READING HALL

THE DOORS OF WISDOM

ATHENS . 478—401 B.C.

CHAPTER XV

GREEK ART AND ARCHITECTURE

I

LATE ARCHAIC SCULPTURE

IN considering the sculpture of the late archaic period, we may begin, for the sake of simplicity, with the naked male figure and the clothed female figure of the types which we have learnt to know as kouros and kore, for it is not until the time of the Persian Wars that these two simple but happy creations cease to be the dominant type of substantive statue. The last stage in the development of the kouros may be illustrated by the so-called Strangford Apollo in the British Museum. Body, legs and head remain frontal, and the weight is still equally distributed between the two legs: the statue differs from the kouros of Tenea not in the attitude but in the far deeper understanding of the bodily forms. It is not only that the several parts of the body have a more definite and a truer shape than before, and that portions which had been slurred, such as the neck or the area between breast and groin, are now clear and precise, but also that the artist has grasped the structure of the body as a whole, he thinks of the surface forms as determined by underlying muscle and bone, he has learnt how the head sits on the shoulders and the trunk on the pelvis, so that his kouros has a new vigour and a new elasticity. The next step will be to break with the old tradition of rigid frontality and to replace the simple bilateral symmetry of the older figures by a much more complex scheme.

The Strangford statue is said to have been found in Boeotia: but that loving study and systematic exploration of the human body to which it bears witness was not confined to one part of Greece. It is customary to give the principal credit to Peloponnesian artists, but that the movement originated in the Peloponnese we cannot be absolutely certain: all we can say is that wherever we turn in the late archaic period we find the same preoccupation, and that the idea of the young athlete, perfectly shaped and perfectly developed, becomes henceforth and for ever one of the chief elements, perhaps the chief of all, in the Greek conception of a work of art.

For the female figure and the representation of drapery we naturally recur to that splendid series of Athenian dedications to which we have already referred; and select four statues for special remark. The big flash kore 682 belongs to about the beginning of our period. It has been held by many to be not Attic but Ionic, by others to be by an Attic sculptor imitating, and seeking to outdo, Ionian models: in any case a brilliant, pretentious and vapid work, exemplifying a passing mode, and outside the main current of Attic sculpture, though not unparalleled among the multifarious dedications on the Athenian Acropolis. We find the same scheme of drapery, but a more temperate and more monumental style, in the big kore signed by Antenor, the sculptor who made the statues of the Tyrant-slayers for the young democracy of Athens. There is a somewhat similar though a subtler contrast, a decade or more later, between 674, with her bower-sequestered, almost spectral charm, and the giant robustness of 684. The very last stage of the kore, and the advent of a new epoch, is represented by the dedication of Euthydicus: all the little gleeful prettinesses of dress, hair, lip, and eye, swept away by a young, great artist. Such works as the kore by Antenor, 684, and the kore of Euthydicus are sufficient of themselves to refute the extraordinary notion that ‘grace and refinement’ are the characteristics of Attic art. It is not altogether true in the fourth century: in the fifth and sixth centuries it is laughable.

For all the beauty and variety of the late archaic kouroi and korai, it is not in these that late archaic sculpture finds its most perfect expression, but in the action-figures—men not being but doing—common as before in groups, especially in decoration of buildings, and becoming common now as substantive statues. On the Acropolis of Athens the long series of pedimental decorations in limestone culminates in the marble gigantomachy which filled the Peisistratid pediment of the old Temple of Athena.

The Athena and the giants have that truly Attic bigness of treatment which we have already admired, at an earlier stage, in the great beast pediments or in Tricorpor, and at the dawn of Attic sculpture in the Apollo of Sunium. The Alcmaeonid pediment of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi belongs to the same period as the Gigantomachy, but is not nearly so well planned. Neither of these works bears evidence of a really systematic study of the human body and its anatomy: but this we do find, only a little later, in the finely and vigorously executed  metopes of the Athenian Treasury at Delphi, with their scenes from the life of Heracles and his young compeer the Attic Theseus. There is another respect in which the metopes mark a new epoch: the modelling no longer hugs the front plane, as it did, for the most part, in earlier high relief or pedimental action-groups: the mass of the stone is fully utilized, the trunk is often rendered in three-quarter view, and regularly sheers away from the spectator towards the background. From these Attic works we may turn for a moment to an Ionian work of the same period, the exquisite pedimental figures from the Temple of Apollo at Eretria, Theseus carrying off the Amazonian queen in his chariot, with Athena presiding; and then to those sculptures which, over a hundred years ago, opened modern eyes to the beauty of archaic sculpture, and which despite the desecrations of the restorer remain unsurpassed by any subsequent discovery, the pediments of the Temple of Aphaia at Aegina.

The west pediment is distinctly less advanced in style than the east, and it is plausibly conjectured that the west belongs to the years just before 490, the east to the years just after. The excellence of the several figures has long been recognized, and wonder expressed, that the Aeginetan sculptors, best known in antiquity as bronze-casters, should have been masters of marble as well: but not until the new excavations of 1901 was it possible to form an accurate idea of the composition. Many-figured battle-scenes, dense yet clear; each man eager, light of foot, and trained to the last ounce; and all the freedom of a picture in the attitudes—darting, dying, and even falling. The theme of the pediments is one upon which Pindar loved to dwell in his Aeginetan odes: how the sons of Aeacus had twice taken Troy: once with Heracles, and again with the Atreidae. Pindar composed a hymn to Aphaia, possibly for the opening of the temple: but it is not to Pindar that we must turn for a counterpart to the sculpture of the pediments, but to the swift Homeric hexameter…

II.       

LATE ARCHAIC PAINTING

We have seen how in the course of the sixth century the Attic potters drove their competitors from the field. About 525, a new technique came in. The old black-figure method long survived, never quite died out, and produced masterpieces down to the end of the sixth century, but it waned gradually before the new red-figure method, in which the figures arce not painted in black on the clay of the vase, but left in the colour of the clay, and the background painted black: the minor details are in brown lines; a purplish-red is used very sparingly; and the colour-effect is thus very sober. That manly precision, which is one of the chief characteristics of Greek vase-painting, is now imparted not by incised lines as previously, but by the wiry unerring ‘relief-line’. In its relation to nature, the drawing of the earliest red-figure vases does not differ in essentials from that of the black-figured vases signed by Execias or Amasis. The great change sets in fully about ten years after the introduction of the red-figure technique. The characteristics of the new style are first, a profound interest in the individual forms of the human body, and second, a new conception of the body in space, a conception of which the most obvious manifestation is the love of certain violent yet definite foreshortenings.

