The Life of Greece

by Will Durant

  Fine buildings developed beyond any precedent. At Athens, in the second century, the lofty Corinthian columns of the Olympieum were set up, and the general design of the extended edifice, the most magnificent in Athens, was kid down by the Roman architect Cossutius—a strange inversion of Rome’s usual dependence upon the artists of Greece. Livy described this temple of the Olympian Zeus as the only structure he had seen that could be a fit dwelling for the god of gods.7 Sixteen columns of it stand—the most beautiful existing specimens of the Corinthian style. At Eleusis the dying piety of Athens and the genius of Philon completed the majestic temple of the Mysteries which Pericles had begun on a site already sacred in Mycenaean times; only fragments are left, but some of them show Greek design and carving still at their best. At Delos the French have excavated the ground plan of Apollo’s sanctuary, and have revealed a city once crowded with edifices devoted to commerce or the protection of a hundred Greek or foreign gods. At Syracuse Hieron II raised many impressive buildings, and restored and enlarged the extant municipal theater; to this day we may read his name on its stones. In Egypt the Ptolemies adorned Alexandria with edifices that gave the city a reputation for beauty, but no sign of them survives. Ptolemy III erected at Edfu a temple which is the noblest architectural relic of the Grecian occupation, and his successors built or rebuilt the temple of Isis at Philae. In Ionia new homes were given to the gods at Miletus, Priene, Magnesia, and elsewhere; the third temple of Artemis at Ephesus was finished about 300 B.C. A still vaster fane was raised by the architects Paeonius and Daphnis at Didyma, near Miletus, in honor of Apollo (332 B.C.—A.D. 41); some drums of the superb Ionic columns still remain. At Pergamum Eumenes II made his capital the talk of Greece by building, among many noble structures, that famous Altar to Zeus which the Germans exhumed in 1878, and have skillfully reconstructed in the Pergamum Museum in Berlin. A majestic flight of steps mounted between two porticoes to a spacious colonnaded court; and around one hundred and thirty feet of the base ran a frieze as supreme in its period as that of the Mausoleum in the fourth century, or the Parthenon in the fifth. Never had Greece been so handsomely adorned; and never had the enthusiasm of its citizens and the skill of its artists transformed with such splendor so many habitations of men.

  II. PAINTING

  Painting is usually the last great art to mature in a civilization; in the early stages of a culture it is subordinated to religious architecture and statuary, and it acquires independence only when private life and private wealth invite the decoration of the home or the commemoration of a name. The death of democracy having weakened the sense of the state, the individual returned to domestic consolations. Rich men built themselves palatial residences, and gave high fees to artists who could adorn a fountain or brighten a wall. Alexandria used painting on glass as one form of mural ornament; all Hellenistic cities employed for this purpose movable panels of wood; princes and magnates preferred to have immense pictures painted on detachable marble slabs. Pausanias describes a prodigious number of paintings seen by him in his tour of Greece, but nothing of this flourishing art has cheated time except some faded tints on pottery or stone. We are left to guess at its quality from the pale and middling copies found at Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Rome.

  Greece continued to rank its painters as high as its sculptors and architects, perhaps higher. It paid them American commissions, and told a thousand fond stories about their lives. Ctesicles of Ephesus, failing to receive a desired boon from Queen Stratonice, painted her romping with a fisherman, exhibited the picture, and then took ship to safety; Stratonice, because “the likenesses of the two figures were so admirably expressed,” forgave him and let him, return.8 When Aratus took Sicyon he ordered all portraits of its past dictators destroyed; one dictator, Archestratus, had been shown by Melanthus (a fourth-century painter) beside his chariot, and so vividly that the artist Neacles entreated Aratus to spare the picture; Aratus consented, on condition that the figure of Archestratus be replaced by some less offensive form.9 Protogenes, says Strabo, painted a satyr with a partridge so realistically that live partridges called to it; the painter finally blotted out the bird so that people might appreciate the excellence of his satyr.10 The same artist, Pliny tells us, applied four coats of paint to his most famous picture, lalysus (supposed founder of the town of that name in Rhodes), so that when time wore out the uppermost layer the colors might still be fresh and clear. Vexed by his inability to represent with sufficient verisimilitude the foam that dripped from the mouth of lalysus* dog, Protogenes lost his temper and hurled a sponge at the picture, willing to destroy it; the sponge, of course, struck just at the right place, and, when it fell, left a blotch of color marvelously like the foam of a panting hound. When Demetrius Poliorcetes besieged Rhodes he refrained from setting fire to the town lest this painting be destroyed. During the siege Protogenes continued at work in his village studio, in the direct line of the Macedonian advance. Demetrius sent for him and asked why he had not, like the other villagers, taken refuge within the city walls. “Because I know,” answered Protogenes, “that you are waging war with the Rhodians, and not with the arts.” The King assigned a guard to protect him, and neglected the siege to watch the artist work.11

