What the Facts Reveal
Of all the statues of classical antiquity the Venus of Milo is the greatest favorite, not only with the public at large but with art critics as well, and it is strange that the statue has acquired this popularity, for it is by no means perfect in conception nor has it been made by any one of the famous artists. The sculptor is either not known at all or, if the pedestal bearing the name of Agesandros or Alexandros actually belonged to the statue, he was a man unknown to fame, and it seems difficult to point out the reasons which give to this most badly wrecked piece of marble its peculiar charm.
We cannot help thinking that the artist worked after a living model and followed details pretty faithfully. It has been noticed for instance that the feet of the Venus are larger than those of the average woman of to-day and the head is unusually small. In fact this close adherence to actual life may be the main secret of the charm of the statue, for on account of this reality there is a personal element in it, and we can almost read the character of the woman who stood as a model. We see at once an absence of any and every lascivious trait quite common to Venus figures of a later period, and in the face there is a remarkable unconsciousness of self.
We may assume that the artist belonged to the famous school of Rhodes or to the group of those artists who made Pergamum famous with their work, but no statement can be made with certainty. Upon archeological grounds we cannot place the date of the statue earlier than about 400 B. C., nor later than the first part of the second century B. C., and this opinion is mainly based upon the excellent workmanship, the peculiar warmth of the skin as well as the classical simplicity of the statue as a whole. It appears that this valuable piece of art is worthy of a Phidias, a Praxiteles, a Lysippos, or a Scopas.
Having searched art books in vain for an explanation of the history of the Venus of Milo and its tragic fate, we will here briefly recapitulate what the simple facts of the statue, its workmanship, its sad and mutilated condition and also its place of discovery, can teach us.
The statue shows a few scratches which indicate that it may have been dragged along the ground, but the marble bears innumerable indentations which can scarcely be explained otherwise than as due to blows with heavy sticks or clubs. The story of M. Ferry recapitulated in the foregoing chapter does not suffice. Some mutilations may be due to a rough handling in transportation, but the scratches are few and the cudgel marks are many. Apparently the statue has stood an attack of a mob of infuriated enemies who hated the goddess and regarded her as a devil—as the patron deity of the worst of sins. She must have endured a terrible persecution at the hands of implacable enemies, and these enemies can only have been Christians.
It is obvious that the statue has been hidden, and we need not doubt that it was concealed by pagan worshipers who wanted to preserve the effigy of the goddess. The marks of brutal treatment visible all over the body of the statue indicate that the fair goddess had been most furiously belabored as if in corporeal chastisement with rods and any weapons that happened to be at hand. The arms are broken and we must assume that the statue was upset and thrown from its pedestal. Probably the goddess fell on her right shoulder which is crushed, while the left arm exhibits a smooth fracture as if it had been broken by the concussion of the fall. If the arms are not the fragments enumerated by Count Marcellus and now preserved in the Louvre, they must have been lost; possibly they were smashed to small fragments.
Can we assume that the provincial population of a small island could have produced the greatest piece of art of antiquity? Could a few farmers have engaged a sculptor who must have been the equal of Phidias and Scopas? If the statue had represented the tutelary goddess of the island, would not some Greek author have alluded to its existence; would not Pausanias have mentioned the fact? The idea that the statue was of indigenous workmanship is a mere assumption and by no means probable. But whence can the statue have come, and how did it find its way to this little island in the Ægean Sea?
This question is not unanswerable; we need only consider the history of the island and its political connections.
The island of Milo was too small a place to have a temple that could afford a statue of such extraordinary value, and we must assume that it was carried thither on a ship. Athens is the only place that we can think of which might have been its original home.
The early centuries of the Christian era were troublesome times. Lawlessness prevailed and a general decadence had set in, which was due to the many civil wars in both Greece and Italy. The establishment of the Roman empire checked the progress of degeneration but only in external appearance. In reality a moral and social deterioration continued to take an ever stronger hold upon the people. The old religion broke down and the new faith was by no means so ideal in the beginning as it is frequently represented by writers of ecclesiastical history.
