The oldest remaining models of Greek furniture to which we can point are the chairs in which the antique figures in the Syrian room at the British museum are seated. These are dated six, or nearly six, centuries before Christ. They represent chairs with backs, quite perpendicular in front and behind. The frame-pieces of the seats are morticed into the legs, and the mortices and tenons are accurately marked in the marble, the horizontal passing right through the upright bars. These early pieces of furniture were probably executed in wood, not metal, which was at first but rarely used. The woodcuts show the different forms taken from antique bas-reliefs.
The chest or coffer in which Cypselus of Corinth had been concealed was seen by Pausanias in the temple of Olympia. It was made about the middle of the sixth century B.C. The chest was of cedar, carved and decorated with figures and bas-reliefs, some in ivory, some in gold or ivory partly gilt, which were inlaid on the four sides and on the top. The subjects of the sculpture were old Greek myths and local legends, and traditions connected with the country. This coffer is supposed to have been executed by Eumelos of Corinth.
The great period of Greek art began in the fifth century B.C.; but those were not days favourable to the development of personal luxury among the citizens. An extreme simplicity in private manners balanced the continual publicity and political excitement of Greek life. The rich classes, moreover, had little inducement to make any display of their possessions. The state enjoyed an indefinite right to the property of its members; the lawgiver in Plato declared "ye are not your own, still less is your property your own." In Sparta the exclusive training for war admitted of no manner of earning money by business. In Athens the poorer class had so exclusively the upper hand of the rich that the latter had to provide the public with entertainments of sacrificial solemnities, largesses of corn, and banquets. "The demos," says the author of the "Gentile and the Jew," "understood the squeezing of the rich like sponges." Greece was the paradise of the poor.
It is therefore to be expected that the sculpture of the day, though employed sometimes upon the decoration of thrones or state seats, chariots, chests, looking-glasses, tripods, as the painting was on walls, vases, and movable pictures on panels, should have been employed mostly in temples and, with occasional exceptions, on objects of some public use. The chest described above was kept as a relic, and the elaborately carved thrones in the temples were those of the statues of gods and heroes. Ivory and gold laid over a substructure of olive wood were the materials quite as frequently used by great sculptors as marble or bronze for statues which did not form parts of the actual decorations of their architecture. In later times these materials were used in sumptuous furniture.
The Greeks used couches for sleeping and resting upon, but not for reclining on at meals, till the Macedonian period. We give two or three examples, from marbles: one of which resembles the modern sofa. Women sat always, as in Rome, sometimes on the couch at the head or foot, on which the master of the house or a guest reclined, generally on chairs. Besides chairs like the one represented here, the Greeks made arm-chairs; and folding chairs of metal. In the Parthenon frieze Jupiter is seated in a square seat on thick turned legs, with a round bar for a back, resting on short turned posts fitted into the seat. The arms are less high than the back; they are formed by slight bars framed into the uprights at the back, and resting on winged sphinxes.
