W. Titzenthaler, Photo. Berlin, W.
adulation as Eastern potentates, and actually marrying their sisters after the customary manner of Pharaohs. In Egypt Father Zeus took over the horns of Amen-Ra and became Zeus Ammon. Aphrodite, the foam-born goddess, assumed her Oriental nature once more and was mated with young Adonis in weird and lascivious Eastern ritual. Adonis was no Grecian youth, but a mystic personification of the spring, and his worshippers tore their hair and made lamentation for him with the same frenzy as made the priests of Carmel cut themselves with knives in honour of Baal. All over Asia Minor Hellenism had to mingle with Asiatic elements, losing in the contact all its fine austerity and sweet reasonableness. Hence was born the worship of Cybele, an Oriental Great Mother, with horrid mysteries performed by priestly eunuchs. Even the sculpture with which the wealthy Attalids adorned their great altar of Zeus at Pergamum, though Greek in plot and execution, is of almost Asiatic luxuriance and voluptuous beauty.[111] Passion and effort replace calm and dignity even as they do in the new Asiatic schools of oratory. Alexander’s violent battering at the gates which separate East from West had produced a strange hybrid in many of the cities of Eastern Greece.
But in some quarters the pure Greek spirit still produced lovely and reasonable work in art and literature alike. It seems to me impossible to think of degeneracy in connection with the Aphrodite of Melos, known to the public as the Venus of Milo.[112] If she has the charm and suavity of Praxiteles, she has the dignity and breadth of Pheidias. Unless you follow the pedants who make some point of the arrangement of her drapery, there is not a trait of vulgarity in her aspect. No doubt if we had the original Lady of Cnidos we should know better, but at present this superb statue rightly stands as the embodiment of feminine loveliness in statuary. And yet all the archæological indications go to prove that her author lived at the very end of the second century in the Asiatic city of Antioch, on the Mæander. She was found in a cavern on the little island of Melos, hidden there by who knows what devout worshipper or terrified pirate? She is, in fact, surrounded with mystery. No one has succeeded in restoring her missing arms, though far the most plausible theory is that which would make her hold a shield for a mirror in the same manner as the Victory of Brescia. No one has found anything else in Greek sculpture which could belong to the same artist, or even to the same phase of art. I name her here only to prove that you cannot fairly close the history of Greek art with Praxiteles or any other named sculptors, seeing that an unnamed artist living two centuries later could produce a statue on the same plane of excellence.
One of the most interesting figures among the warriors who followed Alexander was Demetrius, the Besieger of Cities, who gained his title from a celebrated but unsuccessful siege of Rhodes. He gained the kingdom of Macedonia and enslaved Athens. In celebration of a naval victory gained by him in 306 B.C. he set up at Samothrace a wonderful statue of Victory standing on the prow of a warship.[113] Her wings are outspread, her drapery is blown back by the wind, she is all life and motion. Along with the Venus of Milo she is the chief glory of the sculpture galleries in the Louvre. The reader should compare her with that earlier Victory fashioned by Pæonius. He will see that her drapery is much richer and the whole conception far more sensational. Both are very beautiful statues, but a pure taste will probably prefer the earlier one.
In all this period the dear city of Pallas had not suffered any material change. She had lost most of her colonies and maritime possessions, and in external politics she was but a pawn among the kings of Macedon and Egypt. But for the most part she remained a free democracy, governed by her free Assembly. The Peiræus still remained an important centre of commerce. Intellectually Athens still ruled the world not only in virtue of her past achievements, but by the continuing pre-eminence of her philosophers. Her principal literary product
Plate LXXXVII. APHRODITE OF MELOS [VENUS OF MILO
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