The traditional character of the lion, which was known to the Greeks rather from the Iliad than from personal experience, made his figure a fitting adornment for the tombs of those who had died in battle for their country. Two gigantic lions still survive which adorned Greek tombs of historical celebrity. One stood over the remains of the Theban band which fell at Chaeroneia. The other, brought by Sir Charles Newton from Cnidus, probably marked the burial-place of the Athenians who fell in the battle of Cnidus, 394 B.C. The lioness on tombs seems to have scarcely had such dignified associations. On the tomb of Lais at Corinth stood a lioness, holding in her paws a ram[149], a symbol of the destructive force of the charms of the courtezan. A lioness without a tongue is said also to have stood on the tomb of Leaena, the Athenian courtezan who was a friend of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, and refused to betray the conspirators against the Tyrants.
A bull or cow sometimes also stood on a grave. In the British Museum is a bull of this class[150]. A heifer is said to have stood on the tomb of Boidion, concubine of Chares, who followed him in his expedition against Philip of Macedon[151]. On the grave of Diogenes of Sinope was a dog, to mark his cynic nature. But the dog which appears on the summit of a tomb in the Athenian cemetery need not have anything to do with cynicism. He may have his place as a trusty watcher and guardian; or he may be connected with the cultus of the dead, as we have already suggested. On the grave of Philager his teacher, Metellus Nepos, set a raven, which Cicero declared to be most appropriate to a master who taught how to fly better than how to speak[152]. Of course the raven, as the bird sacred to Apollo, was very appropriate on the tombs of learned men. In an epitaph in the Anthology[153] it is said that the grave of the poet Sophocles was surmounted by a satyr, holding in his hand a female mask. As, however, we are told by other authorities that a Siren stood on his tomb, we must suppose the satyr to have surmounted a cenotaph erected to the poet by his admirers in some other city than Athens. From another epigram[154] we learn that on the grave of Plato an eagle was sculptured: here we are clearly in the realm of poetic symbolism.
CHAPTER IX
ATHENS AND GREECE. PORTRAITS
In the Spartan group of sepulchral monuments we found one of the two fountain-heads of Greek sepulchral reliefs, springing directly out of the ancestor-worship of the Dorian race. For the other main source, which is much less religious and more artistic in origin, we turn to Athens and to Ionia. It arises out of the custom of setting up portraits of the dead.
The earliest sepulchral monuments which reach us from Attica, setting aside the merely decorative or symbolical sphinx, are portraits of the dead. In these portraits there is something of artistic and something of religious purpose. As we shall presently see, no hard and fast line can be drawn between the image used in ancestor-worship and the portrait which is merely a memorial. In fact we may see two lines of tendency taking their rise in the mere image of the dead. The one tendency is to bring it nearer to the images of the gods; to identify the departed ancestor or friend with Hades, the ruler of the world of shades. The other tendency is to render the portrait a characteristic memorial of the life which is past. In almost all existing sculptural remains we may see something of both tendencies, and it is by no means easy to determine what features in them properly belong to the past life, and what features to the life which begins with death. At Sparta, as we have seen, there is almost no reference to the past. In Lycia, past and future are closely blended. At Athens, and in several districts of Greece, the past has a tendency to eclipse the future. Yet at least in the earlier stelae the religious, the human, and the artistic are all actively working elements.
From the middle of the sixth century onwards the custom prevailed of placing upon the tomb a portrait of the occupant, who is represented in characteristic attitude and employment[155]. A man in middle life is commonly represented in arms; a youth appears as an athlete holding strigil or discus. A married woman appears with the basket of wool, which signifies her most usual employment to be spinning; a young girl carries a doll, or plays with a pet bird or dog. Sometimes this portrait is sculptured in the round; sometimes it appears in relief, on a larger or a smaller scale.
But no one at all well acquainted with the religious feelings and artistic tendencies of the Greeks will expect that portraits thus erected will be portraits in any modern or naturalistic sense, at all events until after the fourth century. When an honorary statue was erected in the neighbourhood of a temple or set up in a market-place in the likeness of some statesman or poet or athlete, it would represent the actual features of the person so commemorated, in the manner in which the sculptors of the time understood the art of portraiture. Greater vagueness and generality always in Greece characterized the sepulchral portrait. It was a radical feeling of the Greek mind that he who died put away the accidents of his personal individuality, and became in some degree a mere phase of the deity of the lower world. Thus, though he would not lose what was most essential in his personality, sex, youth or age, warlike or peaceful character, and the like, he would become typical of a class rather than individual, the warrior, the athlete, or the girl, rather than a particular man or woman. Besides this deep-seated tendency, it must often have happened that the sculptor who made the effigy had scarcely seen the person to be represented, and was quite incapable of making from memory a life-like portrait, whereas taking a mould from the dead face was a process invented, we are told[156], by Lysistratus, brother of Lysippus, the contemporary of Alexander the Great, and unknown at an earlier period.
FIG. 51. PORTRAIT FROM TOMB, THERA[157].
We find in Greece proper as early as the sixth century portrait statues from tombs. Male figures stand naked, female figures are closely wrapped in archaic drapery. It is very probable that some of the stiff archaic statues of men which figure in the earlier chapters of the histories of Greek sculpture really come from tombs. They commonly pass under the name of Apollo, as the Apollo of Thera, of Orchomenus, of Tenea, and so forth. But at the very early stage of Greek art to which they belong, the figures of gods and men were distinguished one from the other rather by circumstance and attribute than by any marked feature of the statues themselves. And thus some writers[158] have maintained that these so-called Apollos are really portraits of athletes. In regard to one of them, the Apollo of Thera, Professor Loeschcke has argued from its find-spot, in the neighbourhood of the rocky cemetery of that island, that it probably stood on a tomb. To bring before the eyes of the reader the character of these early portrait-statues I have given an engraving of the head of this statue ([Fig. 51]). The long locks fall over the shoulders, and the hair over the forehead is close curled in the decorative Ionian fashion. The upturned corners of the mouth, and the almost Chinese obliquity of the eyes, are well-known features of the most primitive art of Greece.