It is by no means unlikely that in later days tombs in Greece may sometimes have been adorned with life-like portraits of their occupants, executed by some of the great sculptors of the day, such as the noble figures of Mausolus and Artemisia, which stood in the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. But certainly this was not the only, probably not the usual, line followed in memorial statues. The idea of generalization and of deification of the dead, of which I have already spoken, was by no means inoperative in this province.
Pl. VII represents one of two figures found in the island of Andros, and now placed in the museum at Athens[163]. This male figure obviously appears in the guise of Hermes, and indeed bears a resemblance which is more than superficial to the celebrated Olympian Hermes of Praxiteles. Very probably it may have grasped the herald’s staff of Hermes. But the snake which twines round the tree-trunk, which is a necessary support to the marble statue, has no connexion with Hermes, but seems to indicate rather a connexion with
Plate VII
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Plate VIII
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the grave, that in fact the statue is rather of a mortal in the similitude of Hermes than of the god himself. And this suspicion becomes a certainty when we consider other facts. Close to it was found its companion, a female figure, which does not seem to stand for a goddess, but for an ordinary woman[164]; and as male and female were thus found together, they had probably both stood on one tomb. There are other pairs of figures, of later and ruder work, at Athens, which in general character resemble the pair from Andros. Thus we seem to be on the track of a clear and defined sepulchral custom prevailing from the fourth century onwards. The successors of Alexander in Egypt, Syria, and Macedon appear on their coins in the guise of various deities, Hermes, Apollo, and Dionysus particularly; and it can scarcely surprise us that a distinguished private person should by the ennobling touch of death be raised to the same level, and take the form of Hermes, the messenger of the world of shades. We find that in Thessaly tombstones quite usually are inscribed, not only with the name of the occupant of the grave, but also with a formula dedicating them to Hermes Chthonius[165].