The first of these characteristics we knoyv from the sculpture of the time: in painting it may be illustrated by the Antaeus of Euphronius, which stands at the beginning of the movement, and is full of the enthusiasm of the pioneer: the artist delights in collecting and recording the very smallest facts. Such extreme profusion of detail is hardly found in later works: by the end of the archaic period the knowledge now being amassed is common property, and though used is not displayed. The second characteristic has no exact equivalent in sculpture in the round, but it naturally appears in low relief, and to some extent in high relief. Hitherto the figures making up a picture had moved past the beholder on a plane parallel to the plane of his eyes: either the legs had been in profile and the breast frontal, or the whole figure had been in profile. In the new style of the later sixth century the figures are apt to turn towards the spectator and front him, partly or mainly: there are figures in which one leg is in profile and the other leg and. the trunk frontal; and figures in which both legs are in profile and the trunk three-quartered. Such figures do not merely make more variety in the representation: the foreshortenings lead the eye onwards beyond the surface of the picture, and by suggesting the third dimension give the bodies more solidity and substance. The frontal figure is not a mere vehicle of action: it invites the beholder to contemplate its mass. The Thorycion of Euthymides is a good example; in which we notice further that the two halves of the body are differentiated by the frontal leg, that the head, though still in profile, no longer perches rigid on a rigid neck, but bends on to the shoulder, that one hip is higher than the other, and the trunk on the eve of turning with the bend of the head. Thus, and by the turn towards us, the figure falls into line, in some degree, with the new kind of statue which we shall find taking the place of the kouros at the beginning of the next period: an earlier manifestation of the same revolutionary idea.

Besides figures seen from the front, we have figures seen from behind: with profile legs and the back three-quartered; or with one leg in profile, and trunk and the other leg in full back-view. The head is still nearly always in profile: the full face remains rare, and three-quarter faces are not attempted till after the beginning of the fifth century, and then only occasionally and for a long time unsuccessfully. Three-quartered hands add life to the gesture; the foot may make a three-quarter turn. Finally, the artist no longer shrinks from obscuring important parts of the body: the thigh of Antaeus occludes the lower half of his leg.

Thus, by purely linear devices, the painter contrives to give his picture a certain depth in space. Towards the end of the archaic period, a device of a different kind but with a kindred tendency makes its first appearance: shading. It is used very seldom and very sparingly: a flat wash of brown to give the hollow of a hat or of folds, hatched brown brush-strokes to model the rotundity of a vessel or a shield. But it is the first step towards the abolition of the linear contour and towards the replacement of outline drawing by what the modern world calls painting.

The chief interest of the vase-painter remains action. Narrative subjects —mythical and heroic— are as popular as ever, but pictures from everyday life become commoner than before, and there is a special love of athletic scenes with their straining muscles, intense movements, and countless postures; for scenes of revelry, the ‘komos,’ where men rush, dance, quarrel, lust, vomit, shout, and sing; and for the counterpart of the komos in the ideal sphere—the thiasos, Dionysus with his satyrs and maenads. For all its variety, humour and unconcern, this art is not naturalistic: apart from some very old persons, crookbacked and borne-over, from a fat belly or so, a wrinkled brow, a bald head, a bad beard, or a blobby nose; god and man, Greek and barbarian, athlete, drinker and amorist, have the same well-formed bodies and the same untainted vigour.

The number of vases is so great, and the styles so individual, that it is possible to trace the history of vase-painting with a detail and precision hardly attainable in other branches of Greek art. The earliest stage of red-figure vase-painting is best represented by the anonymous artist who painted most of the works which bear the signature of the potter Andocides—probably the same Andocides who dedicated the kore signed by Antenor. In the next stage, which is marked by the introduction of the new style of drawing with its anatomy, its foreshortenings, and its corporeity, the leading painters are Euphronius and Euthymides. By this time the drinking-cup had begun to engage the particular attention of the artists, and for the rest of the archaic period cup­painters and pot-painters may be said to form two distinct classes. The chief cup-painters of this third period, the late archaic, are the Panaitius painter, master of careering movement, who at one time worked for Euphronius; Duris, who began like the Panaitius painter but soon formed a staider subtle style of his own; the Brygus painter, at once passionate and delicious, able to put new fire even into the Panaitian style; and Macron, enamoured of the warm swing of women’s clothes. Of the pot-painters the Berlin painter, the Cleophrades painter, and the Pan painter are the chief: the first is sober and gracious; the massive power of the second anticipates Olympia and the early classical style; the third is an exquisite.

The remains of ripe archaic painting apart from vase-painting are trifling, and cannot detain us in this brief sketch. Our literary record, moreover, is extremely scanty. The great change which came over drawing in this period did not escape the notice of ancient writers. Pliny preserves an account, probably derived from Xenocrates, of the innovations ascribed to Cimon of Cleonae, which correspond in the main to those which we know from Euphronius, Euthymides and their companions: but whether Cimon was the moving spirit, or only one of those who had a hand in the movement, there is no saving.

III.     

EARLY CLASSICAL SCULPTURE

The art of the period between 480 and 450 is often termed transitional, but the term is misleading. Transitional implies inferiority to that which goes before or comes after, or to both, and the great works of this period—enough to mention the sculpture of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia—are equivalent to those of any other in quality, originality and creative force.

Let us begin with two early examples of the new art, both from the Acropolis of Athens, the Critian boy, and the fair-haired head.

The Critian boy is so-called because of its close stylistic resemblance to the Tyrant-slayers by Critius and Nesiotes. That famous group we possess in copies only: the boy is an original of about 480. The old kouros-type, with its simple symmetry, has now disappeared and given place to a new type of substantive statue: the weight is no longer equally distributed between the two legs, but rests principally on one, here the left; the left hip is consequently higher than the right, the shoulders are uneven, the spine curves, the axis of the whole body is thrown out, and the head turns to one side instead of looking straight in front of it. In the Critian boy the turns and twists are still slight: in later statues they will be more marked: the free leg will be farther away from the stiff leg, and the body will often sheer away from the spectator: but the age-long tradition is broken, an infinite prospect opened up, and the Critian stance will persist, developed but not essentially changed or contested, until Polyclitus introduces a still more complex and subtle idea. This great formal innovation is not a mere change of mode, it is the expression of a new view of life. The old kouros stood at the ready, with much about him of the perfect machine: his successor stands at ease, and the differentiation of the two sides of the body, with the alternation of contracted parts and relaxed, of muscle in play and at rest, gives a strong suggestion of the life, within the body, which controls the mechanism. The archaic artist was concerned with the surface and the build of the body, the interest of the early classical sculptor recedes, inwards from these, to the will.

