Plate XI
Page 146
It would not be easy to imagine a more vigorous and lifelike image of a fallen warrior than this. Drapery and bodily forms alike are of the noblest. The face, with its square form, overhanging eyebrows, and parted lips, breathes the very spirit of military ardour. Such as every friend of Aristonautes would wish him to look when he sprang forward in his last fatal rush upon the foe, such he stands in imperishable marble. A grave in Westminster Abbey is supposed to recompense the English soldier for pain and untimely death, but surely the idea of living in marble under the eyes of all his fellow-citizens might furnish at least as strong an impulse to valiant deeds as the thought of a modern cathedral with its tasteless monuments and inanimate likenesses. It would, however, be a mistake to suppose that this figure, for all its lifelikeness, is an individual portrait. It is too strongly marked by the style of one of the noblest of Attic sculptors, Scopas, to allow us to doubt that there is in it a strong ideal element.
Another monument of the same school is the well-known relief ([Pl. XII]) in which we see Dexileos of the Athenian cavalry riding down and transfixing an overthrown foe, who vainly tries to strike back[172]. The inscription beneath this relief, which comes from a small chapel near the Dipylon gate of Athens, proves that it was executed in memory of a horseman who fell in the Corinthian War of 394 B.C. History records that in the battle the Athenians were defeated, and one is tempted to pause for a moment to consider how a modern sculptor would have represented Dexileos. An artist such as those who have modelled the tombs of St. Paul’s and Westminster would probably have sculptured him smitten to death, falling back in the arms of a grateful country; perhaps would have added above an angel crowning him with a wreath of celestial reward. But the Greek artists of the good period could not find in defeat and death any elements worthy of their art: they must represent those whom they portrayed in the moment of success and victory, not in that of overthrow. The difference is very suggestive. Infinitely inferior to Greek art in charm, in simplicity and dignity, modern art introduces higher elements than were usually taken into account in Hellas. From the artistic point of view the ancients were right; but from the ethical point of view there may be more to be said for the moderns.
FIG. 56. WARRIOR OF TEGEA.
A more modest memorial of a warrior comes from Tegea[173] ([Fig. 56]). In the relief we see a man named Lisas in the
