“The Three Fates”
British Museum
Enough remains of the various parts of the Parthenon decorations to enable us to judge of the supreme gifts of the artist to whose imagination they were due and under whose direction they were fashioned. An hour in the Elgin room of the British Museum, where the larger part are enshrined, should be sufficient to convince the greatest sceptic. The magnificent group “The Three Fates” show the marvellous skill of the Athenian sculptors in dealing with drapery. There is an ideal nobility in such a figure as that familiarly known as “The Theseus” which places it on a higher plane of art than either the beautifully proportioned forms of Polyclitus or the rhythmical translations of nature by Myron. The wonderful fertility of invention, which is, perhaps, the most noticeable feature of the whole of the Parthenon designs, would have been an impossible achievement for the steady imagination of the Argive sculptor. It needed the temperament of an Athenian artist working under the inspiration of his subject and certain of the appreciation of his countrymen. It is one of the tragedies of art that one who had deserved the esteem of his fellows so fully did not retain it. Phidias died in exile at Elis. An accusation of misappropriating the gold voted for the statue, together with a charge of sacrilege for engraving his own portrait and that of Pericles on the shield of Athena, caused the great sculptor to leave the city he had served so well. He died about 432 b.c.
So far we have spoken of Phidias, the sculptor, and Ictinus, the architect. Our modern ideas incline us to associate the artist with the work—Wren with St. Paul’s and Raphael with the “Sistine Madonna.” In reality, the foundation-stone of the Parthenon should be inscribed thus: “Pericles and the people of Athens made me.”
A work of art so great, which exemplified the struggles and aspirations of a race so completely, could not but owe the largest debt to the political leader of the State. All the forces of Athens were united to beautify the Acropolis, and these were marshalled, naturally enough, not by an artist but by a politician. The real creator of the temple of Athena was Pericles. He realised that the greatness of his countrymen depended, not upon the breadth of their dominions, but upon the healthy development of every citizen, physically, mentally, and emotionally. He divined that the proud boast “we love the beautiful without extravagance and knowledge without exaggeration” was incompatible with strivings after empire. To engage the Athenian imagination, and to wean it from the road which eventually led to ruin, Pericles bethought him of the erection of the series of monuments witnessing to the glory of the first city of Greece. His was the conception in its entirety, he found the means, and, above all, he never permitted the enthusiasm of his countrymen to flag.
These are the chief facts. They prove that the temple of the Virgin goddess and the marbles with which it was adorned, played a part in the life of the fifth-century Athenian, for which there is no modern counterpart. The Parthenon brought heaven to earth. It satisfied the individual Athenian’s craving for light as to his personal destiny. But above all, it stood for those social and political ideals which he estimated far above his own personal wants. It spoke to his soul as the idea of Empire speaks to the patriotic Briton of to-day. The pedimental groups, too, were more than decorations or mere pictures of the great gods; they glowed with a message which we should deem inspired. When the Athenian’s gaze wandered towards the Acropolis—still more when, during some high festival, he stood before the temple marbles—he could forget the perpetual sacrifice of will, liberty and individuality—things which we Europeans deem altogether desirable—and say with all sincerity, “it is worth while.”
The Temple Statuary
One thing will have struck our readers throughout the foregoing argument. It has been impossible to avoid a certain tendency towards confusing terms. For instance, stress has been laid upon three factors in Greek life, as exercising an immense influence upon Hellenic sculpture—civic pride, a deep tolerance in religious opinion, and an intense feeling for physical strength and beauty. Yet, directly we have come to grips with these conceptions, they have appeared to be inextricably commingled. The Greek’s pride in his city-state, his absorption in physical beauty, are religious in their fervour and in the way in which they are utilized to uphold a strenuous moral ideal. Again, the actions which are most akin to what we term religion nowadays, closely resemble philosophy in their rigid rejection of everything approaching mysticism.
In relating any art to the social and political circumstances which gave it birth, it is all-important to remember that the distinctions between such terms as science, art, religion, and philosophy are more or less arbitrary. In the earliest times men did not distinguish between any of the four. When the skin-clad dweller in the forests gazed upon the lightning flashing among the oak branches, and imaged the angry ruler of earth and sky, he did not separate the explanation of the natural phenomenon from the symbolical incarnation, or both from the religious belief. Nor was this less so when the human mind rose to more complex conceptions. The Pueblo Indian, for instance, recognizes a Sky-god and an Earth-goddess, the parents of all living things. The Sky-god passes across the heavens with the blazing shield of the sun’s disc in his hand, to vanish beyond the portals of the dark underworld where the spirits of the dead are at rest. This is at once the science, the art, and the religion of the Pueblo Indian. It satisfies two elemental cravings of his nature. In the first place it translates the phenomena of the natural world into terms which his reason can grasp. In the second place it satisfies his yearning for some superior will—we call this God—to which he may attribute the purpose and order which he instinctively assumes in the world.
