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The Historians' History of the World 03 [Greece to the Peloponnesian War]
- Автор: Gutenberg
- Год: 1905
- Язык: английский
- Жанр: История
Электронная книга - «The Historians' History of the World 03 [Greece to the Peloponnesian War]». Краткое содержание книги:
The work was finished in 435 B.C. It is neither the centuries nor the barbarians that have mutilated it. The Parthenon was still almost intact in 1687, when on the 27th of September Morosini bombarded the citadel. One of the projectiles, setting fire to the barrels of powder stored in the temple, blew up a part of it; then the Venetian desired that the statues should be taken down from the pediment and he broke them. Lord Elgin, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, tore down the bas-reliefs of the frieze and the metopes: this was another disaster. The Ilissus or Cephisus, the Hercules or Theseus, the Charities, “vernal goddesses”—called by some the Three Fates, by others Demeter, Core, and Iris—are still, though somewhat mutilated, the most precious of our relics of antiquity. In 1812 some other Englishmen carried off the frieze of the temple of Phigalia (Bassæ), built by Ictinus. All these fragments of masterpieces were sold for hard cash, and it is under the damp and gloomy sky of England that we are reduced to admiring the remains of that which was the imperial mantle which Pericles wrapped about Pallas Athene. Thus to understand the incomparable magnificence of the Parthenon, we must render back to it in imagination what men have taken away, then place it on its lofty rock, one hundred and fifty-six metres (512 ft.) high, whence a magic panorama is unrolled before the eyes, and surround it with the buildings of the Acropolis; the Erechtheum, which exhibited all the graces of art, beside the severe grandeur of the principal temple; the bronze statue of Athene Promachus, “she who fought in the front rank,” to which the artist gave a colossal height, so that the sailors arriving from the high sea steered by the plume on her helmet and the gold tip of her lance, maris stella; and lower down, at the only place by which the rock was accessible, the wonderful vestibule of the Propylæa and the temple of Victory which formed one of its wings; but, above all, it must be seen wrapped in the blazing light of the eastern sky, compared to which our clearest day is but a twilight.
One thing has been observed in the Parthenon which proves the profound artistic sense the Greeks possessed and how well they understood how to correct geometry by taste. In all the Parthenon there is no surface which is absolutely flat. As the columns owe their full beauty only to the fact that they exhibit towards their centre a slight outward curve, of which the eye is not aware, so the entire building, colonnades and walls, is inclined slightly inwards towards an invisible point which would be lost in the region of the clouds, and all the horizontal lines are convex. But all with such delicacy that it is sufficient to allow the eye and the light to wander gently over the surfaces and to give the monument at once the grace of art and the solidity of strength; but not enough for it to assume the compressed and heavy aspect of a truncated pyramid like the Egyptian temples. On the southern façade the rise of the curve is only one hundred and twenty-three millimetres (about 4½ inches).
The Propylæa, the masterpiece of civil and military architecture, belonged, like the Parthenon, to the Doric order, and stood at the only accessible point of the Acropolis. The architect Mnesicles disposed its various parts in such a manner as to give an aspect of grandeur to the entrance to the Holy of Holies of pagan Athens and also to secure its defence. Epaminondas would have transported it to Thebes to adorn the Cadmea: six centuries after, Pausanias admired it more than the Parthenon, and Plutarch said: “These works have preserved a freshness, a virginity which time cannot wither; they appear still bright with youth as if a breath would animate them and as if they had an immortal soul.”
Athens had other monuments which were erected at very diverse epochs: the Anaceum, the temple of Castor and Pollux, where the sale of slaves took place; the Pantheon or temple of all the gods, the work of the emperor Hadrian; the octagonal Tower of the Winds, an indifferent work built about the first century before Christ. On each of its eight sides, corresponding to the quarters of the principal winds, was sculptured the figure of one of them. This tower still exists, as well as the choragic monument erected by the choregus Lysicrates, in 334 B.C., on the occasion of the victory of the Acamantid tribe in a chorus. The remains of the theatre of Bacchus are still to be seen on the south-eastern slope of the citadel, some of the marble seats bearing very beautiful sculptures. But the Stadium beyond the Ilissus, according to Pausanias one of the wonders of Athens, has disappeared and the excavations made there produced nothing remarkable.
Like its capital, Attica too had monuments of victory, of patriotic pride, and pious gratitude to the gods: and all these monuments were constructed in the severe style whose principal models we have just studied. In the sacred city of Eleusis, in sight of Salamis, a vast religious edifice was built, capable of containing the multitude of those initiated into the mysteries of Ceres. Rhamnus which overlooks the plain of Marathon, raised a sanctuary to Nemesis, the goddess of just vengeance; and on the summit of Cape Sunium, two temples consecrated to Poseidon and Athene, the tutelary deities of Attica, signalised from afar, to sailors coming from the isles or the coast of Asia, their approach to the ground where the Persians had found a tomb and the Greeks liberty. When on the days of the sacred festivals, the people arrived in long theoria (embassies) at the promontory now called Cape Colonna, they saw extending at their feet that sea which had now become their own domain, and fervently thanked the two divinities for having given them: for their leaders, political wisdom; for their mariners, favourable winds. At a later time philosophy was to take its seat near the temple of the gods, and we, like it, believe that Sunium heard some of the discourses of Plato.
The school of Athens extended her influence to distant places. It did not build the temple of Olympia, but Phidias made the statue of Zeus; Pæonius of Mende and Alcamenes of Lemnos have been credited, without absolute proof, with the sculptures of the two pediments, on one of which was represented the combat of Pelops and Œnomaus, and on the other the contests of the Lapithæ and Centaurs at the nuptials of Pirithous.
Ruins of Temple of the Olympian Jove. Athens
Time, barbarians, perhaps fire, destroyed the temple, and the Alpheus, in overflowing its banks, covered the plain of Altis which Pausanias had seen in such beauty with eight or ten metres (about 26 or 32 ft.) of alluvium. Before the Expédition de Morée, which brought away some fragments for the Louvre, even the spot in which so much magnificence stood was unknown. The successful excavations of the German commission have brought to light a victory of Pæonius, a Hermes of Praxiteles and other masterpieces.
The Ionic style is also native to the coast of Asia, where the Doric had preceded it. It was exhibited there in all its grace in the sixth century, when the temple of Ephesus was erected. The Cretan Chersiphron and his son Metagenes began its construction, which was carried on, like that of our Gothic cathedrals, with a tardiness that extended it over two or three centuries. Its columns, several of which were given by Crœsus, had a height of eight diameters, with bases which lacked the Doric columns and voluted capitals which the ancients compared to the drooping curls of a woman’s hair. Of the Ionic temple at Samos, burned by the Persians, a single column remains upright, and according to the diameter of the base it was sixteen metres (about 52½ ft.) high. This temple was therefore a colossal structure. At Athens the Erechtheum and the temple of the Wingless Victory are in the same style, but of very small dimensions. The first contained the oldest image of Athene: a statue of olive wood which was said to have fallen from heaven. In the second was a warlike Minerva; in order to attach her permanently to the fortunes of Athens, the sculptor had not given her the wings which are the attributes of the fickle goddess of lucky battles.