Antioch, though like Alexandria in many respects—in her turbulent population, her cosmopolitanism, her irreverence for all authority—seems never to have developed the cultured love of literature and the arts which we find at Pergamon and on the Nile. She remained in all probability a collector and not an originator of art. The glimpses which we can get of her statues indicate a catholic taste. The Apollo seated on the Omphalos, which decorates the Seleucid coins, resembles the Lysippic type, and a Herakles type, also found on Syrian coins and reproduced in the bronze colossus of the Conservatori, has some connexion with the later Sikyonian school. By the side of these we must place the Apollo of Bryaxis.
Ephesos, a strong place more or less at the meeting-point of three empires, has left us considerable remains of Hellenistic art. Her bronze athlete at Vienna ([Fig. 26]) belongs to a later development of the Scopaic school; her frieze of Erotes[61] is more in the Alexandrian manner. Some beautiful bronzes, in particular a Herakles attacking a centaur,[62] are in the mixed Lysippo-Scopaic manner. There are also traces of Praxitelean influence in her art.
These cosmopolitan collecting centres cannot tell us much of the methods of Hellenistic art. Our best resource is to examine more closely the works of certified origin. Ephesos is, however, important for its school of copyists. The marble copies of the Attalid dedications were perhaps made here, and Agasias, the author of the Borghese Fighter,[63] was an Ephesian by birth, although a Rhodian by education.
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26
III
THE RHODIAN SCHOOL
The school of Rhodes stands on a different footing from that of Pergamon or Alexandria. The latter were new foundations, or at least new societies, in which the Greek element was associated with much that was alien and exotic. The orgiastic wildness of Phrygia went far to influence the art of Pergamon, whether in its earlier sensuality or its later pageantry of exaggerated triumph. In Alexandria and in Antioch non-Greek races imported into Hellenic art the cynicism and the world-weariness of older and exhausted civilizations. But Rhodes was pure Greek and a living, growing, prosperous community without recollections of humiliation and defeat. Rhodes as a city had been born of the union of Lindos, Kameiros, and Ialysos at the end of the fifth century. The fourth century brought slow growth, but the successful defence against Demetrios Poliorcetes in its last decade opened a new chapter in Rhodian history. Henceforward Rhodes was mistress of an empire. She acquired possessions on the mainland; her fleet rode and controlled her neighbouring seas; her trade stretched out tentacles in all directions; and among the semi-barbarous Hellenistic kingdoms she alone carried proudly the torch of undefiled Hellenic tradition. Chares of Lindos, a pupil of Lysippos, headed the long roll of her sculptors; her painter, Protogenes, had but one rival in the Sikyonian Apelles. Thus from the first she boasted great artists, closely connected too with the school of Sikyon. Her Dorian sympathies naturally isolated her from the Attic school and from the mixed Praxitelean-Scopaic school of the Ionian mainland. Her Peloponnesian and Sikyonian connexions identified her at once with athletic art and with the school of Lysippos. Thus while Alexandria and Pergamon patronized marble sculpture, Rhodes now becomes the home of bronze casting. Her vast Colossus was matched by at least one hundred more statues of remarkable size, and the roll of her artists as recorded in inscriptions is noteworthy for its length. The great siege gave that impulse of idealism which is necessary for the growth of any artistic development, and the traditional friendship with the rising power of Rome helped her to preserve her prosperity and independence later than any of her neighbours. The last great work of Rhodian art, the Laocoon, is almost as late as the Empire, and the whole period of two hundred and fifty years between it and the Colossus is marked by an immense output of sculpture.