Every Greek statue owes its greatness to the intensity of the artist’s attachment to one or other of these dominating beliefs. The Panathenaic frieze on the Parthenon was, primarily, the result of the first; the great temple statues of Zeus, Hera, Athena and Asclepius represent the fruits of the second; the glorious series of athletic statues by Hellenic sculptors of every period witness to the potency of the third.
Like most ultimate problems, the puzzle goes back to a question of morality. To-day, virtue is personal, morality is practically a bargain between man and man and between the individual creature and his Creator. We cannot easily realise the position of the fifth-century Hellene, whose moral sense did not depend upon the promptings of an individual conscience, but upon the influence of an unwritten, but unbending, civil code. There was not one such code in Greece, but a hundred and fifty. Each city-state had its own fixed ideals. Greatly as these differed, all agreed that the interests of the individual were as nothing compared with those of the city. And to this all added as the second great commandment, “Thou shalt love thy body as thyself.” To-day, we appoint Degeneration Commissions. In Greece they went to the root of the matter and made a well-proportioned and strong body a prime condition of citizenship. In Sparta every child was submitted to the inspection of the heads of the tribe, whose task it was to decide if any bodily weakness or deformity was present or seemed likely to develop. If so, the verdict was death. At seven the Spartan boy left home and entered the state schools, his life, until he reached manhood at thirty, being a continual round of exercises, athletic and military. And so it was with the fairer sex. The one end of the education and training of a Spartan woman was to give birth to perfectly-proportioned sons. Each girl attended the public gymnasium. Nor were these customs peculiar to Sparta. The maidens of the Greek world had their athletic festivals, under the guardianship of the goddess Hera. A typical example, the Heræa of Elis, was celebrated once in every Olympiad, and was presided over by the sixteen matrons who had woven the sacred peplos of the goddess. The principal solemnity was the race of the maidens in the Olympic stadium. The course, however, was much shorter than that of the Olympian games, in fact a sixth part. The girls were divided into three classes according to age, their prize being the garland of wild olive awarded at Olympia. The victors were allowed to set up statues of honour, and a marble copy of one of these bronzes, often called “[The Spartan Girl],” has come down to us. The forearms have been wrongly restored, but the statue evidently represents a maiden of about sixteen years of age at the starting-point, waiting for the signal. She is clad in the short linen chiton, reaching to the knees.
But to return to the main thread of our argument. The Spartan system was not singular but typical. It is true that no other Greek state called upon its parents to expose their halt, maimed, and blind weaklings on the wild slopes of Mount Taygetus. So drastic a method was only necessary where military considerations were paramount. But every Greek city relied upon the physical fitness of its citizens, and any Greek commander might confidently have followed the example of the officer who stripped the rich robes and jewels from his Persian captives and exposed their unmanly limbs to his company. “Such plunder as this,” he cried, “and such bodies as those!”
The Hellenic belief in the prime importance of physical fitness and the worship of bodily beauty to which it gave rise explain why the school of “Athletic” sculptors, who first shook off the chains which had hampered the progress of the plastic arts, made such an immediate impression. These men appealed to more than the sense of physical beauty. They touched a chord in the Greek heart which was in a very true sense “religious.” An Athenian of the time of Pericles must have inspired Mr. Arthur Balfour when in answer to the query “What do you mean by a beautiful soul?” he replied, “Well, to tell you the truth, my dear lady, I mean a beautiful body.”
The mythological religion of Greece had retarded, as we have seen, the progress of the sculptor. In its early stages the art, of course, owed much to its position as a handmaiden of religion. The first artists found the priests, and still more those making dedicatory offerings at the shrines of the great gods, their chief patrons. When, however, the craftsmen proved the possibility of not only a truthful but even an ideal representation of nature, and were ready to discard the meaningless conventionalities of the earlier stage, these religious influences proved a bar rather than an aid to progress. When a city desired to erect a new statue in its chief temple, it offered the commission, not to the daring innovator, but to one of the old school, or at least to an artist who was willing to confine his experiments to other classes of subjects.
“THE SPARTAN GIRL”
Vatican, Rome
THE DORYPHORUS OF POLYCLITUS