What Have the Greeks Done for Modern Civilisation?

by J. P. Mahaffy

IT is of course an illogical division to separate art from literature. Among the Greeks, at all events, literature in all its forms, was not only an art but the most perfect art. No statue of Lysippus is more perfect than a drama of Sophocles. But for convenience’ sake, and in this age where literature is seldom an art, we may speak of Greek art as that division of their work where they dealt not with words, but with other materials, and where they combined the uses of life with the love of the beautiful, as no other nation ever did. We may add that in regard to Greek influence on modern life (which is our proper subject), none has been greater and more permanent than that of art in this sense. Thousands of men have copied, or imagined they copied, Greek art, who were never able to read one word of Greek and who never cared one jot about Greek literature. I take to-day its more solid and larger expressions—architecture and sculpture, reserving for my next lecture the more subjective arts and those of mere ornament.

It is not true, as you might suppose, that these latter were later in development than the art of architecture. Far from it. In rude pre-historic ages, when the knowledge of building had not advanced beyond the question of mere safety, we find delicate and beautiful ornaments put upon arms and on personal decorations. The most elaborate tattooing of the savage is consistent with extreme rudeness in his dwelling.[20]

The earliest form of house we know, which was designed not only for shelter and durability, but also for safety, is the underground beehive house. Beehive huts of stone are common in many nations, and may perhaps best be seen now in the huts of the monks on the wild rock of Skellig Michael, which is the nearest land in the British Islands to the traveller coming from America. But such huts are not easily defended against an enemy. This latter advantage is obtained by making the hut a chamber underground,[21] and only to be entered by a passage long, narrow, and low, in fact a sort of horizontal shaft into which the enemy can only creep on hands and feet, and so can have his head chopped off as soon as it appears within the chamber, without possibility of using his weapons. I have seen this form of house in the most primitive village of the stone and bone age, which is known as the Weem of Scale, on a very wild bay of the main island of the Orkneys, looking northwest into the Atlantic. There, under the sands accumulated by the gales of thousands of years, we find small subterranean huts, with nooks in the stone work to hold rude vessels and implements, and with a low covered way for the owner to creep in and find himself at home. The weapons found in such houses, many of which are yet unexplored, are either of stone or bone or shell. These dwellings, once a very general type—for remember, similar wants in mankind produce similar satisfactions of that want in the most widely severed parts of the world—usually come to us in the stage of survival, when men had already learned other kinds of architecture. Hence they often preserved for the dwellings of the dead this type of underground beehive house with a long and narrow approach, though as time went on the house was made higher, and the avenue of approach better (as we have it in the famous New Grange in Ireland), and they even ornamented the inner surface of the slabs that formed the walls. As usual, the prehistoric Greeks did it all more perfectly than the rest of the world. The beehive house known in former days as the Treasury of Atreus, but now recognised as a tomb of some prehistoric king, is a splendid building fifty feet high, and made of thirty-three horizontal courses of stone overlapping as they rise, with the inner surfaces cut to form a conical chamber. Not only are large lintel stones used, but there were rosettes of bronze ornamenting the inner surface of the walls, and the stately avenue (dromos) lined with stone work of great finish and open to the sky, led to an ornamented gate or entrance. A restoration of this entrance, made by the aid of the actual pillars carried home long ago by the Marquis of Sligo, now astonishes the student of prehistoric art in the British Museum.[22] Why do I, however, delay over this very perfect and beautiful kind of building of which another noted specimen is the Tomb of the Minyæ at Orchomenos in Bœotia?[23] In the first place, to show you how the highly developed and finished forms were the gradual perfection of the oldest and rudest protected house, to which they merely added height, careful finish, and ornament, which ornament we know from Egyptian parallels to date some fifteen centuries before Christ; secondly, to bring home to you the important fact that the beehive or round house was at an early date abandoned to the use of the dead, and not employed for the use of the living till quite late in Greek history, when a few round public buildings show that the idea had not been lost. The men that built the great and elaborate tomb of Atreus probably never themselves lived in a round or beehive, but in a square house. They only maintained the round form out of respect for the dead, and indeed for the sake of the safety of the treasures buried with the dead.

To the square house (of course I include under this short word all rectangular buildings) we now turn. It seems to me that the earliest model which suggested this form was the hut of logs, laid one over the other alternately at right angles so as to enclose a square space. Two upright posts with a horizontal beam over them would supply the first rude doorway in an opening left by using shorter logs on each side of it, and then it was very obvious that a gable roof to cover the house would be made by laying logs from the top of the wall to rest one against the other at their upper ends, or of course a flat roof in a similar way.

We can derive from this simple form the whole classical architecture of Europe. In the first place, the gaps between the logs were filled with clay, and so even the great stones at Tiryns are treated. Thus the wall was made staunch against rain and wind. But then someone discovered that by making clay into bricks and drying them slowly in the sun, they would have a building material much more serviceable than wooden logs or stones. And so the filling up stuff became the main stuff of the wall; yet how persistent the idea of using wood can be inferred from the fact that early brick walls have wooden beams built into them longitudinally by way of giving firmness, but also affording a danger of complete ruin, if the building was attacked by fire. The door posts and the lintels were of wood; for the mud brick wall ending beside the door would rapidly suffer if not protected by a facing of wood, and later on, terra cotta casing was used to replace the wood. Ultimately, stone door frames and pillars replaced the older wooden work. But everywhere the traces of the primitive wood work survives. The oldest pillars were tree stems set on a stone base. At the top where the weight laid on them tended to flatten them out, they were probably bound with a metal band. This you see perpetuated by the Doric pillar, standing on its base without plinth, and at the top we have a band running round, and over it a splaying capital with a slab or abacus over it, to protect the inwards of the wood from being soaked with rain.