The smile has faded from the boy’s lips and his look is even sombre; and a serious, even sombre face is common in the early classical period. The kouros and the kore smiled, not because the artist knew no better, but because the gay look was part of the code of behaviour at the time. It is no longer so: the statue will still smile sometimes: not a party-smile, however, or a royal smile (though these are not unlovely things), but in Lucian’s phrase, when deep spiritual felicity transfigures the face without perceptible change of feature.

The new simplicity and the new seriousness were observable in one of the last of the korai, the maiden dedicated by Euthydicus: and a second, slightly later masterpiece by the same great artist, the fair-haired head from the Acropolis, is the first of that long and wonderful line of fifth-century boy victors, not elated in the hour of their triumph, but grave and even troubled, as if made conscious, for the first time, of the meaning of life. The Critian boy and the fair-haired head belong to the same five years or so, but the style is totally different: the terse forms of the one point on to Myron; the larger forms of the other to Olympia. A third original, of the same period as the Tyrant-slayers, though not of the same school, is the bronze charioteer from Delphi, part of one of those great chariot-groups which we read of in Pausanias.

The new depth of content appears in the statues of the gods as well as in those of men: in the archaic period god and man look much alike; but now the sculptor is able to suggest a superhuman majesty and power. Significantly enough, Apollo, young, lofty, and austere, seems to have had a special attraction for the art of this time. The chief embodiment of him, for us, is the Apollo of the west pediment of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia: but other noble Apollos have been preserved to us in marble copies after bronze: chief among them the Choiseul-Gouffier, perhaps an Argive work, and the Cassel Apollo, perhaps Attic.

The smile is only one of the superficial graces or ornaments which are rejected by the new age. Just as a starker or more massive habit of body prevails in the male figure, so in the female the drapery becomes simpler and heavier. This is partly owing to a change in fashion, for the plain peplos, with its big unadorned spaces and severe verticals and horizontals, is now a favourite wear, not only in the Peloponnese, but also in Attica, where it had been replaced for nearly half a century by the gayer Ionic costume, and even in Eastern Greece itself: but the truth is that change of mode and change of treatment are due to a single cause. The kore of Euthydicus shoved the new love of plainness applied to the Ionic costume itself: the next step may be illustrated by the post-Persian figure from the Propylaea, a work of the seventies. The garments are no longer subordinated to the forms of the body, but live a life of their own. The austere magnificence of the ‘peplos figure’ is one of the main features of the Olympian pediments and metopes: but splendid examples of the substantive female statues of the period have survived to us in marble copies, and to two at least of these we must turn our attention: the so-called Hestia Giustiniani, and the statue called Amelung’s from the scholar who first placed the head on the body. The Hestia wears the peplos, and presents a complete contrast to the regular archaic kore whose elastic unvoluminous immaterial drapery clings to her body like a glove. The forms of the body are almost concealed : the heavy garment is like a fluted column from the waist down; the waist is not seen; and even the outlines of shoulder, neck, and head are masked by the thick veil. Once more, the life withdrawn from the surface into the core of the statue, where it burns with a strong unflickering flame. There is no reason to suppose that the goddess is Hestia—although it was a little poem to name her so: she stands and looks with the queenliness of the young matron: perhaps Hera, perhaps an Aeschylean Aphrodite.

Amelung’s statue belongs to the same period and the same school, probably the Argive. The costume is here the Ionic chiton and the himation, but it is as plain, and the envelopment as total, as in the Hestia. The tone of the figure is subtly different: not the matron, but the bride; and it is perhaps Europa, chosen by Zeus to be the mother of mighty kings.

Of the early classical sculptors mentioned in our literary sources, only two are much more than names to us. The many attempts which have been made to associate extant works with Pythagoras or Calamis have failed: but of Critius and of Myron we can form a notion. The bronze Tyrant-slayers by Critius and his partner Nesiotes are preserved to us by the marble copies in Naples; other fragmentary copies—especially the newly-discovered heads of Aristogeiton in the Vatican and of Harmodius in New York—help to supply what is missing or spoilt in the Naples group. The exact compositional relation of the two figures to each other is uncertain, but we are fortunate to possess, even incompletely, a historical monument of the first interest, an admirable example of the severe athletic art of the stage immediately after the Aeginetans, and a chronological landmark, for the group is known to have been dedicated in 476. Of the Critian boy on the Acropolis we have spoken already, and other torsoes might be added.

Myron made statues of athletes victorious in 456 and 448; and was probably active from about 480 to 440. The two famous bronzes of which we possess marble copies belong to the late part of his career: both show him as a master of movement, and an artist of great variety and originality. The discus-thrower is the culmination of the single action-figure to which the late archaic sculptors had paid close attention, and which would be more fully represented among our copies if it had lent itself to translation into marble. The original of the Athena and Marsyas stood on the Acropolis of Athens: the half-playful theme is a peculiar one for fifth-century sculpture, and must have been inspired by some special event at which we can only guess. Here as in the Tyrant-slayers the composition is not certain in every detail, but the main movement is clear. Athena has dropped the flute and turned to pass on; the satyr who has been listening awestruck, steals up after the discarded flute, while the goddess looks round with a warning gesture, for the flute will be his death. Both in the group and in the discus-thrower the movement is so planned that it is momentary without being trivial, and strong without violence. Strength and firmness are subtly blended in the body and head of the discus-thrower, and there is a wonder­ful freshness in the characterization of Athena, here a quite young girl, and of the wild man’s sinewy dry body and his hidebound few-featured face.

Hestia, Amelung’s, Tyrant slayers, discus-thrower, Athena and Marsyas, are all copies. In the archaic period we were able to confine ourselves to originals, but now we must consider copies as well. Most of the ancient statues in our museums are copies, made between the first century before Christ and the second after, of earlier works, and these copies preserve to us many of the masterpieces of the fifth and fourth centuries. It is considered good taste, especially in this country, where little attention has been paid to the history of Greek sculpture, to disparage these copies as made by irresponsible workmen for indiscriminating customers—‘Romans.’ Quality and faithfulness obviously vary: the quality is often admirable; to determine how faithful a copy is, in the loss of the original, is naturally a most delicate matter; but not necessarily impossible because delicate.

The place and more than the place, which the Aeginetan pediments occupied in the ripe archaic period, is taken in the early classical by the sculptures of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia. It is only recently that their overwhelming excellence has been recognized. More than one well-known writer has characterized them as ‘comparatively crude and archaic’: and these are the very words which other thinkers have applied to Aeschylus. The two great artists—Aeschylus and the master of Olympia—are akin in spirit; and we may add a third, the painter Polygnotus, for although no fragment from his hand has survived, passages in ancient writers enable us to form a certain notion of one who was reckoned the earliest of the great Greek painters.

