The Historians' History of the World 03 [Greece to the Peloponnesian War]

THE ERECHTHEUM

Greek Head

(In the British Museum)

Egypt and Asia were prodigal of colour, whether in painting or by the use of enamelled faiences with which the monuments of Persia are still covered. The most ancient inhabitants of Hellas passed under their influence. Colour has been found on the walls of dwellings older than Homer by ten centuries; it was to be seen at Tiryns, one of the capitals of the heroic age, and on the prows of the first ships which ventured into the midst of the waves. This usage continued through the epochs which succeeded; but, as in every domain of art, the Greeks modified this legacy of their ancestors and of the peoples which had preceded them in civilised life, according to the requirements of a delicate taste. Hues more or less vivid covered the stone of the temple, even the sculptures of the frieze, the metopes, and the pediment; terra-cottas, whose colours mixed with a kind of paste were indestructible, decorated the upper parts of the monument and enlivened these severe structures. But a distinction must be drawn between the polychromy of Athens in the time of Pericles and that of other Hellenic countries. In Sicily, in greater Greece, even in Ægina, where the materials which the architects had to dispose of were of a coarse description, it may be that the temples received a brilliant colouring. But at Athens the beautiful Pentelic marble employed in the construction of the temples was certainly not entirely concealed under crude and violent colours. The words of Plutarch, quoted above, on the freshness and youth preserved by the monuments of the Acropolis, when six centuries had already passed over them, does not allow us to believe in more than a moderate colouration for the columns and walls. At one point only of the building there was certainly greater variety. In all countries women, who are ingenious artists, apply themselves to adorning their heads, and with reason: it is the stronghold from which formidable arrows are shot. Ictinus also decorated the upper portions of the Parthenon with all the graces he could call into play. Ornaments of gilt bronze fastened to the draperies of the figures, inlaid enamels, and magnificent carvings running all along the frieze. On festival days treasures and garlands were added, so that the edifice wore on its brow, as it were, a crown of flowers and foliage over a circlet of precious stones.

Antiquity has preserved us no details concerning the artists; we are ignorant of even the native country of most of them. For centuries their works spoke for them, but the very ruins of the monuments they raised have perished. Only the Parthenon still proudly lifts its mutilated head above the mass of rubbish.

A great poet saw a gloomy vision of Europe dying and Paris vanishing. Twenty-five centuries before, Thucydides drew a less poetic but more faithful fantasy for Athens and Lacedæmon. Comparing the sterility of the one to the fertility of the other, he said: “Let both towns be destroyed and the mere débris of the monuments and temples of Athens will reveal a glorious city; the ruins of Lacedæmon will be only those of a large village.”

SCULPTURE

Art is a natural instinct which is to be found even amongst the last of the savages who were the prehistoric inhabitants of Gaul, and which the most intelligent of animals do not possess. This instinct is developed or arrested, not, as has been said, according to race, but in response to the social influences to which a people is subjected amidst melancholy and severe or peaceful and smiling scenes which extinguish or call forth the creative imagination. These influences, working through the centuries, predisposed Hellas to change the paths which art had been pursuing in the East; and habits which were easily acclimatised in Greece, but which could not have had their birth on the banks of the Nile and Euphrates, favoured this slow evolution.

Thanks to a good system of education, to long-continued gymnastic exercises and to a life in the open air, often without clothing and always without a dress which could hamper the harmonious development of the body, the Greeks became the most beautiful race under the sun. As they had always before their eyes the ephebi, so agile in the race, the wrestlers and the athletes, who displayed so much virile grace, the æsthetic sense developed in them with a strength which, when nature had given genius to the artists, produced masterpieces. Religion still further increased this tendency. Their gods having been conceived in the image of man, as a superior humanity, the sculptors, as the religious conscience grew more elevated and taste was purified, took their ideal for the representations of the dwellers on Olympus from human beauty carried to perfection. The people even looked upon it as a gift of heaven, and after death men were accorded heroic honours on account of their beauty.

Minerva

(From a statue)

Herodotus has preserved us a fact which exhibits the Greek character: Philip of Croton was venerated as a hero after his death, in a small building erected to him because he was the most beautiful man of his time, and the old historian agrees with the Egestans who had made this singular kind of god. He does not ask if Xerxes had truly royal qualities. “In his vast army,” he says, “none was more worthy by his beauty of the sovereign power.” In one of the choregiæ in which he often triumphed by his magnificence, Nicias had given the part of Dionysus to a young slave so perfectly handsome and so nobly attired that on his appearance the people broke into applause. Nicias liberated him at once, considering, he said, that it was an impiety to retain in servitude a man who had been hailed by the Athenians in the character of a god. Nicias indeed was performing a very popular act; it was the handsome ephebus, not the god, who had excited the admiration of the spectators.