THROUGH all this turmoil literature reflected the declining virility of Greece. Lyrical poetry was no longer the passionate expression of creative individuals, but a polite exercise of salon intellectuals, a learned echo of schoolday tasks. Timotheus of Miletus wrote an epic, but it did not accord with an argumentative age, and remained as unpopular as his early music. Dramatic performances continued, but on a more modest scale and in a lower key. The impoverishment of the public treasury and the weakened patriotism of private wealth reduced the splendor and significance of the chorus; more and more the dramatists contented themselves with unrelated musical intermezzi in place of choruses organically united with the play. The name of the choragus disappeared from public notice, then the name of the poet; only the name of the actor remained. The drama became less and less a poem, more and more a histrionic exhibition; it was an era of great actors and small dramatists. Greek tragedy had been built upon religion and mythology, and required some faith and piety in its auditors; it naturally faded away in the twilight of the gods.
Comedy prospered as tragedy decayed, and took over something of the subtlety, refinement, and subject matter of the Euripidean stage. This Middle Comedy (400-323) lost its taste or courage for political satire precisely when politics most needed a “candid friend”; possibly such satire was forbidden or the audience was weary of politics now that Athens was ruled by second-rate men. The general retirement of the fourth-century Greek from public to private life inclined his interest from affairs of state to those of the home and the heart. The comedy of manners appeared; love began to dominate the scene, and not always by its virtue; the ladies of the demimonde mingled on the boards with fishwives, cooks, and bewildered philosophers—though the honor of the protagonists and the dramatist was saved by a marriage at the end. These plays were not coarsened by Aristophanes’ vulgarity and burlesque, but neither were they vitalized by his exuberance and his imagination. We know the names, and have none of the works, of thirty-nine poets of the Middle Comedy; but we may judge from their fragments that they did not write for the ages. Alexis of Thurii wrote 245 plays, Antiphanes 260. They made hay while the sun shone, and died with its setting.
It was a century of orators. The rise of industry and trade turned men’s minds to realism and practicality, and the schools that once had taught the poems of Homer now trained their pupils in rhetoric. Isaeus, Lycurgus, Hypereides, Demades, Deinarchus, Aeschines, Demosthenes were oratorpoliticians, leaders of political factions, masters of what the Germans have called the Advokatenrepublik. Similar men appeared in the democratic interludes of Syracuse; the oligarchic states did not suffer them. The Athenian orators were clear and vigorous in language, averse to ornate eloquence, capable, now and then, of noble patriotic flights, and given to such dishonesty of argument and abusiveness of speech as would not be tolerated even in a modern campaign. The heterogeneous quality of the Athenian Assembly and the popular courts had a debasing as well as a stimulating effect upon Greek oratory, and through it upon Greek literature. The Athenian citizen enjoyed bouts of oratorical invective almost as much as he enjoyed a prize fight; when a duel was expected between such word warriors as Aeschines and Demosthenes, men came from distant villages and foreign states to hear them. Often the appeal was to pride and prejudice; Plato, who hated oratory as the poison that was killing democracy, defined rhetoric as the art of governing men by addressing their feelings and passions.
Even Demosthenes, with all his vigor and nervous intensity, his frequent ascent to passages of patriotic fervor, his withering fire of personal attack, his clever and relieving alternation of narrative and argument, the carefully rhythmic quality of his language, and the overwhelming torrent of his speech—even Demosthenes strikes us as a little less than great. He laid the secret of oratory in acting (hypocrisis), and so believed this that he rehearsed his speeches patiently, and recited them before a mirror. He dug himself a cave and lived in it for months, practicing secretly; in these periods he kept one half of his face shaved to deter himself from leaving his retreat.1 On the rostrum he contorted his figure, whirled round and round, laid his hand upon his forehead as in reflection, and often raised his voice to a scream.2 All this, says Plutarch, “was wonderfully pleasing to the common people, but by well-educated persons, as, for example, by Demetrius of Phalerum, it was looked upon as mean, humiliating, and unmanly.” We are amused by Demosthenes’ histrionics, amazed by his self-esteem, confused by his digressions, and appalled by his ungracious scurrility. There is little wit in him, little philosophy. Only his patriotism redeems him, and the apparent sincerity of his despairing cry for freedom.