The Temple seems to have been complete by 456, and the sculptures must have been made in the decade or so previous, are contemporary therefore with the latest and greatest works of the Athenian poet. The two pediments are contrasted: the west all tumult—Apollo, and the struggle between the Lapiths and the Centaurs at the wedding of Peirithous and Hippodameia; the east quiet—Zeus, and the preparations for the fateful chariot­race between Pelops and King Oenomaus. The twelve metopes deal with the labours of Heracles.

The treatment of these subjects is characteristic of the time. It has often been noticed that Polygnotus liked to represent, not the action itself, but the scene after: not the taking of Troy, delight of the archaic artist, but the morning after the taking. And so in the metopes, side by side with action-representations of the time-honoured kind, there are others in which the labour is over: Heracles is not shooting the Stymphalian birds as in the earlier versions of the subject, but offering their dead bodies to a wavering Athena; he is not grappling with the Nemean lion—a subject which the archaic artist enjoyed extremely—but resting his foot on the corpse of the monster and his head on his hand, the heroic boy exhausted by his first labour, and darkly conscious of the life of toil before him: his friend Athena stands by, her divine brow furrowed in sympathetic concern. A third metope shows Heracles supporting the firmament, while Athena lends him a hand and a kingly, a Promethean Atlas fetches him the golden apples. The idea of Heracles is greater and richer than any version of it: Aeschylus, perhaps Sophocles, might have expressed Heracles, but as far as we know did not: the metopes of Olympia are the grandest and profoundest single embodiment of Heracles.

The Polygnotan Troy Taken gave the time after the action, with its revulsion, resipiscence, remorse, resignation, and despair: the east pediment at Olympia gives the time before the action, with its conflicts and contrasts of emotion, its moral tension as opposed to the physical tension of Aegina, its hopes and fears, resolutions, sorrowful forebodings and anguish of expectation. Two things are to be said: first, that what we here observe in narrative art, the recession of interest from the action itself to the mental condition previous or subsequent to action, is parallel to something already noticed in the substantive statue; and secondly, that long and conflicting suspense, a knife-flash of action and that unseen, and then strange revulsion and unease, is the very formula, the very soul of Aeschylean tragedy. To go closer, the Troy Taken of Polygnotus finds a real counterpart in the speech of Clytaemnestra.

So perfect a pendant for the East pediment we shall not expect to find: but every note in that harsh symphony is struck either in the Persians, or in Agamemnon, or in the Seven.

Are there then no representations of action itself in this period? Of course there are, and the West pediment is one. But there is a great difference between action as treated at Olympia and as treated at Aegina. At Aegina Athena is in the middle of each pediment, but who of us remembers her? At Olympia the whole scene is dominated by the contrast between the knots of frantic strugglers and the towering figure of Apollo with the great gesture of command.

The unevenness of execution in the Olympian pediments has shocked some critics: the work is meant to tell from below and at a distance, and not every part of it will stand examination at close range. Others were repelled by a strong infusion of realism, foreign to the modern cathedral close, but characteristic of the early classical period and exactly paralleled in Aeschylean tragedy; or by a disregard of trivial propriety which seems naive—to the naive. The truth is that the pediments and the metopes are one of the highwatermarks of Greek art.

Who was the artist? Pausanias gives an answer: the East pediment was by Paeonius of Mende and the West by Alcamenes. We know something about both artists, or of the work they were doing in the thirties and twenties, and Pausanias’ attributions present difficulties which cannot be discussed at length. To sum up: first, it looks as if a single artist was responsible for the designs of the two pediments and the metopes; secondly, it is hard to believe that Alcamenes worked on the Temple, unless in a completely subordinate position, even in his youth; thirdly, it is a little less hard to believe that Paeonius was the artist. But it is better to call the artist not Paeonius, but the master of Olympia.

IV.

EARLY CLASSICAL PAINTING

The painters and paintings of the early classical period have left more mark in our literary records than their predecessors. Popular opinion regarded Polygnotus, an Ionian from Thasos, as the earliest of the great painters, or putting it more crudely as the inventor of painting. Pausanias has left an unusually full description of the great pictures by Polygnotus in the club-house of the Cnidians at Delphi: and with the help of this, of brief references in other writers, and of contemporary vase-paintings, we can form a certain notion, if not of Polygnotus, of the painting of his kind and time. ‘Troy Taken’ and the ‘Nekyia’—Odysseus in Hades—were huge mural decorations each comprising a great number of lifesize or nearly lifesize figures. The composition— apart, one must suppose, from a general balance—was not syn­optic but episodic; and the principle on which the figures were arranged on the wall can be determined from a comparison of the language of Pausanias with such vase-paintings as the Argonaut krater in the Louvre. This vase marks, for us, an epoch, for the age-old rule that the figures must share a common standing-line is abandoned: they are now disposed at different levels in the curtly-indicated landscape setting of rocks and herbage. The vase is in the ordinary red-figure technique, and its contrast of light and dark must not be transferred to Polygnotus. In Polygnotus the background was not black, but no doubt neutral and variable; the figures must have been modelled, though still very lightly, by shading; as to the colouring we hear something from our literary records, which tell us that Polygnotus was a four-colour painter, using white, red, ochre, black, and combinations of these: that is to say, restricting himself to a low, sober scheme of colour, without bright blue, bright green, and the intermediate shades for which these are necessary. The colour-scale is in the main that of Corinthian or Attic black-figure vases, but the proportions of the colours were naturally quite different in Polygnotus. A closer analogy is furnished by the white-ground cups of the early classical period: but once more, in Polygnotus the effect must have been made more complex by the use of mixed and intermediate tints. An excellent example of four-colour painting is preserved to us in the mosaic of Alexander and Darius, a careful copy of a famous picture by Philoxenus, an artist of the later part of the fourth century. The colouring of the Alexander mosaic reminds one of such modern pictures as Rubens’s Battle of Ivry. Rubens, as we know, did not always confine himself to the austeri colores, but used the Horidi as well: all fourth-century painting was not four-colour painting; and we need not suppose that all early classical painting was four-colour either. Philoxenus models strongly in light and dark, uses high-lights, reflected lights, and cast-shadows: Polygnotus knew none of these devices, but his colouring, though simpler than Philoxenus’s, was doubtless of the same kind.

