Two works of this late age deserve special mention. One is the statue of the Dying Gladiator, in the Capitoline Museum at Rome, supposed to have come from Pergamus. Says LÜBKE, "It undoubtedly represents a Gaul who, in battle, seeing the foe approach in overwhelming force, has fallen upon his own sword to escape a shameful slavery. Overcome by the faintness of approaching death, he has fallen upon his shield; his right arm with difficulty prevents his sinking to the ground; his life ebbs rapidly away with the blood streaming from the deep wound beneath his breast; his broad head droops heavily forward; the mists of death already cloud his eyes; his brows are knit with pain; and his lips are parted in a last sigh. There is, perhaps, no other statue in which the bitter necessity of death is expressed with such terrible truth—all the more terrible because the hardy body is so full of strength."
Supported on his shortened arm he leans,
Prone agonizing; with incumbent fate
Heavy declines his head, yet dark beneath
The suffering feature sullen vengeance lowers,
Shame, indignation, unaccomplished rage;
And still the cheated eye expects his fall.
—THOMSON.
The other statue is that masterpiece of art, the group of the La-oc'o-on, now in the Vatican at Rome, the work of the three Rhodian sculptors, Agesan'dros, Polydo'rus, and Athenodo'rus. It represents a scene, in connection with the fall of Troy, that Virgil describes in the Second Book of the Æneid. A Trojan priest, named Laocoon, endeavored to propitiate Neptune by sacrifice, and to dissuade the Trojans from admitting within the walls the fatal wooden horse, whereupon the goddess Minerva, ever favorable to the Greeks, punished him by sending two enormous serpents from the sea to destroy him and his two sons. The poet THOMSON well describes the agony and despair that the statue portrays:
Such passion here!
Such agonies! such bitterness of pain
Seem so to tremble through the tortured stone
That the touched heart engrosses all the view.
Almost unmarked the best proportions pass
That ever Greece beheld; and, seen alone,
On the rapt eye the imperious passions seize:
The father's double pangs, both for himself
And sons, convulsed; to Heaven his rueful look,
Imploring aid, and half-accusing, cast;
His fell despair with indignation mixed
As the strong-curling monsters from his side
His full-extended fury cannot tear.
More tender touched, with varied art, his sons
All the soft rage of younger passions show:
In a boy's helpless fate one sinks oppressed,
While, yet unpierced, the frighted other tries
His foot to steal out of the horrid twine.
An American writer thus apostrophizes this grand representation:
Laocoon! thou great embodiment
Of human life and human history!
Thou record of the past, thou prophecy
Of the sad future! thou majestic voice,
Pealing along the ages from old time!
Thou wail of agonized humanity!
There lives no thought in marble like to thee!
Thou hast no kindred in the Vatican,
But standest separate among the dreams
Of old mythologies-alone-alone!
—J. G. HOLLAND.
II. PAINTING.
In painting, the Asiatic school of Zeuxis and Parrhasius was also followed by a "Si-çy-o'ni-an school"—the third and last phase of Greek painting, founded by Eupom'pus, of Si'çy-on. The characteristics of this school were great ease, accuracy, and refinement. Among its chief masters were Pam'philus, Apel'les, Protog'enes, Ni'cias, and Aristides. Of these the most famous was Apelles, a native of Col'ophon, in Ionia, who flourished in the time of Alexander the Great, with whom he was a great favorite. Of his many fine productions the finest was his painting of Venus rising from the Sea, and concerning which ANTIPATER, the poet of Sidon, wrote the following epigram:
Graceful as from her native sea she springs,
Venus, the labor of Apelles, view:
With pressing hands her humid locks she wrings,
While from her tresses drips the frothy dew:
Ev'n Juno and Minerva now declare,
No longer we contend whose form's most fair.