The historic climax of Greek oratory came in 330. Six years before, Ctesiphon had carried through the Council a preliminary proposal to award Demosthenes a crown or wreath in appreciation not only of his statesmanship but of his many financial gifts to the state. To keep this honor from his rival, Aeschines indicted Ctesiphon on the ground (technically correct) of having introduced an unconstitutional proposal. The case of Ctesiphon, repeatedly postponed, finally came to trial before a jury of five hundred citizens. It was, of course, a cause célèbre; all who could came, even from afar, to hear it; for in effect the greatest of Athenian orators was fighting for his good name and his political life. Aeschines spent little time attacking Ctesiphon, but turned his assault upon the character and career of Demosthenes, who replied in kind with his famous speech On the Crown. Every line of the two orations still vibrates with excitement, and is hot with the hatred of enemies brought face to face in war. Demosthenes, knowing that offense is better than defense, charged that Philip had chosen the most corruptible of the orators as his mouthpieces in Athens. Then he etched in acid a life portrait of Aeschines:
I must let you know who this man really is who embarks upon vituperation so glibly . . . and what is his parentage. Virtue? You renegade!—what have you or your family to do with virtue? . . . Where did you get your right to talk about education? . . . Shall I relate how your father was a slave who kept an elementary school near the Temple of Theseus, and how he wore shackles on his legs and a timber collar round his neck, or how your mother practiced daylight nuptials in an outhouse? . . . You helped your father in the drudgery of a grammar school, grinding the ink, sponging the benches, sweeping the room, holding the position of a menial. . . . After getting yourself enrolled on the register of your parish—no one knows how you managed it, but let that pass—you chose a most gentlemanly occupation, that of clerk and errand-boy to minor officials. After committing all the offenses with which you reproach other people, you were relieved of that employment. . . . You entered the service of those famous players, Simylus and Socrates, better known as the Growlers. You played small parts to their lead, picking up figs and grapes and olives, and making a better living out of those missiles than by all the battles you fought for dear life. For there was no truce or armistice in the warfare between you and your audience. . . .
Compare, then, Aeschines, your life and mine. You taught reading, I attended school. You danced, I was choragus. . . . You were a public scribe, I a public orator. You were a third-rate actor, I a spectator at the play. You failed in your part, and I hissed you.3
It was a powerful speech; not a model of order and courtesy, but so eloquent with passion that the jury acquitted Ctesiphon by a vote of five to one. In the following year the Assembly voted Demosthenes the disputed crown. Aeschines, unable to pay the fine that was automatically levied upon so unsuccessful a persecution, fled to Rhodes, where he made a precarious living by teaching rhetoric. An old tradition says that Demosthenes sent him money to alleviate his poverty.4
This duel of oratory has been loudly lauded and devoutly studied in every generation. But in truth it represents almost the nadir of Athenian politics; we cannot see nobility in this street-corner contest in vituperation, this mean quarrel for public praise between two secret recipients of foreign gold. Isocrates is a little more attractive, and carries down into the fourth century something of the grandeur of the fifth. Born in 436, he lived till 338, and died with Greek liberty. His father had made a fortune by manufacturing flutes; he gave his son every educational advantage, even sending him to study rhetoric with Gorgias in Thessaly. The Peloponnesian War, and the example of Alcibiades, ruined the flute business, and destroyed the family fortune; Isocrates had to go forth and earn his living by the sweat of his pen. He began by writing speeches for others, and thought of becoming an orator. But he suffered from shyness and a weak voice, and a strong distaste for the crudities of political strife. He abominated the demagogues who had captured the Assembly, and shrank for a time into a quiet pedagogic life.
In 391 he opened the most successful of Athenian schools of rhetoric. Students came to him from all the Greek world; perhaps their variety of origin and outlook helped to form his Panhellenic philosophy. He thought that all other teachers were on the wrong track. In a pamphlet Against the Sophists he denounced both those who professed to turn any numbskull into a pundit for three or four minas, and those who, like Plato, hoped to prepare men for government by training them in science and metaphysics. As for himself, he admitted that he could get results only when the student possessed some natural talent. He would not teach metaphysics or science, for these, he argued, were hopeless inquiries into insoluble mysteries. Nevertheless, he gave the name of philosophy to the instruction provided in his school. The curriculum centered upon the arts of writing and speaking, but these were taught in connection with literature and politics;5 Isocrates offered, as we should say, a cultural course as opposed to the mathematical course given in Plato’s Academy. The art of speech was the goal, as being then the chief medium of public advancement; the Athenian state was governed by argument. So Isocrates taught his pupils the use of words: how to arrange them in the clearest order, in rhythmic but not metrical sequence, in polished but not ornate diction, in smooth transitions of sound and thought,* in balanced clauses and cumulative periods; such prose, he believed, would please the refined ear as much as poetry. Out of this school came many leaders of the Demosthenic age: Timotheus the general, Ephorus and Theopompus the historians, Isaeus, Lycurgus, Hypereides, and Aeschines the orators, Speusippus the successor of Plato, and, some say, Aristotle himself.6
Isocrates was not content with forming great men; he wished to play some part in the affairs of his time. Unable to be either an orator or a statesman, he became a pamphleteer. He addressed long speeches to the Athenian public, to leaders like Philip, or to the assembled Greeks at the PanheRenic games; instead of delivering these he published them, and thereby unconsciously invented the essay as a literary form. Twenty-nine of his discourses remain, and rank among the most interesting survivals of Greek antiquity. His first great pronouncement, the Panegyricus† struck the theme of all his thought—the theme of his old master Gorgias—a call to Greece to forget its little sovereignties, and become a state. Isocrates was a proud Athenian—“So far has our city distanced the rest of mankind in thought and speech that her pupils have become the teachers of all the world.” But he was a prouder Greek; to him, as to the Hellenistic age, Hellenism meant not membership in a race, but participation in a culture; and that culture, he felt, was the finest that men had yet created anywhere.7 But all around this culture were “barbarians”—in Italy, Sicily, Africa, Asia, and what we should now call the Balkans. It saddened him to see the barbarians becoming stronger, and Persia consolidating her control of Ionia, while the Greek states consumed themselves in civil war.
