business class too young to have graduated from wealth to taste. Nevertheless the age of the dictators was a period of stimulation and improvement in every Greek art—above all, under Peisistratus and Hippias in Athens. Towards the end of this period the old rigidity of sculpture began to thaw, the rule of frontality was broken down; legs began to move, arms to leave the side, hands to open up, faces to take on feeling and character, bodies to bend in a variety of poses revealing new studies in anatomy and action. This revolution in sculpture, this animation of stone with life, became a major event in Greek history; the escape from frontality was one of the signal accomplishments of Greece. Egyptian and Oriental influences were set aside, and Greek art became Greek.
3. Architecture
The science of building recovered slowly from the Dorian invasion, and redeemed beyond its deserts the Dorian name. Across the Dark Age from Agamemnon to Terpander, the Mycenaean megaron transmitted the essentials of its structure to Greece; the rectangular shape of the building, the use of columns within and without, the circular shaft and simple square capital, the triglyphs and metopes of the entablature, were all preserved in the greatest achievement of Greek art, the Doric style. But whereas Mycenaean architecture was apparently secular, devoted to palaces and homes, classical Greek architecture was almost entirely religious. The royal megaron was transformed into a civic temple as monarchy waned and religion and democracy united the affections of Greece in honoring the personified city in its god.
The earliest Greek temples were of wood or brick, as befitted the poverty of the Dark Age. When stone became the orthodox
material of temple building the architectural features remained as set by timber construction; the rectangular naos or temple proper, the circular shafts, the “master-beam” architraves, the beam-end triglyphs, the gabled roof, confessed the wooden origin of their form; even the first Ionic spiral was apparently a floral figure painted upon a block of wood.63 The use of stone increased as Greek wealth and travel grew; the transition was most rapid after the opening of Egypt to Greek trade about 660 B.C. Limestone was the favored material of the new styles before the sixth century; marble came in towards 580, at first for decorative portions, then for façades, finally for the entire temple from base to tiles.
Three “orders” of architecture were developed in Greece: the Doric, the Ionic, and, in the fourth century, the Corinthian. Since the interior of the temple was reserved for the god and his ministrants, and worship was held outside, all three orders devoted themselves to making the exterior impressively beautiful. They began at the ground, usually in some elevated place, with the stereobate—two or three layers of foundation stone in receding steps. From the uppermost layer, or stylobate, rose directly, without individual base, the Doric column—”fluted” with shallow, sharp-edged grooves, and widening perceptibly at the middle in what the Greeks called entasis, or stretching. Furthermore, the Doric column tapered slightly towards the top, thereby emulating the tree, and successfully contradicting the Minoan-Mycenaean style. (An undiminished shaft—worse yet, one that tapers downward—seems top-heavy and graceless to the eye, while the wider base heightens that sense of stability which all architecture should convey. Perhaps, however, the Doric column is too heavy, too thick in proportion to its height, too stolidly engrossed in sturdiness and strength.) Upon the Doric column sat its simple and powerful capital: a “necking” or circular band, a cushionlike echinus, and, topmost, a square abacus to spread the supporting thrust of the pillar beneath the architrave.
While the Dorians were developing this style from the megaron, modified probably by acquaintance with the Egyptian “proto-Doric” colonnades of Derel-Bahri and Beni-Hasan, the Ionian Greeks were altering the same fundamental form under Asiatic influence. In the resultant Ionic order a slender column rose upon an individual base, and began at the bottom, as it ended at the top, with a narrow fillet or band; its height was usually greater, and its diameter smaller, than in the Doric shaft; the upward tapering was scarcely perceptible; the flutings were deep, semicircular grooves separated by flat edges. The Ionic capital was composed of a narrow echinus, a still narrower abacus, and between them—almost concealing them—emerged the twin spirals of a volute, like an infolded scroll—a graceful element adapted from Hittite, Assyrian, and other Oriental forms.64 These characteristics, together with the elaborate adornment of the entablature, described not only a style but a people; they represented in stone the Ionian expressiveness, suppleness, sentiment, elegance, and love of delicate detail, even as the Doric order conveyed the proud reserve, the massive strength, the severe simplicity of the Dorian; the sculpture, literature, music, manners, and dress of the rival groups differed in harmony with their architectural styles. Dorian architecture is mathematics, Ionian architecture is poetry, both seeking the durability of stone; the one is “Nordic,” the other Oriental; together they constitute the masculine and feminine themes in a basically harmonious form.