Turning to the individual groups and figures, we find that Polygnotus was regarded as the earliest master of expression: Pliny says that he was the first to open the mouth, show the teeth, vary the countenance from its ancient rigour. This is a crude exaggeration, but doubtless refers to some such elaboration of facial expression as distinguishes Leonardo’s Last Supper from previous Italian painting: and the great expression-figures in the Lesche—Helenus ‘utterly dejected,’ Thamyris ‘blinded, unshorn, and altogether humbled’—make one think of the words of Leonardo (although in other respects Leonardo represents a later stage in the development of the art) when he calls ‘that figure most worthy of praise, which best expresses the passion which animates it.’ Polygnotus painted action-pictures: but the tone of his ‘Troy Taken’ or ‘Odysseus after the Slaying of the Suitors’ was like that of the East pediment at Olympia or the Argonaut vase: not the action itself represented, but the previous tension or the subsequent reaction; as in a tragedy as here the killing is done off the stage. Finally, the ethos of Polygnotus was contrasted by critics with the lack of ethos in his successors: his figures were of heroic breed, and breathed character and will. He stood as Aeschylus, or the Sophocles of the Ajax, to Euripides, or as Michael Angelo, let us say, to Paul Veronese.

The vase-painting of the early classical period is on the whole quieter than that of the late archaic. There is less calligraphic precision about body and drapery, and more breadth. The violent movement, which reached its acme in the Brygus painter, slows down. The light and nimble drinking-cup gradually loses the importance which it had acquired in the ripe archaic period, and big, imposing, more monumental vases play a greater part than before.

The art of Micon or Polygnotus sometimes inspires the vase­painter, and sometimes leads him to attempt what is beyond his powers. The thought of dignity and majesty is often in his mind: aiming at dignity, he is apt to become official; at majesty, to become grandiose. The vase-paintings of the seventies and sixties are on the whole more vigorous and significant than those of the sixties and fifties. By the middle of the century it is clear that the vase-painter, the peer of all other artists in the archaic period, is sinking to a humbler position, and can no longer keep abreast of the great transformations which are taking place in other branches of art. Vases and vase-paintings of the rarest beauty will still be produced for many a year, but ever fewer in proportion to the output, nor always with that perfect harmony not only between shape and picture, but between expression and decoration, which is the mark of the best archaic vases.

The great vase-painters of the seventies and sixties are the Penthesilea painter, the Sotades painter, and the Pistoxenus painter. The first is mainly a painter of cups: and his master­piece, the Penthesilea cup itself, is in a sense a last word in cups, an audacious attempt, this once by a miracle successful, to cram an Agincourt into an oe. The grand pathos and the huge gestures of the Penthesilea cup and the Tityus cup recall Olympia, and these, with the amazonomachyon a calyx-krater in Bologna, bring us closer than any other vases to the breadth and passion of battle-pieces by Micon or Polygnotus. The ordinary run of the painter’s works, youths and horses, satyrs and maenads, are broadly drawn with much realism and a pungent charm. The Sotades painter is akin to him: his white-ground cups are April-fresh, and for all the tiny scale, bold beyond what would have seemed possible. The Pistoxenus painter is less of a realist than the other two: his masterpiece is also on a white-ground cup, the Aphrodite on the Swan: it is the earliest work of classical, as opposed to archaic or early-classical, beauty. Among the vase­painters of the sixties and fifties there are two main groups. The Niobid painter and his companions paint large and somewhat heavy-handed amazonomachies and Iliuperseis, which evidently reproduce many of the features of the great wall-pictures, but not the spirit. The art of the Villa Giulia painter and his companions, derived from the later manner of Duris, loves quiet, cool scenes, and is full of harmony.

V.

CLASSICAL SCULPTURE: (1) THE SECOND HALF OF THE FIFTH CENTURY

It was not possible to connect the great innovations of the early classical period with particular artists: but in the ripe archaic period at least one great innovation can be ascribed to its author or perfector, the Polyclitan stance. And speaking generally, the literary sources are not only somewhat less scanty, but fit in better with the actual remains. Two sculptors stand out above the others in our record: Pheidias and Polyclitus. We know a good deal about Polyclitus, and if Pheidias still outtops knowledge, we have advanced beyond the foothills: of others, Alcamenes, Agoracritus, Cresilas, Paeonius, we catch more than a glimpse.

Polyclitus, described both as a Sicyonian and an Argive, made statues of athletes victorious in 460 and 452; and late in life, about 420, the chryselephantine image of Hera at Argos. Over half a dozen of his works have come down to us in more or less adequate copies. The chief of them is the so-called Doryphorus, a naked youth shouldering a spear. The best-preserved copy is the marble in Naples which formerly decorated the beautiful Hellenistic palaestra at Pompeii: but other copies give, one the head, and two the body better. The figure expresses in new and final form that general idea of which the earlier, less elaborate, and less perfect expression was the early archaic statue of the type of the Critian boy or the Choiscul-Gouffier Apollo: the idea of giving the impression of life by means of the alternation and contrast of tense and relaxed. The two legs are much more strongly differ­entiated than before, for the whole weight rests on the right, while the left, drawn far back, and touching ground with the toes only, is quite free; the head turns towards the supporting leg; the right arm hangs down at the side, resembling the right leg in its straightness, unlike it in being relaxed; the left arm holding the spear across the shoulder resembles the left leg in being bent, differs in being functional. The forms of the body are firm and massive, and the whole figure weighty: but there is no clumsiness, for the artist has been at pains to give each part a harmonious contour, and to make each take its place in the grand total design. It has been said that the Naples copy can give us but little notion of the finish of Polyclitus’ style, in which his chief excellence lay. The first part of the sentence is true, the second not. The principal thing is after all not the finish, but the total design, and that can be appreciated perfectly well in the Naples copy, though hardly in any photograph of it, for photographs always fail to give the recession of the free leg into depth. Pliny’s tag for the Doryphoros, viriliter puer, evidently translates a Greek andropais.

Certain ancient critics, hardly the subtlest, complained that the statues of Polyclitus were ‘very square, and all alike’: and the mind of Polyclitus was no doubt guided by the thoroughly Greek conception of a single ideal representation of the human figure which must be the goal of the sculptor’s efforts. In the Doryphorus he felt that he had approached as near the perfect statue as he could, and he wrote a treatise on the system of proportions which it embodied. The Hermes and the Heracles of Polyclitus go with the Doryphorus: theDiadumenus—an athlete, or perhaps Apollo, binding his head with the victor’s fillet—is generally allowed to belong to a later period in the sculptor’s life, when his art had become freer and blither. The two boys, the Dresden and the Westmacott, alter the rhythm of the Doryphorus and the other adult figures by turning the head away from the supporting leg: the assured look of early manhood gives place to modest downcast eyes.