Our notions concerning the vicious character of ancient paganism are entirely wrong. Even the worship of Aphrodite and of the Phenician Astarte was by no means degraded by that gross sensualism of which the fathers of the church frequently accuse it. Wherever we meet with original expressions of the pagan faith we find deep reverence and childlike piety. In many respects the worship of Istar in Babylonia and Astarte in Phenicia, of Isis in Egypt, of Athene, Aphrodite and Hera in Greece, of the Roman Juno, and Venus, the special protectress of the imperial family, was noble in all main features, and did not differ greatly from the cult of the Virgin Mary during the Middle Ages. We shall discuss this phase in a subsequent chapter and here reproduce an ancient platter which is ascribed by archeologists to the fourth century B. C., and shows a noble and serene Venus who is fully draped and flying on a swan.
When Christianity spread over the Roman empire, the city of Athens was the last stronghold of paganism, but even there the mass of the population had become Christian. There was a time in the development of Christianity when it was hostile not only to ancient pagan mythology but also to pagan science and to pagan art. This was the age in which almost all the statues of the Greek gods were either destroyed, or maltreated and shattered so that not one has come down to us unmutilated.
Prof. F. C. Conybeare of University College, Oxford, describes conditions of that age in his translation of the Apology and Acts of Apollonius and Other Monuments of Christianity, as follows:
“The obvious way of scotching a foul demon was to smash his idols; and we find that an enormous number of martyrs earned their crown in this manner, especially in the third century, when their rapidly increasing numbers rendered them bolder and more ready to make a display of their intolerance.
Sometimes the good sense or the worldly prudence of the Church intervened to set limits to so favorite a way of courting martyrdom; and at the Synod of Elvira, c. A. D. 305, a canon was passed, declaring the practice to be one not met with in the Gospel nor recorded of any of the Apostles, and denying to those who in future resorted to it the honors of martyrdom. But in spite of this, the most popular of the saints were those who had resorted to such violence and earned their death by it; and as soon as Christianity fairly got the upper hand in the fourth century, the wrecking of temples and the smashing of the idols of the demons became a most popular amusement with which to grace a Christian festival. As we turn over the pages of the martyrologies, we wonder that any ancient statues at all escaped those senseless outbursts of zealotry.”
It must have been in one of these “outbursts of zealotry” that one of the temples of Aphrodite was attacked and the statue of the goddess brutally assaulted. The mutilated statue presumably lay prone upon the ground at the foot of its pedestal at the overturned altar, and had to suffer under the clubs of fanatical zealots. When night broke in and the rioters sought their homes, the few friends of paganism, perhaps the priests, perhaps some well-to-do philosophers and admirers of the ancient Greek civilization, came to the rescue. They met stealthily at the place of the tumult and with the assistance of their servants had the statue carried away down to a ship at anchor in the harbor. Before the riot could be renewed on the next morning the ship set sail for the island of Milo where the devotees of the goddess may have had friends, or where possibly one of their own number possessed a farm. There they hid the statue, and it is certain that the act of concealment was done in the greatest haste, for it was only lightly covered over, and a mark, discovered later on by careful investigation of the place of hiding, was scratched into the curbstone on the wayside to indicate the spot.
This explanation seems to me simple enough to be acceptable. The facts seem to tell it. Consider the age when paganism broke down; consider the fanaticism of the early Christians, the uncultured mobs led by fanatical monks, mobs capable of tearing to pieces a noble woman—I refer to Hypatia—in the conviction that they were doing a good deed pleasing in God’s sight. Other statues of pagan gods have received exactly this treatment. Is it possible to explain the cudgel marks on the statue of the Venus of Milo differently?
It seems strange that this explanation has not been offered before. The data of the conditions in which the statue was found, the place of hiding, the political relation of Melos to Athens, and the character both of the few pagans and of the multitudes of Christians who lived in the beginning of the Christian era, tell us the story of the statue, its sad fate and why it found here a safe place of concealment.
The pagan remnant was small and kept quiet for fear of persecution, but we may very well imagine how they lived in the hope that paganism would celebrate a revival, that the storms of these barbarous outbursts would pass by and the temples of the gods would be restored in all their ancient glory. Then would come the time to bring the goddess back to her ancient dwelling place, to raise her altar again and light the sacrifice anew. But though the riots ceased and the authorities restored order, though for a short time a pagan emperor sat again on the throne of Cæsar, the ancient gods never returned and Christianity permanently replaced paganism. The devotees of the lost cause died without seeing their hope fulfilled. The desecrated statue remained hidden and their secret was buried with them in the grave.