  Hellenistic painters knew the tricks of perspective, foreshortening, lighting, and grouping. Though they used landscapes only as background and decoration, and rendered them (if we may judge from the Pompeian copies) in a lifeless and conventional way, they at least realized the existence of nature, and brought it into art at the same time that Theocritus was importing it into poetry. But they were so interested in man and all his works that they had little time for trees and flowers. Their predecessors had painted only the gods and the rich; the Hellenistic artists were fascinated by anything human, and discovered that an ugly subject might make a beautiful painting, or at least a handsome fee. They turned to common life with a Dutch zest, and delighted in picturing barbers, cobblers, prostitutes, seamstresses, donkeys, deformed men, or peculiar animals. To these genre pictures they added representations of still life—cakes and eggs, fruit and vegetables, fish and game, wine and all the paraphernalia of its ancient ritual. Sosus of Pergamum amused his contemporaries by imitating, in a deceptively realistic floor mosaic, an unswept floor still littered with the leavings of a feast.12 The sedate were scandalized, and denounced these glorifiers of common things as pornographoi and rhyparographoi—portrayers of obscenity and filth. In Thebes the representation of ugly objects was forbidden by law.13

  Certain larger masterpieces of the age were rescued not from anonymity but from oblivion by the lava of Vesuvius. A fresco found at Ostia is apparently a weak copy of a Hellenistic original; we know it as The Aldobrandini Wedding from the Italian family to which it belonged before it found a place in the Vatican. Aphrodite, Rubensianly robust, warms up the courage of the timid bride while the bridegroom, needing no prodding, waits impatiently beside the couch; finer than these central personages is a graceful woman playing some hymeneal strain on a faded lute. A Pompeian mural, traced uncertainly to a third-century Greek original, shows Achilles, with Patroclus beside him, angrily surrendering Briseis to Agamemnon’s lust. The figures in these paintings seem to our wont and taste more ample than beautiful; we are accustomed to less body and longer legs; but it must be conceded that ancient artists knew Greek men and women better than we shall ever know them. Time has taken the bloom from these works; only an act of historical imagination can restore the brilliance and freshness that doubtless were once the admiration of multitudes and kings.

  More impressive are certain Roman mosaics that have apparently been derived from Hellenistic paintings. Mosaic was an old art in Egypt and Mesopotamia; the Greeks took it over, and lifted it to the peak of its history. A painting was divided by lines into little squares, and tiny cubes of marble were so colored that when put together they reproduced the picture in a form surprisingly durable; several mosaics, though trodden by innumerable feet through many centuries, still retain their
color and tell their ancient tale. The Battle of Issus, found in the House of the Faun at Pompeii, and dubiously connected with a fourth-century Greek painting by Philoxenus,* is composed of approximately 1,500,000 stones, each some two or three millimeters square, the whole mosaic measuring eight by sixteen feet. It was badly injured by the earthquake and eruption that overwhelmed Pompeii in A.D. 79, but enough remains to attest the skill and vigor of the work. Alexander, black and disheveled with the heat and filth of war, is leading the attack, and has ridden his Bucephalus to within a few feet of the chariot that carries Darius. A Persian grandee has flung himself between the kings, and has received Alexander’s lance in his body. Darius, ignoring his own danger—for the conqueror’s next lance is aimed at him—leans from his chariot towards his fallen friend, his face full of anxiety and grief. Persian cavalrymen rush up to rescue their ruler, and Alexander’s weapon stays poised in the air. The representation of complex emotions in Darius’ face is the outstanding accomplishment of the work; but the most attractive head in the composition is that of Alexander’s horse. There is no greater mosaic than this.