We would gladly know how Polyclitus treated drapery and the female figure. What little is known about his Hera does not help us: and which of the Amazons preserved in copies is his has been hotly disputed. The two candidates are the Berlin type and the Capitoline. The Berlin Amazon has that perfect harmony of fold and form which the Doryphorus leads us to look for; the Capitoline is the work of a realist, but its forms seem the more Polyclitan. Whoever the sculptors, both are great works; two different embodiments of athletic and heroic womanhood, not in action, but in defeat and pain playing the man.

The Polyclitan stance never ousts the simpler pre-Polyclitan, but its influence shows itself wherever we turn in the later part of the fifth century: the strong swing imparted to the figure by bent knee and tiptoe foot becomes one of the dominant elements not only in naked male figures, but in draped female. But a second motive, just encountered for the first time, is destined to play an equally important part—the Berlin Amazon rests her left forearm on a pillar. This is the first step towards the leaning­figures which are characteristic of fourth-century sculpture, figures in which the axis of the statue is not within the body but outside it. The motive is naturally common in painting long before it appears in sculpture; and where it occurs in fifth-century statues it usually has a strong and special justification: the Amazon is wounded, and Aphrodite the most indolent of the immortals. But before the end of the century it appears in male figures also, as in a charming statue by a follower of Polyclitus, of which we have many copies, the best-preserved in the Louvre: the so-called Narcissus, really a boy athlete leaning with his hand on one of the little pillars of the palaestra. Artists are becoming more and more interested in the human figure not merely at ease, but completely at rest: when the motive power is withdrawn still farther from the surface, and there is no thought of action at all. The deep repose of such figures as the ‘Theseus’ of the Parthenon, or the nightward Moira, is another manifestation of the same interest.

Ancient critics thought of Polyclitus as the sculptor of men, of Pheidias as the sculptor of gods. The masterpieces of the great Athenian were the two colossal chryselephantine images of Zeus at Olympia and of Athena in the Parthenon at Athens. The Athena Parthenos was finished in 438: whether the Zeus was earlier or later is debated: Pliny gives the 83rd Olympiad (448 b.c.) as the artist’s acme, and since this date is not that of the Parthenos, it has been held to be the date of the Zeus. Of the Zeus we have nothing but tiny representations on Roman coins: a fourth-century head in Boston has been thought to reflect the majesty of the Olympian Zeus: but if we care for reflections, we had much better go to one or two Attic heads of the fifth century. Of the Parthenos we have reduced copies, the most complete and circumstantial the little vulgar souvenir which is known as the Varvakeion statuette. Something of the radiance and grandeur of the original lingers in the Hellenistic statue from Pergamum: but the Pergamene copy makes no pretence to fidelity. The great works of the earlier, the Cimonian, period of Pheidias have left no certain trace. At the other end, we have some evidence for the style of two sculptors who were described as his pupils, Alcamenes, and the Parian Agoracritus: and there is the Parthenon. The Procne found on the Acropolis is in all probability an original work, though a slight one, of Alcamenes; and a herm from Pergamum is a copy, perhaps on a reduced scale, of another work of his, the Hermes which stood beside the Propylaea. Small fragments of a great marble temple-statue by Agoracritus, the Nemesis of Rhamnus, still remain; fragments of the reliefs on its base, presumably carved under his supervision, quite possibly from his design; and a copy, now in Stockholm, of part of those reliefs. The list of Alcamenean works can be increased—for instance by a Pergamene copy of one of his goddesses—but it cannot yet be said that to us he stands out from his contemporaries as Myron or Polyclitus from theirs. Nor does Agoracritus. In the general disposition of the figures, the reliefs on the base of the Nemesis follow the Birth of Pandora on the base of the Parthenos: the style of the figures, which finds parallels in a number of Attic votive reliefs, and in a statue of a boy from Rhamnus itself, takes us a step beyond the Parthenon in the direction of softness and sunniness, anticipating one of the tendencies of the fourth century: but we must not forget that the base is probably pupil-work. Our ancient sources would suggest that the Nemesis itself stood well within the Pheidian tradition; and we may perhaps supplement our notion of it with the help of the so-called Demeter of the Vatican Rotonda, a copy, though polished up in modern times, of a statel) Atttic temple-statue which seems to stand close to what we knov of Agoracritus.

The sculpture of the Parthenon is our third great body of original sculpture in the fifth century, the first being Aegina ant the second Olympia. Thanks to inscriptions, the dates are mor precise than one could have expected: 447 to 442 for the metope 442 to 438 for the frieze, and 438 to 433 for the pediment: Pheidias was general superintendent of the great Periclean building operations on the Acropolis; but the question just what share I took in the sculptural decoration of the Parthenon is an extreme difficult one. The metopes vary considerably not only in quality and execution but in style, and here the individual sculptors mu have had very free scope. In the frieze several hands are of course observable, but it is nevertheless so homogeneous that the sculptors must all have worked to a design and followed it closely, aid that design not a mere sketch but carried out in considerable dets.

The pediments, extremely fragmentary, present the most difficult problem of all. The general sketch of both would seem to have been the work of a single person. But there are differ ends between the two which go deeper than differences of execution; as if the general design had been carried out in models by two different persons: and it cannot be supposed that all the figures were executed or even finished off by one hand.

Whatever the solution we must suppose an unusual organizing ability in some one, no doubt Pheidias: more than this, in spite of all differences from one part to another, it is possible to speak of a style of the Parthenon: this style can be recognized in other works as well, but to say that it is nothing more than the Attic style of the third quarter of the fifth century is no explanation: styles of this grandeur do not grow up, they are created by great men: and Pheidias has a better claim to be considered the true begetter of the style than Alcamenes, or Agoracritus, or an unknown.

The temple was Athena’s, and the adornment was all concerned with Athena, Athens, and the mission of Athens. The shield of the image of the goddess was decorated inside with a gigantomachy, outside with an amazonomachy, and the sandals with Lapiths fighting Centaurs, all three symbolic of the triumph of the higher over the lower breed. The base of the statue bore a relief of Pandora, symbol of Athens made lovely and prosperous by Athena and the craft-god Hephaestus. In the metopes, gigantomachy on the east side and amazonomachy opposite the hill of Ares on the w’est, incidents from the remote past of Athens in the middle of each side, and, to left and right of these, scenes from the taking of Troy on the north side, and centauromachy on the south. On the frieze under the colonnade, the people of Athens in festal procession, and the gods looking on. In the east pediment the birth of Athena, in the west the contest between Athena and Poseidon for the Attic land.