For many as are the ills that are incident to the nature of man, we have ourselves invented more than those that nature lays upon us, by engendering wars and factions among ourselves. . . . Against these ills no one has ever protested; and people are not ashamed to weep over the calamities that have been fabricated by the poets, while they view complacently the real sufferings, the many terrible sufferings, that result from our state of war; and they are so far from feeling pity that they even rejoice more in each other’s sorrows than in their own blessings.8
If the Greeks must fight, why not fight a real enemy? Why not drive the Persians back to their plateau? A small detachment of Greeks, he prophesied, would defeat a large army of Persians.9 Such a holy war might at last give unity to Greece; and the choice was between Greek unity or triumphant barbarism.
Two years after publishing this appeal (378) Isocrates, turning theory into practice, toured the Aegean with his ex-pupil Timotheus, and helped to formulate the terms of the second Athenian Confederacy. The rise and fall of this new hope of unity formed one more disappointment in his long life. In a brave and vigorous pamphlet On the Peace he condemned Athens for again corrupting an alliance into an empire, and called upon her to sign a peace that would assure every Greek state against Athenian encroachments. “What we call empire is in reality misfortune, for by its very nature it depraves all who have to do with it.”10 Imperialism, he said, had ruined democracy by teaching Athenians to live on foreign tribute; losing that, they now wished to live on state contributions, and exalted to the highest offices those who promised them most.
Whenever you deliberate on the business of the state you distrust and dislike men of superior intelligence, and cultivate instead the most depraved of the orators who come before you; you prefer . . . those who are drunk to those who are sober, those who are witless to those who are wise, and those who dole out the public money to those who perform public services at their own expense.11
In his next address, the Areopagiticus, he spoke more leniently of democracy. “We sit around in our shops denouncing the present order,” says a timeless passage, “but we perceive that even badly constituted democracies are responsible for fewer disasters than are oligarchies.”12 Had not Sparta made a worse mistress for Greece than Athens had been?—and, “Have not we all of us, because of the madness of the Thirty, become greater enthusiasts for democracy than those who occupied Phyle?*13 But Athens had ruined itself by carrying to excess the principles of liberty and equality, by “training the citizens in such fashion that they looked upon insolence as democracy, lawlessness as liberty, impudence of speech as equality, and license to do what they pleased as happiness.”14 All men are not equal, and should not be equally free to hold office. The institution of the lot, Isocrates felt, had lowered disastrously the level of Athenian statesmanship. Better than this “mob rule” was the “timocracy” of Solon and Cleisthenes; for then amiable ignorance and eloquent venality had less chance of being raised to leadership; able men rose naturally to the top, and the Areopagus, receiving them after their term of office, became automatically the mature brain of the state.
In 346, when Athens came to terms with Philip, Isocrates, now ninety, addressed an open letter to the Macedonian King. He foresaw that Philip would make himself master of Greece, and begged him to use his power not as a tyrant, but as the unifier of autonomous Greek states in a war for the liberation of Greece from the King’s Peace, and of Ionia from Persian rule. The war party denounced the letter as a surrender to despotism, and for seven years Isocrates held his pen. He spoke once more in 339, addressing his pamphlet to the Greeks who were gathering for the Panathenaic games. The Panathenaicus is a weak and prolix repetition of the Panegyricus; the style trembles in the old man’s hand; but it is an astonishing performance for one who was only three years short of a century. Then in 338 came Chaeronea; Athens was defeated, but Isocrates’ dream of a unified Greece was about to come true. A late Greek tradition says that when the news came he forgot about Philip and unity, and thought only of his native city humiliated, the days of her glory ended; and that, at the age of ninety-eight, having at last lived long enough, he starved himself to death.15 We do not know if this is true; but Aristotle tells us that within five days after Chaeronea, Isocrates was dead.
The influence of “the old man eloquent”16 upon the statesmen of his time is open to doubt, but his influence upon letters was immediate and enduring.* It was felt first by the historians. Xenophon and others imitated his sketch of Evagoras,† and biography became a popular form of Greek literature, culminating in the gossipy masterpieces of Plutarch. To one of his pupils, Ephorus of Cyme, Isocrates committed the task of writing a general history of Greece—a record not of any one state, but of Greece as a whole. Ephorus carried out the assignment so well that his contemporaries ranked his Universal History with the books of Herodotus. To another pupil, Theopompus of Chios, Isocrates committed the field of recent events; Theopompus covered it in his Hellenica and Philippica, lively and rhetorical works highly praised by his contemporaries. About 340 Dicaearchus of Messana wrote a history of Greek civilization under the title of Bios Hellados—The Life of Greece; so ancient is our present enterprise, even, by chance, to its name.