There is no more persistent ornament in a Doric Temple than that course over the actual wall which consists of what are called metopes and triglyphs. The metopes are not foreheads (μέτωπα) as even some persons who know Greek might imagine, but interstices (μετόπαι), in fact open spaces or holes between the triglyphs. Originally, when the roofs were of opaque tiles, these openings were necessary to let in light. But the triglyphs, what were they? Vitruvius notes them as beam ends, for he calls the metopes intertignia; and why were they always marked with three grooves, as their name implies? Apparently because two horizontal beams, intended to make a ceiling, had a third pinned between them which rose to the gable, where it met another, and so formed the skeleton of the sloping roof. When marble tiles, which were semi-transparent, or when a higher false roof was set on, the metopes were no longer necessary to let in light, and the Greeks made the now closed interstice an ornamented surface, showing groups, either painted, or carved in relief, to vary the severe lines of the building.

We have drifted into some of the leading features of temples, and they are indeed the buildings which have most influenced subsequent centuries, but the features of the temple were originally those of the stately house, as we can see clearly in the remains discovered at Tiryns. The roofs and upper stories are all gone, but the arrangements of the doorways are quite the same in principle as those of the historic temples, except that in the Tirynthian doorways, there are many evidences remaining of the actual use of wooden pilasters and pillars. Pausanias in the second century still found one or two wooden pillars surviving in the ancient temple of Hera at Olympia. As they got worn out, they were replaced by stone, and Dr. Dörpfeld found that these substitutions were not all uniform, but in accord with the altering taste of the day. The capitals in particular varied from pillar to pillar, to judge from those found among the débris of the temple, which, by the way, contained the famous Hermes of Praxiteles.

The ultimate separation between the dwelling house and the temple was that the house included a central court with rooms around it, which was too large to roof over, and so the model was handed on to all southern Europe. The Italian palaces, for example, are all dark and fortified toward the street, and contain an inner court and a gallery running round it on the building within, on which the rooms open. So permanent are the right principles of architecture when once discovered by a race of genius.

The temple or house of the gods was, of course, a single chamber of moderate size with a treasure house behind it, and the gradual development of it from a simple square chamber with one end opened for a door, and adorned with two pillars between the pilasters which formed the ends of the house wall—the doorway in antis, to the elaborate peripteral temple with double rows of pillars running round it—all this is to be found in any handbook of ancient art. From the very use of the temple as compared with the private house, it followed that while the temple looked outward, and was meant to show its beauty to those that approached it, the private house looked inward—all its beauties were reserved for the occupants, and care was even taken to prevent any curious observation on the part of the public. But it is only of recent years that the extant ruins have been minutely measured and studied, and now we know that, in addition to building this rectangular house for the god, there were the most elaborate and minute laws observed in the proportions of the various parts, and in the optical corrections of straight lines, which were found to appear curved. This perfection, therefore, of Greek religious architecture was not merely the adoption of a good practical form, and the carrying out of it in precious materials and with clear and competent workmanship. The most delicate adaptation of curves, the most curious and subtle applications of harmonies in lengths and heights, were utilised to produce an effect which all observers have long felt to be the most marvellous in the world.

But before I go further I will dispose of an interesting point which many have thought a defect in the architectural genius of the Greeks. You will see in every book that the use of the arch was unknown to them, and that for this capital feature in our buildings we are wholly indebted to the Romans. That the arch was not in use among the Greeks, I attribute to the fact that the round house and conical roof were deliberately rejected by them in favour of the square house and wooden structure of doorways and roofs. As already observed, this form was long since devoted to funeral purposes and to the burying (not burning) of the dead, and so its associations were gloomy. But it seems to me absurd to say that people who could frame a conical stone roof, by horizontal layers of stones gradually closing inwards, should not have advanced to the principle of the arch with its keystone. This in fact Pausanias assumed them to have done in the Tomb of the Minyæ at Orchomenos. He says the top stone of the vault is the άρμονία of the whole vault. If this was not accurate in the case of Orchomenos, it at least shows that Pausanias, a very experienced observer of old Greek building, did not hold that this generic distinction existed between Greek and Roman building. But, as I said, the Greeks rejected round or conical forms for rectangular, and the Roman combination of the two, which passed on to the Renaissance, is distinctly a modification of form to which the Greeks would not have agreed. Still less would they have approved of the use of arches and of architraves as the mere ornament of a building, and supporting nothing. To the Greeks every member of their building was there for use. A pillar was set to support an architrave, this latter to support the beams of a roof. Flat surfaces were decorated with painting, or with reliefs, but these flat surfaces were necessary to close in the building from the weather. Thus, to illustrate bad building by an example, when you look at the portal of St. Mark’s at Venice, you will see groups of marble pillars with a highly decorated arch over them, making a rich doorway. But there are more pillars than are wanted to support the arch, so that some of them stand idle, as a mere added ornament. That is only one instance of the tawdriness which infects the decadence of a great style—in this case of the Romanesque architecture of eastern Italy and Sicily.