Most of the metopes preserved are from the centauromachy of the south side: the finest of these is still on the building, and the quality of the rest is unequal. It is as if the centauromachy had found its final expression in the previous generation, at Olympia and in the great wall-pictures of the same time, and was not thoroughly congenial to the age now beginning. But it must also be remembered that the frieze also is less perfect on the southern, least frequented, side than on the others. Of the pediments only the end-figures remain (and all these incompletely), with fragments of the others: but old drawings give the state of the pediments in the seventeenth century, when the west was still fairly well preserved, and the east somewhat better than now.

The pediments of the Parthenon are far more complex than those of the Temple of Olympia. The elements which make up the total effect are more numerous and more subtly employed. It is not only that there is much more detail in the individual figures on the Parthenon, which are worked out as if for a close­ view as at Aegina and not as at Olympia, and worked out with a knowledge of the ways of the body and of drapery far more intimate and more profound than that of the Aeginetans. There is something else: whereas at Olympia the general position of the individual figures and groups is either profile or full-front and the design has something of the look of a flat drawing, in the Parthenon there is much more variety in the position with regard to the spectator, the eye is continually drawn into depth, and the lines, curves, and planes with which it is concerned are multiplied, complicated, and enriched.

In the Olympian pediments the tone of the whole composition is given by a simple and powerful contrast: in the west between the violent struggle and the calm imperious Apollo, in the east between the quiet attitudes and the beating hearts. This is not the manner of the Parthenon. In the west, one instantaneous crash of unison, the tremendous apparition of the two gods on earth in glory and power. In the east, a more solemn theophany still, the birth of the Virgin goddess on Olympus: the awestruck or dreaming divinities, and every phase of movement and repose, slowing from the centre to the wings, and vastened by the cosmic setting, the upward urge of the Sun in his chariot, and night wheeling away. The beauty of Olympia grows stern and lunar beside the Parthenon; where one pediment is a blaze of noonday splendour, and the other glows with the swelling fires of dawn.

The subject of the frieze is the people of Athens; not fighting, or working, but engaged in that kind of festivity—surviving in the English word holiday, but eradicated from English life—which is at once a high religious ceremony and a delight to the participant. The special quadrennial celebration of the July feast which began the Athenian year was crowned by the Panathenaic procession. It is interesting to compare these men and boys and maidens and horses with the long lines of tribute-bearers on the reliefs of Oriental palaces, or with the rulers of Rome in the Ara Pacis Augustae. In the union of common aims and individual freedom, in an order which never breaks down although constantly looking as if it would, the frieze of the Parthenon is a perfect illustration of that ideal of democracy which is expressed in the funeral speech of Pericles. There is another great work which the Parthenon, and the frieze particularly, brings to mind at every turn; the Eeschylean Oresteia in its closing scenes. There also the procession of young and old, the eye of the whole Thesean land; Athena caring for her people; the same idea of freedom; and the deep note of confidence and joy.

In a brief glance at the Attic style of this period, it is almost unnecessary to go outside the Parthenon. One or two monuments which supplement it have been mentioned already: but a word at least must be given to the so-called Demeter of Cherchel, copy of an Attic original belonging to the earlier part of the period of the Parthenon. It is natural to compare her with a goddess of the early classical period, the Hestia Giustiniani: the costume is nearly the same, and the quality of the originals must have been equal. It is Olympia and the Parthenon over again in another field: the austerer beauty of the Hestia with the wonderful hard straight lines; the warmer, ampler majesty of the goddess of Cherchel.

The catchwords grace and refinement are as appropriate to the art of the period of the Parthenon as to the Apollo of Sunium or Tricorpor. The bodily forms are rounder and easier than in the early classical period, but still extremely powerful and solid. The faces are broad and well-liking, the features are large, and the hair glows in strong heavy undulations. There is much sweetness not of face only but of body and attitude and gesture; but it is the sweetness of the strong.

Most of the monuments with which we have been dealing are earlier than the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, which is naturally an important date in the history of Greek art. The Archidamian War meant les work for the sculptor not only at Athens but elsewhere. The Peace of Nicias saw a revival of architectural and sculptural activity; at the end of the century the ruin of Athens had to be commemorated; and there were always employers in outlying or foreign lands. A good deal of original work has survived from this period, and the art of sculpture did not stand still. But broadly speaking it was living on the ideas of the Parthenon; and the great discoveries and innovations were not in sculpture, but in painting. In Attica the sculpture of the Erechtheum and the Temple of Athena Nike belongs to the last twenty years of the century; in the Peloponnese, the frieze and metopes of the Temple of Apollo at Phigalea, and the metopes of the Heraeum at Argos. The influence of Polyclitus shows itself both at Argos and at Phigalea, but only in the forms not in the spirit. At Phigalea especially, the wildness of the movements and of the wind-swept draperies, and the extraordinary unevenness of the execution, are symbolical of a hurried and distracted age. In Lycia, where Greek artists had long been welcome, the Nereid monument, sepulchre of a native prince, illustrates Ionic sculpture of the late fifth century as Ionic sculpture of the late archaic period was illustrated by the Harpy Tomb. The garments, clinging insistently or abandoned to the wind, seem like an exaggeration of Attic drapery as we see it in the Fates of the Parthenon; and the fairy lightness of the male figures is ill-suited to the siege, the sortie, or the clash of battle. The same general style shows itself in the sepulchral monument from LycianTrysa,and at a somewhat earlier and fresher stage in the Lycian sarcophagus from Sidon.

From this summerstricken art it is a pleasure to turn back, in conclusion, to the Attic tombstones and their tranquil representations of women with their maids, mothers with their children, young warriors and unaged men, which preserve through the war and beyond it much of the style of the Parthenon and, for all the subdued mood, much of its spirit, and silently confute the peculiar belief that the people whose poets created an unrivalled line of noble mothers, wives, maidens, and viragos, had a low opinion of womanhood; or to the boy lately discovered at Pompeii, a bronze copy of a fifth-century statue; or to such boy victors as the bronze Idolino in Florence, probably an original, and probably by a Peloponnesian master, or the figure recently acquired by New York, the best of several marble copies from a famous bronze. The civilization which produced such creatures perished in the storms of the late fifth century, the long war and the so-called intellectual awakening. The men of the fourth century, sculptors or not, looked for other qualities of form and mind: these boys belong to the age of Sophocles, Pheidias, and Polyclitus:

VI

CLASSICAL PAINTING; (1) THE SECOND HALF OF THE FIFTH CENTURY

The second half of the fifth century witnessed the rise of modern painting. The great mural decorations of the early classical period yield pride of place, as a rule, to panel-pictures with not many figures. Polygnotus reaches into the period, but the great new names are Apollodorus of Athens, Zeuxis of Heraclea (which Heraclea is uncertain, the Lucanian possible), and Parrhasius of Ephesus. Apollodorus, ‘the shadow-painter’ was the pioneer. Shading was used, as we saw, in the late archaic period, though most sparingly: but Apollodorus seems to have been the first to make a systematic study of light and shade, including gradation from one to the other, and cast-shadows. Zeuxis and Parrhasius elaborated the art farther. As to the general character of their work we can gather a little from our ancient authorities: Zeuxis fond of contrast and outlandishness and surprise, his style ampler and his figures robuster, Parrhasius lighter, gayer and more subtle.