The only one of the fourth-century historians who has survived is Xenophon. Diogenes Laertius describes him in his youth:
Xenophon was a man of great modesty, and as handsome as can be imagined. They say that Socrates met him in a narrow lane, and put his stick across it, and prevented him from passing by, asking where all kinds of necessary things were sold. And when Xenophon had answered him, he asked, again, where men were made good and virtuous. And as Xenophon did not know, Socrates said, “Follow me, then, and learn.” And from that time forth Xenophon became a follower of Socrates.17
He was among the more practical of Socrates’ students. He liked his master’s fascinating sleight-o’-mind, and loved him as a philosophic saint. But he enjoyed action as well as thought, and became a soldier of fortune while some other scholars, as Aristophanes disdainfully put it, were “measuring the air.”18 About the age of thirty he took service under the younger Cyrus, fought at Cunaxa, and led the Ten Thousand to safety. At Byzantium he joined the Spartans in their war against Persia, captured a wealthy Mede, accepted a rich ransom for him, and lived on it for the rest of his life. He became a friend and admirer of the Spartan King Agesilaus, and made him the subject of a worshipful biography. Returning to Greece with Agesilaus after Athens had declared war upon Sparta, he chose to be loyal to him rather than to his city; whereupon Athens decreed him an exile, and confiscated his property. He fought on the side of the Lacedaemonians at Coronea, and received as a reward an estate at Scillus in Elis, then under Spartan domination. There he spent twenty years as a country gentleman, farming, hunting, writing, and bringing up his sons sternly on the Spartan plan.19
To his banishment we owe the varied works that lifted him to the front rank among the authors of his time. He wrote as his mood inclined him, about breaking in dogs, managing horses, training a wife, educating princes, fighting with Agesilaus, or raising revenues for Athens. In the Anabasis, with the fresh style of one who had seen or done the things he described, he told the thrilling (but quite uncorroborated) story of the Ten Thousand’s long trek to the sea. In the Hellenica he took up the history of Greece where Thucydides had left off, and brought it down to the battle of Mantinea, in which his own son Gryllus died fighting bravely after slaying Epaminondas. The book is a dreary chronicle, in which history is conceived as an endless chain of battles, a vain logic-chopping alternation of victory and defeat. The style is lively, the character sketches are vivid; but the facts are judiciously chosen to prove the superiority of Spartan ways. Superstition, which disappeared from history in Thucydides, returns with Xenophon, and supernatural agency is invoked to explain the trajectory of events. With like simplicity or duplicity, the Memorabilia transforms Socrates into a monster of perfection, orthodox in religion, in ethics, in genderless love, in everything except that scorn for democracy which particularly endeared him to the banished and Laconizing Xenophon. Still more unreliable is the Banquet, which reports conversations alleged to have occurred when Xenophon was a child.
In the Oeconomicus, however, Xenophon speaks in his own right, and with such frank conservatism that we are charmed despite ourselves. Asked for instruction in agriculture, Socrates modestly confesses his ignorance, but recalls the advice and example of the rich landowner Ischomachus. The latter voices the knightly Xenophon’s disdain for any occupation except husbandry and war. He expounds not only the secrets of successful tillage, but the art of managing one’s property and one’s wife. In pages that for a moment rival the grace of Plato, Ischomachus tells how he taught his bride—only half his age—the business of caring for the home, keeping all things in place, governing her servants with kindness but without familiarity, and building a good name for herself not through artificial beauty but through a faithful performance of her obligations as wife, mother, and friend. In the view of Ischomachus-Xenophon marriage is an economic as well as a physical association, and decays when the silent partner does all the work. Perhaps the readiness with which the young bride accepts all this is merely the devout wish of a general who won no victories on the domestic battlefield; but we should be willing to believe everything in the account except the tale of how Ischomachus, with but a moment’s reasoning, persuaded his wife to abandon powder and rouge.20
Having expounded the art of marriage, Xenophon describes in the Cyropaedia (i.e., The Education of Cyrus) his ideals of schooling and government, as if in answer to Plato’s Republic. Cleverly adapting fictitious biography to the uses of philosophy, he gives an imaginary account of the training, career, and administration of Cyrus the Great. He makes the story dramatically personal, enlivens it with dialogue, and decorates it with the oldest romantic love story in extant literature. He almost ignores cultural education, and concentrates upon making the boy a healthy, able, and honorable man; the youth learns the virile sports, the arts of war, the habit of silent obedience, and finally the capacity for effective and persuasive command over subordinates. The best government, Xenophon thinks, is an enlightened monarchy supported and checked by an aristocracy devoted to agricultural and military pursuits. He admires the laws of Persia for rewarding good as well as punishing evil,21 and points out to the individualistic Greeks, from the example of Persia, the possibility of uniting many cities and states in an empire enjoying internal order and peace. Xenophon began, like Philip, with a vision of conquest; he ends, like Alexander, captivated by the people whom he thought to conquer.
