(The last lines are especially remarkable, and are an artistic commentary on what I have ventured to touch upon ethically at page 85.)
The story of Hippolytus is to be found in bas-reliefs and gems; it occurs on a particularly fine sarcophagus now preserved in the cathedral at Agrigentum, of which there is a cast in the British Museum.
Under the heroic and classical form, Hippolytus conveys the same idea of manly chastity and self-control which in sacred art would be suggested by the figure of Joseph, the son of Jacob.
A noble companion to the Hippolytus would be Neoptolemus, the son of Achilles. He is the young Greek warrior, strong and bold and brave; a fine ideal type of generosity and truth. The conception, as I imagine it, should be taken from the Philoctetes of Sophocles, where Neoptolemus, indignant at the craft of Ulysses, discloses the trick of which he had been made the unwilling instrument, and restores the fatal, envenomed arrows to Philoctetes. The celebrated lines in the Iliad spoken by Achilles—
| “Who dares think one thing and another tell My soul detests him as the gates of hell!” |
should give the leading characteristic motif in the figure of his son. There should be something of remorseful pity in the very youthful features; the form ought to be heroically treated, that is, undraped, and he should hold the arrows in his hand.
Neoptolemus, as the savage avenger of his father’s death, slaying the grey-haired Priam at the foot of the altar, and carrying off Andromache, is, of course, quite a different version of the character. He then figures as Pyrrhus—
| “The rugged Pyrrhus, he whose sable arms, Black as his purpose, did the night resemble.” |
The fine moral story of Neoptolemus and Philoctetes is figured on the Etruscan vases. Of the young, truth-telling, Greek hero I find no single statue.