On the track of Ulysses; Together with an excursion in quest of the so-called Venus of Melos / Two studies in archaeology, made during a cruise among the Greek islands

by William James Stillman

Anything more definite than this it is impossible to establish by any now known evidence. The concealment of the statue, then, was several centuries later than the execution of it.

The Greeks of the classical epoch, even down to the first century after Christ, retained, amidst all the degradation of their contemporary art, a distinct recognition of the excellence of the elder work, as the enormous artistic as well as pecuniary value of some of the masters’ chefs d’œuvre prove. That this was one of them, and of one of the chief masters, all civilization agrees, and, although we have lost the name of the author, the people who hid it must have known it well. The availing themselves of the niche, ready-made to their hands, indicates that the possessors of the statue worked in haste, piling up stones in front of the niche, instead of walling it up.

This indicates the haste of impending attack, or work done in secret. In either case, if the statue had a temple in that locality, it would be concealed near it, or near the place where it was accustomed to stand; but no such temple is known. We may remember the contrast with the colossal and magnificent Hercules found in a drain at Rome, carefully covered over with good masonry. Concealment was the object in both cases, and the greater haste and furtiveness with the Melian statue indicate rather that it was brought from a distance than that it could be a divinity of the island.

Conjecture as to the origin of the statue, if my hypothesis is true, points to Athens, not only because the work is Attic, but because we know by the coins of Melos, which in all the latest coinages still bear the owl of Athens, that Melos belonged to that city as late as she had any Greek allegiance, which must have been some time into the Empire, as the Romans long made it a policy to preserve a certain kind of autonomy in the Greek states, even when their subjection was complete. That it is Attic, no one can doubt in face of the evidence I shall show. That Athens was the only city likely to send to Melos a treasure of this kind, concealment of which was impossible in Athens, is almost certain.

I conclude that it was a highly valued statue of Athens, sent to Melos in time of great danger, to be concealed and preserved. What period this might have been is only to be guessed at; it is therefore hardly worth while to say more about it, except to indicate that four periods in late Athenian history might furnish the motive requisite: when the army of Mithridates, under Archelaus, took Athens; the wars between the factions of Marius and Sylla; the Lacedemonian war, and the invasions of the Iconoclasts. The Romans do not appear, in spite of all their plundering and the enormous quantity of statues carried away from Greece, to have desecrated the temples of the Greek gods, as we see that Pausanias, in the century after Christ, found the most valuable of them in situ, as, for instance, the Diana Brauronia of Praxiteles, the Perseus of Myron, with others of great fame. The above conclusion, considering all the known and reasonably conjecturable details of the discovery and concealment, seems to me justifiable,—as well as that it was concealed at some time between the century or two centuries before Christ and the end of the first century after.

Now, what was the statue? We have so long been in the habit of accepting all female statues, not distinguished by well-known symbols of their divinity, as Venuses, that we make no distinction even in cases where the type demands it. And yet the dominant characteristic of Greek sculpture is this close adherence to established types. We are never at a loss to distinguish Diana, Minerva, Juno, or even Ceres and the lesser deities. Venus, it is true, came into vogue as subject for the sculptors of sacred statues later than some of the others; but all that we know of the Venus of the artists indicates that it was par excellence the womanly type. The treatment of the head in Greek sculpture was a point apparently of doctrine, as it was in Byzantine and in the later ecclesiastical art of Greece. It is always in a conventional type, utterly separated from the individual.

MEDICEAN VENUS.

VENUS URANIA.