He is a masterly storyteller, but a middling philosopher. He is an amateur in everything but war; he considers a hundred subjects, but always from the viewpoint of a general. He exaggerates the virtues of order and has not a word to say for liberty; we may judge from this how far disorder had gone in Athens. If antiquity ranked him with Herodotus and Thucydides it must have been because of his style—the fresh charm of its Attic purity, the harmonious flow of a prose that Cicero called “sweeter than honey,”22 the human touches of personality, the transparent simplicity of language that allows the reader to see through the clear medium the thought or subject in hand. Xenophon and Plato stand to Thucydides and Socrates in the same relation as Apelles and Praxiteles to Polygnotus and Pheidias—the culmination of artistry and grace after an age of creative originality and power.
The highest excellence of the fourth century lay not in literature but in philosophy and art. In art, as in politics, the individual liberated himself from the temple, the state, the tradition, and the school. As patriotic devotion yielded to private loyalties, architecture took on a more modest scale, and became increasingly secular; the great choral forms of music and dance made way for private performances by professionals; painting and sculpture continued to adorn public buildings with the representation of gods or noble human types, but at the same time they entered upon that service and portrayal of living individuals which characterized the succeeding age. Where cities could still afford to patronize art on a national scale it was because—like Cnidus, Halicarnassus, or Ephesus—they had not been deeply touched by war, or, like Syracuse, had found in natural resources and governmental order the means of a rapid recovery.
On the mainland architecture marked time. In 338 Lycurgus rebuilt the Theater of Dionysus, the Stadium, and the Lyceum; and under his administration Philon raised an impressive arsenal at the Piraeus. As the tendency to a delicate refinement increased, the Doric order became less fashionable, it? stern simplicity finding no counterpart in the soul; the Ionic style rose in popularity, and served as an architectural analogue to Praxiteles’ elegance and Plato’s charm; while the Corinthian order made modest conquests in the Tower of the Winds and the choragic monument of Lysicrates. At Arcadian Tegea Scopas raised a temple of Athena in all three styles—one colonnade Doric, another Ionic, another Corinthian23—and beautified it with statuary from his own masculine hand.
Vaster and more famous was the third temple of Artemis at Ephesus. The second temple had burned down on the day of Alexander’s birth in 356, a coincidence which, says the usually kindly Plutarch, Hegesias of Magnesia “made the occasion of a conceit frigid enough to have stopped the conflagration.”24 The new building was begun soon afterward, and was completed by the end of the century. Alexander offered to bear the whole cost of the work if his name as donor were recorded on the edifice; but the proud Greeks of Ephesus refused for the disarming (or possibly satirical) reason that “it was not meet for one god to build a temple to another.”25 Nevertheless, Alexander’s favorite architect, Dinocrates, designed the temple, on a scale that made it the largest in Hellas. Thirty-six of the columns were carved with bas-reliefs by various sculptors, including the ubiquitous Scopas; one sculptured column drum survives in the British Museum, as if to prove by its drapery alone that Greek sculpture was still near the height of its curve. The heads of the figures are not immobile and idealized types, but individualized faces alive with feeling and character—a premonition of Hellenistic realism.