  III. SCULPTURE

  Never has statuary been more abundant than in the Hellenistic age. Temples and palaces, homes and streets, gardens and parks were crowded with it; every phase of human life, and many aspects of the plant and animal world, were represented in it; portrait busts immortalized for a moment dead heroes and living celebrities; at last even abstractions like Fortune, Peace, Calumny, or the Nick of Time, became concrete in stone. Eutychides of Sicyon, a pupil of Lysippus, molded for Antioch a famous Tyche, or Fortune, to serve as the incarnation of the city’s soul and hope. The sons of Praxiteles—Timachus and Cephisodotus—carried on the refined tradition of Athenian sculpture; and in the Peloponnesus Damophon of Messene scaled the heights of fame with a colossal group of Demeter, Persephone, and Artemis. But most of the new sculptors followed the line of least starvation to the palaces and courts of Greco-Oriental magnates and kings.

  Rhodes, in the third century, developed a school of sculpture characteristically its own. There were a hundred colossal statues in the island, any one of which, says Pliny,14 would have made a city famous. The greatest of them was the bronze colossus of the sun-god Helios, set up in successive blocks by Chares of Lindus about 280. Chares, says a naive tradition, committed suicide when the cost seriously exceeded his estimate; and Laches, also of Lindus, completed the work. It did not bestride the harbor, but rose near it to a height of one hundred and five feet. Its dimensions might suggest that Rhodian taste ran to display and size; but perhaps the Rhodians proposed to use it as a lighthouse and a symbol. If we may believe a poem in The Greek Anthology,15 the statue held a light aloft, and symbolized the freedom that Rhodes enjoyed—a curious anticipation of a famous statue in a modern port.* It was, of course, included among the Seven Wonders of the World. “This statue,” Pliny reports,

  was thrown down by an earthquake fifty-six years after it was erected. Few men can clasp the thumb in their arms, and its fingers are larger than most statues. When the limbs are broken asunder vast caverns are seen yawning in the interior. Within it, too, are to be seen large masses of rock by whose weight the artist steadied it while in process of erection. It is said that it was twelve years in the making, and that three hundred talents were spent upon it—a sum raised from the engines of war abandoned by Demetrius after his futile siege.*16

  Almost as famous in history was another product of the Rhodian school, the Laocoön. Pliny saw it in the palace of the Emperor Titus; it was found in the ruins of the Baths of Titus in A.D. 1506, and is almost certainly the original work of Agesander, Polydorus, and Athenodorus, who carved it out of two blocks of marble in the second or first century B.C.18 Its discovery stirred Renaissance Italy and profoundly impressed Michelangelo, who tried, without success, to restore the lost right arm of the central figure.† Laocoön was a Trojan priest who, when the Greeks sent the wooden horse to Troy, advised against receiving it, saying (says Virgil), Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes—“I fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts.”19 To punish his wisdom Athena, who favored the Greeks, commissioned two serpents to kill him. They seized first upon his two sons, seeing which Laocoön rushed to their aid, only to be caught in the coils; in the end all three were crushed, and died from the venom of the fangs. The sculptors took the liberty assumed by Virgil (and, in the Philoctetes, by Sophocles) to describe pain vigorously, but the result does not accord with the natural repose of stone. In literature, and usually in life, pain passes; in the Laocöon the cry of agony has been given an unnatural permanence, and the spectator is not so moved as by Demeter’s silent grief.‡ What nevertheless evokes our admiration is the mastery of design and technique; the musculature is exaggerated, but the old priest’s limbs, and the bodies of his sons, are molded with dignity and restraint. Perhaps if we had known the story before seeing the group we should have been as impressed as Pliny, who thought this the greatest achievement of ancient plastic art.20