So it was in Greece. We may be convinced that the Iliad and the Odyssey should be described as art. They are art to our way of thinking; that is to say, to our minds they are clearly more akin to “Paradise Lost” than to the religious poetry of the Jews. But to the Greek they were at once religion and art and philosophy.
Exactly the same remark must preface our consideration of the third class into which the sculptures of fifth-century Greece may be divided—the temple statues, erected to such deities as Zeus, Hera, and Athena.
For five hundred years or more the best elements in the religious faith of ancient Greece had been fostered and sustained by the Homeric poems. These, at least, offered an antidote to the brutal temple myths which had gradually gathered around the names of the gods, the nature of which can be realized from the pages of Hesiod. But the Greeks must at times have hungered for more definite representations of the great gods and goddesses.
In the fifth century, however, the sculptors shook off the bonds of realism, which had prevented the portrayal of such a purely ideal figure as the deity “who dwelt in the heights of the air,” and whose voice could be heard in the rustling of the oak-leaves of Dodona. It was realized that a divine image, as satisfying to the imagination of the Greek as the word-pictures of Homer, was possible. The success of the great artists of the fifth century was instantaneous. Within a short time all the great temples of the Hellenic world were furnished with statues of the deities in whose honour they were erected.
The sculptors were content for the most part to follow the imaginations of the earlier poets. They only sought to realize in the god-like forms their highest ideals of human beauty and dignity. They avoided the example of the Babylonians and Egyptians who had emphasized the unworldliness of their deities by investing them with strange shapes and symbols. The Greek imagination was content to add to the human form a more than human majesty. Gradually these statues became so much a part of their imagination that the Greeks found it impossible to picture the great gods apart from the artists’ portrayals. So widespread was the effect of sculpture on Greek and Roman religious thought that, at length, no other conception of the gods could be formed. In the wall paintings of Pompeii the deities are represented as of the colour and material of statues, the sculptural effect being imitated as closely as possible.
Lucian, too, in one of his dialogues, pictures the assembly of the Olympian deities who are dismayed that men no longer rest upon the faiths of their forefathers. In the course of the dialogue, Zeus orders “that the gods should be seated in order of merit. The gold gods first, then the silver, then the ivory, bronze, and stone,” he commands, “and give preference to any work of Phidias, or Alcamenes, or Myron, or Euphranor, or other artist of distinction.”
The most famous of the religious statues of ancient Greece were erected to Zeus and Hera. Other gods and goddesses were particularly identified with the various cities of Greece, such as Athena with Athens. But for the whole Greek world Zeus and Hera were the recognized rulers among the dwellers in Olympus. The chief temple of Zeus was at Olympia where, as we have seen, the Pan-Hellenic Games were held in his honour. That of Hera lay between Argos and Mycenæ. To these the Hellenic world came from time to time to honour the Father of the gods and his chosen consort. In the inner shrine of each stood a great “chryselephantine” statue—a term used to distinguish the wooden statues, with their veneer of ivory and gold, from the ordinary marbles and bronzes. No trace of either remains to-day. Wood is perishable, and the plunder of gold would doubtless have proved irresistible to the Turk, even had the Christian been scrupulous enough to resist the temptation. Had they been cut from the cold marble it might have been otherwise. They were, however, still in their places in the time of Hadrian, when Pausanias wrote the greatest of all guide-books.
Vatican, Rome
Terme Museum, Rome
We can picture the great statue of Zeus, possibly the most remarkable creation of the sculptor’s art in Greece. The features of the “Father of the Gods” are majestic, yet not unkindly; the arms and the upper parts of the body are fashioned from the gleaming ivory, the lower limbs being wrapped in the golden mantle. In the days of Pausanias there was a building outside the sacred Grove, which was still treasured by the people of Elis as the workshop in which, for five years, the sculptor wrought the image piece by piece. “Why,” says Pausanias, “the god himself bore witness to the art of Phidias. For when the image was completed Phidias prayed that the god would give a sign if the work was to his mind, and straightway, they say, the god hurled a thunderbolt into the ground at the spot where the bronze urn stood down to my time.” This second-century Baedeker has given us the greater part of our knowledge of the works of antiquity, which are now lost or survive only in Roman copies. He described the statue of Zeus by Phidias thus:
“The god is seated on a throne: he is made of gold and ivory: on his head is a wreath made in imitation of sprays of olive. In his right hand he carries a Victory, also of ivory and gold: she wears a ribbon, and on her head a wreath. In the left hand of the god is a sceptre, curiously wrought in all the metals: the bird perched on the sceptre is the eagle. The sandals of the god are of gold and so is his robe. On the robe are wrought figures of animals and the lily flowers. The throne is adorned with gold and precious stones, also with ebony and ivory; and there are figures painted and images wrought on it.”