At the opposite extreme of size the fourth century distinguished itself in terra-cotta statuettes. Boeotian Tanagra made its name synonymous with little figures in baked and unglazed clay, cast in generalized types but then molded and painted by hand into a thousand individual shapes quick with the color and variety of common life. As in earlier centuries, painting was called in to aid other arts; but now it acquired an independent status and dignity, and its masters received commissions from all the Greek world. Pamphilus of Amphipolis, who taught Apelles, refused to take any pupil for less than twelve years, and charged $6000 for the course. Mnason, dictator of Locrian Elatea, paid ten minas for each of the hundred figures in a battle scene by Aristides of Thebes, making $100,000 for one painting; and the same enthusiast gave Asclepiodorus $360,000 for a panel of the twelve major Olympians. Lucullus paid $12,000 for a copy of the portrait that Pausias of Sicyon had painted of Menander’s mistress Glycera.26 A picture by Apelles, says Pliny, sold for a sum equal to the treasuries of whole cities.27
“Apelles of Cos,” says the same enthusiastic amateur, “surpassed all the other painters who either preceded or succeeded him. Singlehanded, he contributed more to painting than all the others together.”28 Apelles must have been supreme in his day and art, since he could afford the rare extravagance of praising other painters. Learning that his greatest rival, Protogenes, was living in poverty, Apelles sailed for Rhodes to visit him. Protogenes, unwarned, was not in his studio when Apelles came. An old woman attendant asked Apelles whom she should name as visitor when her master returned. Apelles replied only by taking a brush and tracing upon a panel, with one stroke, an outline of exceeding fineness. When Protogenes came back the old woman regretted that she could not tell him the name of his departed visitor; but Protogenes, seeing the outline and noting its delicacy, exclaimed: “Only Apelles could have drawn that line.” Then he drew a still finer line within that of Apelles, and bade the woman show it if the stranger should return. Apelles came, marveled at the absent; Protogenes’ skill, but drew, between the two lines, a third of such slenderness and grace that when Protogenes saw it he confessed himself surpassed, and rushed to the harbor to detain and welcome Apelles. The panel was transmitted as a masterpiece from generation to generation, until it was bought by Julius Caesar and perished in the fire that destroyed his palace on the Palatine Hill. Anxious to awaken the Greek world to Protogenes’ worth, Apelles asked him what he wanted for some of his paintings; Protogenes mentioned a modest sum, but Apelles offered him, instead, fifty talents ($300,000), and then circulated a report that he intended to sell these works as his own. The Rhodians, aroused to a better appreciation of their artist, paid Protogenes more than the sum Apelles had named, and kept the pictures among the public treasures of the city.29
Apelles meanwhile had captured the plaudits of the Greek world by his painting of Aphrodite Anadyomene—i.e., Aphrodite rising from the sea. Alexander sent for him, and sat for many portraits. The young conqueror was not satisfied with the representation of his horse Bucephalus in one of these pictures, and had the animal brought closer to the panel for comparison. Bucephalus, looking at the picture, whinnied; whereupon Apelles remarked, “Your Majesty’s horse seems to know more about painting than you do.”30 On another occasion, when the King was holding forth about art in Apelles’ studio, Apelles begged him to talk of anything else, lest the boys who were grinding the colors should laugh at him. Alexander took it good-naturedly; and when he engaged the artist to paint his favorite concubine, and Apelles fell in love with her, the King sent her to him as a gift.31—Over his finished pictures Apelles painted a thin coat of varnish, which preserved the colors, softened their glare, and yet made them livelier than before. He worked to the last, and death came upon him while he was once more delineating the eternal Aphrodite.
The sculptural masterpiece of the period was the great mausoleum dedicated to King Mausolus of Halicarnassus. Nominally a satrap of Persia, Mausolus had extended his personal sway over Caria and parts of Ionia and Lycia, and had used his rich revenues to build a fleet and beautify his capital. When he died (353), his devoted sister and wife, Artemisia, held a famous oratorical contest in his honor, and summoned the best artists of Greece to collaborate upon a tomb that should be a fitting memorial to his genius. She was a queen by nature as well as by marriage; when the Rhodians took advantage of the King’s death to invade Caria, she defeated them by clever strategy, captured their fleet and their capital, and soon brought the rich merchants to terms.32 But her grief over the death of Mausolus weakened her, and she died two years after him, before she could see the completed monument that was to give a word to every Western tongue. Slowly Scopas, Leochares, Bryaxis, and Timotheus raised a rectangular tomb of white marble slabs over a base of bricks, covered it with a pyramidal roof, and adorned it with thirty-six columns and a wealth of statuary and reliefs. A statue of Mausolus,* calm and strong, was found among the ruins of Halicarnassus by the English in 1857. Still more finished in workmanship is a frieze* showing again the struggle of Greeks and Amazons. These men, women, and horses are among the chefs-d’oeuvres of the world’s bas-reliefs. The Amazons are not masculine females built for battle; they are women of a voluptuous beauty that should have tempted the Greeks to something gentler than war. The Mausoleum took its place, with the third temple at Ephesus, among the Seven Wonders of the World.
