Domestic Architecture.
We have nothing left but imperfect verbal descriptions of the domestic, and even of the palatial architecture of Greece, and, consequently, can only judge imperfectly of its forms. Unfortunately, too, Pompeii, though but half a Greek city, belongs to too late and too corrupt an age to enable us to use it even as an illustration; but we may rest assured that in this, as in everything else, the Greeks displayed the same exquisite taste which pervades not only their monumental architecture, but all their works in metal or clay, down to the meanest object, which have been preserved to our times.
It is probable that the forms of their houses were much more irregular and picturesque than we are in the habit of supposing them to have been. They seem to have taken such pains in their temples—in the Erechtheium, for instance, and at Eleusis—to make every part tell its own tale, that anything like forced regularity must have been offensive to them, and they would probably make every apartment exactly of the dimensions required, and group them so that no one should under any circumstances be confounded with another.
This, however, with all the details of their domestic arts, must now remain to us as mere speculation, and the architectural history of Greece must be confined to her temples and monumental erections. These suffice to explain the nature and forms of the art, and to assign to it the rank of the purest and most intellectual of all the styles which have yet been invented or practised in any part of the world.
BOOK IV.
ETRUSCAN AND ROMAN ARCHITECTURE.
CHAPTER I.
ETRURIA.
CONTENTS.
Historical notice—Temples—Rock-cut Tombs—Tombs at Castel d’Asso—Tumuli.
CHRONOLOGICAL MEMORANDA.
| Migration from Asia Minor | about 12th cent. B.C. |
| Tomb of Porsenna | about B.C. 500 |
| Etruria becomes subject to Rome | about B.C. 330 |
The ethnographical history of art in Italy is in all its essential features similar to that of Greece, though arriving at widely different results from causes the influence of which it is easy to trace. Both are examples of an Aryan development based on a Turanian civilisation which it has superseded. In Greece—as already remarked—the traces of the earlier people are indistinct and difficult to seize. In Italy their features are drawn with a coarser hand, and extend down into a more essentially historic age. It thus happens that we have no doubt as to the existence of the Etruscan people—we know very nearly who they were, and cannot be mistaken as to the amount and kind of influence they exercised on the institutions and arts of the Romans.
The more striking differences appear to have arisen from the fact, that Greece had some four or five centuries of comparative repose during which to form herself and her institutions after the Pelasgic civilisation was struck down at the time of the Dorian occupation of the Peloponnesus. During that period she was undisturbed by foreign invasion, and was not tempted by successful conquests to forsake the gentler social arts for the more vulgar objects of national ambition. Rome’s history, on the other hand, from the earliest aggregation of a robber horde on the banks of the Tiber till she became the arbiter of the destinies of the ancient world, is little beyond the record of continuous wars. From the possession of the seven hills, Rome gradually carried her sway at the edge of the sword to the dominion of the whole of Italy and of all the then known world, destroying everything that stood in the way of her ambition, and seeking only the acquisition of wealth and power.
Greece, in the midst of her successful cultivation of the arts of commerce and of peace, stimulated by the wholesome rivalry of the different States of which she was composed, was awakened by the Persian invasion to a struggle for existence. The result was one of the most brilliant passages in the world’s history, and no nation was ever more justified in the jubilant outburst of enthusiastic patriotism that followed the repulse of the invader, than was Greece in that with which she commenced her short but brilliant career. A triumph so gained by a people so constituted led to results at which we still wonder, though they cause us no surprise. If Greece attained her manhood on the battle-fields of Marathon and Salamis, Rome equally reached the maturity of her career when she cruelly and criminally destroyed Corinth and Carthage, and the sequel was such as might be expected from such a difference of education. Rome had no time for the cultivation of the arts of peace, and as little sympathy for their gentler influences. Conquest, wealth, and consequent power, were the objects of her ambition—for these she sacrificed everything, and by their means she attained a pinnacle of greatness that no nation had reached before or has since. Her arts have all the impress of this greatness, and are characterised by the same vulgar grandeur which marks everything she did. Very different they are from the intellectual beauty found in the works of the Greeks, but in some respects they are as interesting to those who can read the character of nations in their artistic productions.
In the earlier part of her career Rome was an Etruscan city under Etruscan kings and institutions. After she had emancipated herself from their yoke, Etruria long remained her equal and her rival in political power, and her instructress in religion and the arts of peace. This continued so long, and the architectural remains of that people are so numerous, and have been so thoroughly investigated, that we have no difficulty in ascertaining the extent of influence the older nation had on the nascent empire. It is more difficult to ascertain exactly who the Etruscans themselves were, or whence they came. But on the whole there seems every reason to believe they migrated from Asia Minor some twelve or thirteen centuries before the Christian era, and fixed themselves in Italy, most probably among the Umbrians, or some people of cognate race, who had settled there before—so long before, perhaps, as to entitle them to be considered among the aboriginal inhabitants.
It would have been only natural that the expatriated Trojans should have sought refuge among such a kindred people, though we have nothing but the vaguest tradition to warrant a belief that this was the case. They may too from time to time have received other accessions to their strength; but they were a foreign people in a strange land, and scarcely seem ever to have become naturalised in the country of their adoption. But what stood still more in their way was the fact that they were an old Turanian people in presence of a young and ambitious community of Aryan origin, and, as has always been the case when this has happened, they were destined to disappear. Before doing so, however, they left their impress on the institutions and the arts of their conquerors to such an extent as to be still traceable in every form. It may have been that there was as much Pelasgic blood in the veins of the Greeks as there was Etruscan in those of the Romans; but the civilisation of the former had passed away before Greece had developed herself. Etruria, on the other hand, was long contemporary with Rome: in early times her equal, and sometimes her mistress, and consequently in a position to force her arts upon her to an extent that was never effected on the opposite shore of the Adriatic.