Greek architecture distinguished itself by developing the column into an element of beauty as well as a structural support. The essential function of the external colonnade was to uphold the eaves, and to relieve the walls of the naos, or inner temple, from the outward thrust of the gabled roof. Above the columns rose the entablature—i.e., the superstructure of the edifice. Here again, as in the supporting elements, Greek architecture sought a clear differentiation, and yet an articulated connection, of the members. The architrave—the great stone that connected the capitals—was in the Doric order plain, or carried a simple painted molding; in Ionic it was composed of three layers, each projecting below, and was topped with a marble cornice segmented with a confusing variety of ornamental details. Since the sloping beams that made the framework of the roof in the Doric style came down, and were secured, between two horizontal beams at the eaves, the united ends of the three beams formed—at first in wood, then imitatively in stone—a triglyph or triply divided surface. Between each triglyph and the next a space was left as an open window when the roof was of wood or of terra-cotta tiles; when translucent marble tiles were used these metopes, or “seeing-between” places, were filled in with marble slabs carved in low relief. In the Ionic style a band or frieze of reliefs might run around the upper outer walls of the naos or cella; in the fifth century both forms of relief—metopes and frieze—were often used in the same building, as in the Parthenon. In the pediments—the triangles formed by the gabled roof in front and rear—the sculptor found his greatest opportunity; the figures here might be drawn out in high relief and enlarged for view from below; and the cramped corners, or tympana, tested the subtlest skill. Finally, the roof itself might be a work of art, with brilliantly colored tiles and decorative rain-disposing acroteria, or pinnacle figures, rising from the angles of the pediments. All in all, there was probably a surplus of sculpture on the Greek temple, between the columns, along the walls, or within the edifice. The painter also was involved: the temple was colored in whole or in part, along with its statues, moldings, and reliefs. Perhaps we do the Greeks too much honor today, when time has worn the paint from their temples and divinities, and ferrous strains have lent to the marble natural and incalculable hues that set off the brilliance of the stone under the clear Greek sky. Some day even contemporary art may become beautiful.
The two rival styles achieved grandeur in the sixth century, and perfection in the fifth. Geographically they divided Greece unevenly: Ionic prevailed in Asia and the Aegean, Doric on the mainland and in the west. The salient achievements of sixth-century Ionic were the temples of Artemis at Ephesus, of Hera at Samos, and of the Branchidae near Miletus; but only ruins survive of Ionic architecture before Marathon. The finest extant buildings from the sixth century are the older temples of Paestum and Sicily, all in the Doric style. The ground plan remains of the great temple built at Delphi, between 548 and 512, from the designs of the Corinthian Spintharus; it was destroyed by earthquake in 373, was rebuilt on the same plan, and in that form still stood when Pausanias made his tour of Greece. Athenian architecture of the period was almost wholly Doric: in this style Peisistratus began, about 530, the gigantic temple of the Olympian Zeus, on the plain at the foot of the Acropolis. After the Persian conquest of Ionia in 546, hundreds of Ionian artists migrated to Attica, and introduced or developed the Ionic style in Athens. By the end of the century Athenian architects were using both orders, and had laid all the technical groundwork for the Periclean age.
4. Music and the Dance
The word mousike among the Greeks meant originally any devotion to any Muse. Plato’s Academy was called a Museion or Museum—i.e., a place dedicated to the Muses and the many cultural pursuits which they patronized; the Museum at Alexandria was a university of literary and scientific activity, not a collection of museum pieces. In the narrower and modern sense music was at least as popular among the Greeks as it is among ourselves today. In Arcadia all freemen studied music to the age of thirty; everyone knew some instrument; and to be unable to sing was accounted a disgrace.65 Lyric poetry was so named because, in Greece, it was composed to be sung to the accompaniment of the lyre, the harp, or the flute. The poet usually wrote the music as well as the words, and sang his own songs; to be a lyric poet in ancient Greece was far more difficult than to compose, as poets do today, verses for silent and solitary reading. Before the sixth century there was hardly any Greek literature divorced from music. Education and letters, as well as religion and war, were bound up with music: martial airs played an important part in military training, and nearly all instruction of the memory was through verse. By the eighth century Greek music was already old
, with hundreds of varieties and forms.
The instruments were simple, and were based, like our vaster armory of sound, upon percussion, wind, or strings. The first class were not popular. The flute was favored at Athens until Alcibiades, laughing at his music master’s inflated cheeks, refused to play so ridiculous an instrument, and set a fashion against it among Athenian youth. (Besides, said the Athenians, the Boeotians surpassed them with the flute, which branded the art as a vulgar one.66) The simple flute, or aulos, was a tube of cane or bored wood with a detachable mouthpiece and from two to seven finger holes into which movable stopples might be inserted to modify the pitch. Some players used the double flute—a “masculine” or bass flute in the right hand and a “feminine” or treble flute in the left, both held to the mouth by a strap around the cheeks, and played in simple harmony. By attaching the flute to a distensible bag the Greeks made a bagpipe; by uniting several graduated flutes they made a syrinx, or Pipe of Pan; by extending and opening the end, and closing the finger holes, they made a salpinx, or trumpet.67 Flute music, says Pausanias,68 was usually gloomy, and was always used in dirges or elegies; but the auletridai—the flute-playing geisha girls of Greece—do not seem to have purveyed gloom. String music was confined to plucking the strings with finger or plectrum; bowing was unknown.69 The lyre, phorminx, or kithara were essentially alike—four or more strings of sheep gut stretched over a bridge across a resonant body of metal or tortoise shell. The kithara was a small harp, used for accompanying narrative poetry; the lyre was like a guitar, and was chosen to accompany lyric poetry and songs.