In many respects sculpture now reached its apogee. It lacked the stimulus of religion, and fell short of the majestic power of the Parthenon pediments; but it took a new inspiration from feminine grace, and achieved a loveliness never equaled before or since. The fifth century had modeled nude men and draped women; the fourth preferred to carve nude women and clothed men. The fifth century had idealized its types, and had cast or chiseled the harassed life of man into an emotionless repose; the fourth century tried to realize in stone something of human individuality and feeling. In male statuary the head and face took on more importance, the body less; the study of character replaced the idolatry of muscle; portraits in stone became the fashion for any subject who could pay. The body abandoned its stiff, straight pose, and leaned at ease upon a stick or tree; and the surface was modeled to let in the living play of light and shade. Anxious for realism, Lysistratus of Sicyon, apparently first among the Greeks, fitted a plaster mold upon the subject’s face, and made a preliminary cast.33
The representation of sensuous beauty and grace came to perfection in Praxiteles. All the world knows that he courted Phryne, and gave a lasting form to her loveliness, but no one knows when he was born or when he died. He was both the son and father of sculptors named Cephisodotus, so that we picture him as the climax of a family tradition of patient artistry. He worked in bronze as well as marble, and won such repute that a dozen cities competed for his services. About 360 Cos commissioned him to carve an Aphrodite; with Phryne’s help he did, but the Coans were scandalized to find the goddess quite nude. Praxiteles mollified them by making another Aphrodite, clothed, while Cnidus bought the first. King Nicomedes of Bithynia offered to pay the heavy public debt of the city in return for the statue, but Cnidus preferred immortality. Tourists came from every nook of the Mediterranean to see the work; critics pronounced it the finest statue yet made in Greece, and gossip said that men had been stirred to amorous frenzy by viewing it.*34
As Cnidus achieved fame through the Aphrodite, so the little town of Thespiae in Boeotia, birthplace of Phryne, attracted travelers because Phryne had dedicated there a marble Eros by Praxiteles. For she had asked of him, as a proof of his love, the most beautiful of the works in his studio. He wished to leave the choice to her; but Phryne, hoping to discover his own estimate, ran to him one day with news that his studio was on fire; whereupon he cried out, “I am lost if my Satyr and my Eros are burned.”35 Phryne chose the Eros, and gave it to her native town.† Eros, once the creator god of Hesiod, became in Praxiteles’ conception a delicate and dreamy youth, symbolizing the power of love to capture the soul; he had not yet become the mischievous and sportive Cupid of Hellenistic and Roman art.
Presumably the Satyr of the Capitoline Museum in Rome, known to us as Hawthorne’s Marble Faun, is a copy of the work that Praxiteles preferred to his Eros. Some have thought that a torso in the Louvre is part of the original itself.36 The satyr is represented as a well-formed and happy lad, whose only animal element is his long and pointed ears. He is resting lazily against a tree trunk, with one foot crossed behind the other. Seldom has marble conveyed so fully the sense of idle ease; all the charming carelessness of boyhood is in the relaxed limbs and trustful face. Perhaps the limbs are too rounded and soft; Praxiteles looked too long at Phryne to be able to model a man. The Apollo Sauroctonus—Apollo the Lizard-Killer—is so feminine that we are half inclined to class him with the hermaphrodites that abound in Hellenistic statuary.
Pausanias remarks with regrettable brevity that among the statues in the Heraeum at Olympia was “a stone Hermes carrying Dionysus as a babe, by Praxiteles.”37 German excavators digging on the site in 1877 crowned their labors by finding this figure, buried under centuries of rubbish and clay. Descriptions, photographs, and casts miss the quality of the work; one must stand before it in the little museum at Olympia, and clandestinely pass the fingers over its surface, to realize the smooth and living texture of this marble flesh. The messenger god has been entrusted with the task of rescuing the infant Dionysus from the jealousy of Hera, and taking him to the nymphs who are to rear him in secret. Hermes pauses on the way, leans against a tree, and holds up a cluster of grapes before the child. The infant is crudely done, as if the inspiration of the artist had been exhausted on the older god. The right arm of the Hermes is gone, and parts of the legs have been restored; the remainder is apparently as it came from the sculptor’s hand. The firm limbs and broad chest show a healthy physical development; the head is in itself a masterpiece, with its aristocratic shapeliness, its chiseled refinement of features, and its curly hair; and the right foot is perfect where perfection in statuary is rare. Antiquity considered this a minor work; we may judge from this the artistic wealth of the age.
Another passage in Pausanias38 describes a marble group set up by Praxiteles in Mantinea. Excavation has found the base alone, bearing the figures of three Muses, carved probably by the pupils rather than by the master. If we put together the references in extant Greek writings to statues by Praxiteles, we find some forty major works;39 and these were doubtless but a part of his abundant production. We miss in the remains the sublimity and strength, the dignity and reverence of Pheidias; the gods have made way for Phryne, and the great issues of national life have been put aside for private love. But no sculptor has ever surpassed the sureness of Praxiteles’ technique, the almost miraculous power to pour into hard stone ease and grace and the tenderest sentiment, sensuous delight and woodland joyousness. Pheidias was Doric, Praxiteles is Ionic; in him again we have a premonition of that cultural conquest of Europe which was to follow Alexander’s victories.
Scopas played Byron to Pheidias’ Milton and Praxiteles’ Keats. We know nothing about his life except through his works, which are the real biography of any man; but even of his works we know none with certainty. The stocky and pugnacious heads of the statues that are attributed to him, or of the copies that are ascribed to his originals, stamp him as a man of passionate individuality and force. At Tegea, as we have seen, he served as both architect and sculptor, showing a versatility and power unsurpassed in all the centuries between Pheidias and Michelangelo. Excavations have found only a few fragments of a pediment, chiefly two badly damaged heads marked by a brachycephalic roundness, and a moody distant look, which are typical of Scopas’ work; together with a battered and masculine figure of Atalanta. Strangely like these remains is the Meleager head in the Villa Medici at Rome; here again are the full cheeks, the sensual lips, the brooding eyes, the slightly projecting ridge of the forehead above the nose, and the half-disheveled curly hair; perhaps it is a Roman copy of a Meleager set up by Scopas as part of a group representing the Calydonian hunt. Another head, in the Metropolitan Museum at New York, is almost surely by Scopas, or copied from him; blunt and powerful, and yet handsome and intelligent, it is one of the most characterful remains of ancient statuary.