The statue of Hera in the temple between Argos and Mycenæ was the work of Polyclitus. It was erected after 423 b.c., when it was necessary to rebuild the shrine of the goddess owing to the burning of the older temple. The goddess was seated on her throne; the crown on her head was decorated with a design of the Graces and the Seasons in relief. Ivory was used to represent the flesh of the “white-armed” goddess, and her rich garments were elaborately decorated with gold, the finish of every detail being even more complete than was the case with the work of Phidias. If the statue of Hera was second to that of Zeus in its suggestion of god-like majesty and repose, it was nevertheless remarkable for its stately beauty. The head, as would be expected from the hand of Polyclitus, was noticeable for the absolute symmetry of every feature. The ripples of hair falling on either side of the central parting gave an impression of dignified calm to the face of the goddess.
The “Zeus” of Phidias and the “Hera” of Polyclitus are the most famous examples of the Greek statues which we have designated as “religious.” The term is, however, misleading. Religious art proper, religious art in the modern sense of the term, did not exist for the citizens of Periclean Athens: “personal” religion—with its intense subjectivity—was a closed book to him. The mysticism—that yearning to be at one with the ultimate reality—which is the keynote of what we moderns deem religion, would have been simply meaningless to the Argive, the Spartan, or the Athenian of the fifth century. No Greek could ever have said with Bacon, “Our humanity were a poor thing but for the divinity that stirs within us.” Such sentiments as those of the mystic, Antony, the Egyptian, would have struck him as sheer nonsense. “He who sits still in the desert is safe from three enemies—from hearing, from speech, from sight; and has to fight against only one—his own heart.” The Greek had no conception of a “personal” and quasi-human intelligence working in and through the human agent. Human speech, human sight, and, above everything, the promptings of the heart, were all in all to him.
We are, therefore, unable to correlate such a statue as the Zeus of Olympia with such an every-day human craving as that for communion with a personal creator and ruler of the universe which we experience. It rather depends upon a desire for an all-embracing interpretation of the phenomenal world. In other words, such a statue might more rightly be called philosophical than religious.
With the rise of the city-states, the growth of an intense desire for all knowledge brought a new light to bear upon the whole content of consciousness. Men began to distinguish between those impressions which came from outside, and those which seemed rather to depend upon emotional interpretation supplied by the self. The deductions that appeared to be correctly drawn from sense impressions came to be regarded as having a greater validity than the rest, and science arose as a sphere of thought sufficient unto itself and governed by its own rules. During the fifth century the scientists strove to relate the phenomena of the senses, now to one natural force, now to another. But they never reached a unity that carried conviction. The general law upon which they seemed to come ever and again was a constant and eternal flux. “Strife is the father of all things,” said Heraclitus.
But while Greek science was growing there were many—say one half of the Greek world—to whom its generalisations were simply uninteresting. They were the men to whom the poet could appeal. The mystery all desired to fathom was deeper than sense. Each felt, rather than saw, that:
“Something is or seems,
That touches me with mystic gleams,
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams—
Of something felt, like something here,
Of something done, I know not where;
Such as no language may declare.”
To such men the “realities” of the scientists were but shadows behind which lay a more abiding truth. The riddle they desired to solve was what relation the fictional realities of the scientists bore to the abiding truths beyond. And the bolder spirits, spurred on by the great intellectual and emotional flood which followed the Persian wars, started upon the quest.
These were craftsmen all—the artists proper. In obedience to some unreasoned desire, these men bethought them to fashion new representations of “the all of things.” They took the ultimate conceptions of life. For example:
“Him, who from eternity, self-stirred,
Himself hath made by His creative word.”
They strove to convey, not only the impressions realised by their brothers, the scientists, but the emotions astir in their own hearts. What matter if the scientists proved these “ideal types” to be mere lies. The artists felt that the unconscious criticism of nature revealed truths far beyond those at which the conscious criticism of science stopped.