The description of the shield of Achilles is as follows: Hephaistos, “the lame god,” “threw bronze that weareth not, into the fire; and tin, and precious gold and silver.” “He fashioned the shield great and strong, with five folds (or circles) in the shield itself.” “Then wrought he the earth and the sea, and the unwearying sun, and the moon waxing to its full, and the signs, every one wherewith the heavens are crowned.” “Also he fashioned therein two cities of mortal men; and here were marriage feasts, and brides led home by the blaze of torches—young men whirling in the dance, and the women standing each at her door marvelling.” Then a street fight, and the elders sitting in judgment. The other city was being besieged; and there is a wonderful description of the battle fought on the river banks, and “Strife, Tumult, and Death” personified, and mingling in the fight. Then he set in the shield the labours of the husbandman. This is so exquisitely beautiful that with difficulty I refrain from quoting it all. “He wrought thereon a herd of kine with upright horns, and the kine were fashioned of gold and tin,” “and herdsmen of gold were following after them.” “Also did the glorious lame god devise a dancing-place like unto that which once, in wide Knosos, Daidalos wrought for Ariadne of the lovely tresses. There were youths dancing and maidens of costly wooing, their hands upon their waists.” “And now would they run round with deft feet exceedingly lightly”—“and now would they run in lines to meet each other.” “And a great company stood round the lovely dance in joy; and among them a divine minstrel was making music on his lyre; and through the midst of them, as he began his strain, two tumblers whirled. Also he set therein the great might of the River of Ocean, around the utmost rim of the cunningly-fashioned shield.”[55]
There is, indeed, every proof that Greek art was the joint product of the Egyptian and Assyrian civilizations. Their amalgamation gave birth to the archaic style, struggling to express the strength and the beauty of man—half heroic, half divine. Gradually, all the surrounding decorations of life assumed as a governing principle and motive, the worth of noble beauty.
The Greeks were the first artists. They broke away from the ancient trammels of customary forms, and replaced law with liberty of thought, and tradition with poetry.
They destroyed no old ideas, but they selected, appropriated, and evoked beauty from every source. From the great days of Athens we may date the moment when materials became entirely subservient to art, and the minds of individual men were stamped on their works and dated them. Phases indeed followed each other, showing the links of tradition which still bound men’s minds together to a certain extent, and formed the general style of the day. Yet there was in art from that time—life, sometimes death,—but then a resurrection.
It appears from classical writers that about 300 B.C. Greek art had thrown itself into many new forms. Painting, for example, had tried all themes excepting landscapes. We are told that within the space of 150 years the art had passed through every technical stage; from the tinted profile system of Polygnotus to the proper pictorial system of natural scenes, composed with natural backgrounds; and Peiraiïkos is named as an artist of genre—a painter of barbers and cobblers, booths, asses, eatables, and such-like realistic subjects.[56]
I suppose there is no doubt that all the Romans knew or felt of art was borrowed directly or indirectly from Greece,[57] first through Phœnician and perhaps Etruscan sources, and finally by conquest. Everything we have of their art shows their imitation of Grecian models. Their embroideries would certainly have shown the same impress.
Greece—herself crushed and demoralized—even as late as the Eastern Empire gave to Rome the fashion of the Byzantine taste, which she at once adopted, and it was called the Romanesque. This style, which was partly Arab, still prevails in Eastern Europe, having clung to the Greek Church. In her best days, Roman poetry, architecture, and decorative arts were Greek of Greece, imitating its highest types, but never creating.
It is surely allowable to quote here one of Virgil’s Homeric echoes, which touches upon our especial subject,—
“Mournful at heart at that supreme farewell,
Andromache brings robes of border’d gold;
A Phrygian cloak, too, for Ascanius.
And yielding not the palm in courtesy,
Loads him with woven treasures, and thus speaks:
‘Take these gifts, too, to serve as monuments
Of my hand-labour, boy; so may they bear
Their witness to Andromache’s long love,
The wife of Hector:—take them, these last gifts
Thy kindred can bestow; in this sad world
Sole image left of my Astyanax!’”[58]
It is sad to mark how not only the refinements of taste, but even the guiding principles of art, were gradually lost in the humiliation of a conquered people, the dulness and discouragement which followed on the expatriation or destruction of their accumulated treasures, and the deterioration of the Greek artist and artisan, carried prisoners to Rome, and settled there because it was the seat of luxury and empire. As the captive Jews hung their harps on the willow-trees by the waters of Babylon, and refused to sing, so Greek genius succumbed, weighed down by Roman chains. It sickened and died in exile.