At Elis, says Pausanias,40 Scopas cast “a brazen statue of the Pandemian Aphrodite sitting on a brazen he-goat.” At Sicyon he made a marble Heracles, of which, perhaps, we have a Roman copy in the Lansdowne House at London: the body a relapse into Polycleitan stylized musculature, the head small and round as usual, the face almost as refined as in Praxiteles. He paused long enough at Megara, Argos, Thebes, and Athens to make statues that Pausanias saw there five centuries later; and perhaps he had a hand in rebuilding the sanctuary at Epidaurus. Crossing the Aegean, he made an Athena and a Dionysus for Cnidus, and played a major role in the sculptures of the Mausoleum. Going north, he carved one of the column drums of the third temple at Ephesus. At Pergamum he made a colossal seated Ares; at Chrysa in the Troad he set up an Apollo Smintheus to scare mice from the fields. He contributed to the fame of Samothrace with an Aphrodite; and in far-off Byzantium he carved a Bacchante of which the Dresden Albertinum may have a Roman copy in the Raging Maenad. This marble statuette, though only eighteen inches high, is worthy of a great artist—powerful in figure, magnificent in drapery, unique in pose, alive with anger, and beautiful from every side. Pliny refers to many other statues by Scopas, which in his day stood in the palaces of Rome: an Apollo probably copied in the Apollo Citharoedus of the Vatican; a group of Poseidon, Thetis, Achilles, and Nereids, “an admirable piece of workmanship,” says Pliny, “even if it had taken a whole life to complete it”; and a “naked Aphrodite, sufficient to establish the renown of any city.”41
All in all, these works, if a judgment may be based upon a few hypothetical survivals, suggest for Scopas a rank very near to Praxiteles. Here is originality without extravagance, strength without brutality, and a dramatic portrayal of impulse, emotion, and mood, without disfigurement by any strained intensity. Praxiteles loved beauty, Scopas was drawn to character; Praxiteles wished to reveal the grace and tenderness of womanhood, the buoyant health and gaiety of youth; Scopas chose to portray the pains and tragedies of life, and ennobled them with artistic representation. Perhaps, if we had more of his works, we should place him second only to Pheidias.
Lysippus of Sicyon began as a humble artisan in brass. He longed to be an artist, but could not afford a teacher; he took courage, however, when he heard Eupompus the painter announce that for his part he would imitate nature herself, not any artist.42 Lysippus thereupon turned his face to the study of living beings, and formed a new canon of sculptural proportions to replace the stern rule of Polycleitus; he made the legs longer and the head shorter, extended the limbs into the third dimension, and gave the figure more vitality and ease. His Apoxyomenos is a vagrant son of the Diadumenos; Polycleitus’ athlete bound a fillet above his brow, Lysippus’ scrapes the oil and dust from his arm with a bronze strigil, and achieves a greater slenderness and grace. More attractive and alive, if we judge from the marble copy in the Delphi Museum, was his portrait of Agias, a young Thessalian nobleman. Once free, Lysippus struck out into new fields, abandoning the type for the individual, the conventional for the impressionistic,* and almost creating portrait sculpture among the Greeks. Philip interrupted his wars and amours to sit for Lysippus; Alexander was so pleased with the artist’s busts of him that he made him the official royal sculptor, as he had given the exclusive right to Apelles to paint his likeness, and to Pyrgoteles to engrave it upon gems.
Some of the finest sculptural remains of the fourth century are anonymous: the bronze statue of a youth found in the sea near Marathon, an ancient copy of a fourth-century Hermes of Andros, and a modest, pensive, delicate Hygiaea found at Tegea*—all three in the Athens Museum; and in the Boston Museum, from Chios, a profoundly beautiful Head of a Girl. To this period, so far as we can make out, belong most of the Niobid figures that came to Rome from Asia Minor in the days of Augustus, and are now scattered among the museums of Europe. And perhaps to this age must be assigned the originals of three Aphrodites in the Praxitelean tradition: the hesitant Venus of Capua in the Naples Museum, the Vatican’s Crouching Venus, and the modest Venus of Aries in the Louvre. Greater than these in mature beauty and quiet depth of feeling is the seated Demeter found at Cnidus in 1858, and now among the noblest figures in the British Museum. The subject is uncertain; perhaps it is merely the finest funerary piece that has come down to us from antiquity; perhaps it represents the corn goddess as a mater dolorosa, silently mourning the rape of Persephone. The emotion is conveyed with classic restraint; all the tenderness of motherhood, and its silent resignation, are in the face and eyes. This and the Hermes, and not those ingratiating Aphrodites, are the living sculptural masterpieces of fourth-century Greece.