The charm which the simplest things acquired under the hand of a Greek artificer may be seen in the adornment of a circular hand-mirror.[278] Ivy-branches, dividing both ways from the handle, surround its rim with a delicate tracery of sharp-cut leaf and corymb. The central space is occupied by four figures—on the right, the boy Dionysus, who welcomes his mother in heaven; on the left, Phœbus and a young Paniscus playing on the double pipes. Grace can go no further than in the attitude and the expression of this group. Dionysus is thrown backward; both his arms are raised to encircle the neck of Semele, who bends to kiss his upturned lips. A necklace with pendent balls defines the throat of the stripling where it meets his breast, suggesting by some touch beyond analysis the life that pulses in his veins. He has armlets too below the elbow, and his hair ripples in ringlets between cheek and shoulder. The little Paniscus is seated, attending only to his music, with such childish earnestness as shows that his whole soul goes forth in piping. Phœbus, half-draped and lustrous, stands erect beside a slender shaft of laurel planted on the ground. Such are the delights of Paradise to which, as Greeks imagined, a deity might welcome his earthly mother, leading her by the hand from Hades. It would be easy enough to fill a volume with such descriptions—to unlock the cabinets of gems and coins, or to linger over vases painted with the single figure of a winged boy in tender red upon their blackness, and showing the word ΚΑΛΟΣ negligently written at the side.
But it is more to the purpose to note in passing that delicate perception of associated qualities which led the Greeks to maintain a sympathy between cognate deities, while distinguishing to the utmost their specific attributes. Aphrodite, Eros, Dionysus, Hermes, Hermaphrodite, the Graces, the Nymphs, the Genius of Death—these, for example, though carefully individualized, are still of one kindred. They blend and mingle in a concord of separate yet interpenetrating beauties. Between the radiant Aphrodite of Melos, who in her triumphant attitude seems to be an elder sister of the brazen-winged Victory of Brescia, and the voluptuous Aphrodite Callipygos,[279] a whole rhythm of finely modulated forms may be drawn out, each one of which corresponds to some mood or moment of the enamoured soul. Her immortal son in the Eros of Pheidias[280] is imagined as the "first of gods," θεῶν πρώτιστος, upstarting in his slenderness of youth from Chaos—the keen, fine light of dawn dividing night from day. In the Praxitelean Cupid—
That most perfect of antiques,
They call the Genius of the Vatican,
Which seems too beauteous to endure itself
In this rough world—
he becomes the deity described by Plato in the Phædrus, an incarnation of passion, tinged, in spite of his own radiance, with sadness. What thought has made him sorrowful and bowed his head? Perhaps Theognis can tell us:
ἄφρονες ἄνθρωποι καὶ νήπιοι, οἵτε θανόντας
κλαίουσ' οὐδ' ἥβης ἄνθος ἀπολλύμενον.[281]
The winged boy, again, bending his bow against the hearts of lovers, with his lion's skin beside him,[282] is the Eros of Agathon—he who delights to walk delicately upon the tender places of the soul. Next we find him asleep upon his folded pinions, the mischievous child who rewarded Anacreon's hospitality by wounding him, and who gave to the thirsty heart of Meleager scalding tears to drink. How, in the last place, are we to distinguish Love from Harpocrates, the silent, with one finger on his lip?
Turn next to Hermes. When the herald of Olympus met Priam midway between Troy-town and Achilles' tent, he was, says Homer,
νεηνίῃ ἀνδρὶ ἐοικώς,
πρῶτον ὑπηνήτῃ, τοῦπερ χαριεστάτη ἥβη,
"like a young man, with budding beard, whose bloom is in the prime of grace." This adolescent loveliness belongs throughout to Hermes. As the genius of the gymnasium,[283] he is a deified athlete, scarcely to be distinguished from the quoit-throwers and the runners he protects. The Hermes, who woos a nymph with his arm around her waist,[284] has Persuasion for his parent. Again, the seated Hermes, with wings upon his ankles, is the swiftness of auroral light incarnate.[285] Nor lastly, when, with chlamys thrown upon his shoulder and petasos slung from his neck, he leads souls to Hades, caduceus in hand, has he lost this quality of youth and lustre.[286] He upon Aphrodite begat Hermaphrodite. Their union—the union of athletic goodliness and consummate womanhood—produced a blending of two beauties forgotten by an oversight of nature.
How various again is Bacchus, passing from the stately mildness of the bearded Indian god to the wantonness of Phales, the "night-wandering reveller!" At one time you can scarcely distinguish him from young Apollo or young Herakles; at another his brows and tresses have the chastity of Love; again he assumes the voluptuous form which befits the sire by Aphrodite of Priapus. The fascination of the grape-juice lends itself to all qualities that charm the soul of man. Yet another of these cognate deities may be mentioned. That is the Genius of Eternal Slumber,[287] reclining with arms folded above his head, upright against a tree. To judge by his attitude, he might be Bacchus, wine-drowsy, as in a statue of the gallery at Florence. Looking at his long tresses, we call him Love: and what deities are of closer kin than Love and Death? His stately form, not unlike that of Phœbus, makes us exclaim in Æschylean language, ὦ θάνατε παιάν (O Death, the healer!). But he is stronger and more enduring, less swift to move, less light of limb, than any of these. It was a deep and touching intuition of the Greeks which prompted them to ascribe these kinships to Death. Who knows even now whether the winged and sworded genius of the Ephesus column be Love or Death? To trace such analogies further would be fanciful: it is enough to pluck at random a few blossoms, and to scatter them for lovers. To Winckelmann and the antiquaries may be left the accurate distinctions of the Greek deities. Without seeking to confound these, but rather studying them most carefully, we may yet discern by passing hints that purity of tact which enabled the Greeks to interpret in their statuary every nuance of feeling and of fancy, and to mark by subtlest suggestions their points of agreement as well as of divergence.