  Many other Greek centers had flourishing schools of sculpture in this underestimated age. Alexandria turned over its soil and its buildings too often in the long course of its history to preserve the works that Greek artists made for the Ptolemies. The sole important survivor is the serene Nile of the Vatican, humorously supported by sixteen water babies symbolizing the sixteen cubits of the river’s annual rise. At Sidon Greek sculpture cut for unknown dignitaries a series of sarcophagi of which the best, misnamed the Sarcophagus of Alexander, is the pride of the Constantinople Museum. Its carving is equal, on a smaller scale, to that of the Parthenon frieze; the figures are handsome and well proportioned; the action is vigorous but clear, and the soft tints that still cling to the stone exemplify the aid that Greek painting gave to Greek sculpture. At Tralles, in Caria, about 150 B.C., Apollonius and Tauriscus cast for Rhodes a colossal bronze group now known as the Farnese Bull: two handsome youths are lashing the lovely Dirce to the horns of a wild bull, because she has ill-treated their mother Antiope—who looks on in repulsively calm satisfaction.* At Pergamum Greek sculptors cast in bronze several battle groups, which Attalus first dedicated in his capital to celebrate his repulse of the Gauls. To express the debt which all Greek culture felt to Athens, and perhaps to spread his fame, Attalus presented marble replicas of these figures to be set up on the Athenian Acropolis. Fragmentary marble copies have survived in The Dying Gaul of the Capitoline Museum, in the miscalled Paetus and Arria†—a Gaul who, preferring death to capture, kills first his wife and then himself—and in several smaller pieces now scattered through Egypt and Europe. Perhaps to the same group belongs a Dead Amazon,‡ impeccably molded in every detail except the incredibly perfect breasts. These figures show a classic restraint in the expression of emotion; the conquered men suffer the extremes of pain and grief, but die without opera; and the conquerors have allowed the artists to portray the virtues, as well as the defeat, of their enemies. There is no sign here of any falling off in power of conception, accuracy of anatomical observation, or skill and patience of technique. Almost as perfect is the great relief that ran along the base of the Altar of Zeus on the Acropolis of Pergamum, and told again the story of the war between the gods and the giants—presumably a modest allegory for Pergamenes and Gauls. The work is overcrowded, and sometimes theatrically violent; but some figures stand out as in the best tradition of Greek art. The headless Zeus is carved with the strength of Scopas, and the goddess Hecate is a lyric of grace and beauty amid the terror and carnage of war.

  The age was rich in now anonymous masterpieces that almost call the roll of the major gods. The majestic Head of Zeus found at Otricoli, and the Ludovisi Hera now in the Museo delle Terme so pleased the young Goethe that he took casts of them with him to Germany as, so to speak, the authentic autographs of Jove and Juno. The once acclaimed Apollo Belvedere* is academically cold and lifeless; and yet, two centuries ago, it set Winckelmann aflame.21 A world away from this smooth weakling is the Farnese Heracles, copied
by Glycon of Athens from an original attributed to Lysippus—all muscle in the overdone body, all weariness, kindliness, and wonder in the face—as if power was asking itself its never answered question: what should be its goal? Of Aphrodite the age had representatives only less numerous than her devotees; several of these statues have survived, mostly through Roman copies. The Aphrodite of Melos—the Venus de Milo of the Louvre—is apparently an original Greek work of the second century B.C. It was found on the island of Melos in 1820, near a pedestal fragment bearing the letters—sandros; perhaps Agesander of Antioch carved this modest nudity. The face is not as delicately fair as that which forms the symbol of this volume, but the figure itself is a poem of that health whose natural flower is beauty; the wasp waist finds no encouragement in this full body and these sturdy hips. Not so near perfection, but still pleasant to the eye, are the Capitoline Venus and the Venus de Medici.† Candidly and disarmingly sensual is the Venus Callipyge, or Venus of the Lovely Buttocks,‡ who drapes her charms to reveal them, and turns to admire her nates in the pool. More impressive than any of these is the superb Nike, or Victory of Samothrace, found there in 1863, and now the sculptural masterpiece of the Louvre.§ The goddess of victory is shown as if alighting in full flight upon the prow of a swiftly moving ship and leading the vessel on to attack; her great wings seem to pull the craft along in the face of the breeze that confuses her robes. Again the Greek conception of woman as no mere delicacy, but as a strong mother, dominates the work; this is not the frail and passing beauty of youth, but the lifelong call of the woman to the man to lift himself up to achievement, as if the artist had wished to illustrate the last lines of Goethe’s Faust. The civilization that could conceive and carve this figure was yet far from dead.