Of the great progress in painting proper as opposed to drawing, the vases tell us almost nothing: their art remains linear. Throughout the third quarter of the century the tradition of the Niobid painter is carried on by the artists who may be said to form the group of Polygnotus, for the chief painter bore the same name as the famous Thasian. But most of the finest work was done in other quarters, and is to be found among the white lekythoi or the small red-figured vases. Shortly before the middle of the century, a red-figure artist, the Achilles painter, turned his attention to the sepulchral white lekythoi, and his sober, noble style set the tone in them for many a year. In the lekythoi of the Achilles painter and his immediate successors, more than in any other vases, the classical style finds its purest expression. Next to these, in the vases, mostof them small, which deal with the life of women: the wedding and the preparations for it; the mother caressing her children; the mistress or maiden, with her friends or handmaids, working or resting, playing or dressing or making music. The Eretria painter is one of the most exquisite among the artists who painted such scenes: small, graceful figures, with their flowing garments and easeful attitudes, are redeemed from prettiness by the virility of the relief-line. 'The painter of the Berlin dinos brings us to a later stage, and in his large works, such as the Return of Hephaestus in Bologna, or the maenad stamnos in Naples, he makes one think of Parrhasius, his rosefed people, his rushing movement. The style of the Meidias painter, at the end of the century, is of the same kind, but much more florid and ornate: it ravishes us into a rotating heaven of sweetfleshed women with golden names, and moonwhite Erotes with golden wings. The best work of the Meidias painter himself is beautiful: but his imitators are distressing, and the attempt to apply the style to solemn themes leads to the vulgarity of the Talos vase. In Southern Italy, where vase-painting now flourished, the style of the late fifth century is not so honied as at Athens, and the best vases have a weighty grandeur which is rare elsewhere, though it finds an analogy in certain late white lekythoi. Italiote vase-painting never fulfilled its promise, and even in its early period its masterpieces arc easily counted. Its finest products are the superb series of farcical representations on the phlyax-vases; these begin before the end of the century, and have no real parallel in Attic vase-painting: but the spirit is, locally tinged, the spirit of Aristophanes, that rarest, most delicious, and most dangerous of luxuries.

VII.    

DORIC ARCHITECTURE IN THE EARLY FIFTH CENTURY

The masterpieces of the Doric style were almost all built before Leuctra, and most of them were already standing when Pericles died. In the fourth century Ionic established a supremacy which it has, in truth, never since lost, for Corinthian, which challenged it in the Hellenistic age and eclipsed it under Imperial Rome, is Ionic in almost everything but its capitals. But in the first half of the fifth century Doric for a time shook off the Ionic influence which was noticeable towards the close of the sixth, and entered upon a phase of austere severity, of which the finest examples are the temple of Aphaia in Aegina and the temple of Zeus at Olympia. The architects concentrated their attention upon large problems of proportion, for the solution of which traditional Doric provided an admirable field. They aimed at reducing the heaviness of sixth-century work, without elaborating ornament for its own sake.

The decades which followed Salamis and Himera were not, however, marked by great architectural activity in Greece proper, and in the middle of the fifth century Pericles could still appeal for a general restoration of the temples burnt by the Persians. It was otherwise in the West, where the great tyrannies of Syracuse and Acragas carried on the traditions of Periander and Peisistratus. It will be convenient here, starting with temples and similar buildings, to speak first of the Doric West, next to pass by Olympia to the Doric and Ionic works of Periclean Athens, and then to give some account of what little is known of fifth-century temple architecture in Asia. Other types of building, such as theatres, assembly-halls and private houses, will be briefly discussed at the end of the chapter.

The huge temple of Apollo (‘temple G’) at Selinus, begun in the sixth century, was still building in the fifth. Lt was long the only Doric temple comparable in size to the Ionic buildings of Ephesus or Samos, but, after Himera, Theron of Acragas rivalled it with his Olympieum, the ‘Temple of the Giants,’ which is the strangest and most daring venture of Doric architecture and forms a striking exception to the rule of simplicity which in general characterizes this period, in the West as in old Greece. The stylobate of the Olympieum was of the same order of magnitude as its largest predecessors, in the neighbourhood, that is to say, of 120 yards by 55; a scale which remained the approximate limit in temple architecture throughout ancient history. The belief that Roman megalomania overstepped Greek standards of scale is definitely false. The temple at Acragas was, in fact, measured on the stylobate, larger than any of its successors; and it was really much larger, for its outer colonnade was engaged in a continuous wall, which enclosed a rectangle of quite unparalleled size. It was overthrown by earthquakes and its ruins were quarried for an eighteenth-century harbour mole; there is consequently much dispute about its original design and appearance. Diodorus Siculus, who saw it in the time of Augustus, states that it was never fully roofed; he assumes, perhaps wrongly, that complete roofing was originally intended. There were fourteen engaged columns on each flank and seven on each front, and these carried an entablature of normal design, but built of small blocks, and partly supported by the curtain-wall. The odd number of columns on the facade is strange: elsewhere this feature hardly occurs except in combination with a single row of inner columns. A base moulding ran all round the outer wall, and round the bottom of the columns, which thus looked as if they had moulded bases. To the half-columns on the exterior corresponded pilasters on the inner face of the wall, and the in­terior was divided by two rows of square pillars, opposite the pilasters, and themselves connected, at least at the ground-level, by a curtain-wall. But here certainty almost ends. It is known that colossal male and female figures served as additional supports at some point high in the structure, but whether on the outer wall or on the inner pillars has not been finally demonstrated. A recent theory that the temple had no pediments, but a roof sloping downwards and inwards, like that of an atrium is unconvincing. It should be added that one of the peculiarities of the Olympieum was partly anticipated in sixth-century Selinus, where the pteron of temple F was engaged, to about one-third of its height, in a panelled curtain-wall.

No other fifth-century Doric temple in the West calls, in so short a sketch, for a detailed description. Two of the most interesting are the ‘temple of Poseidon’ at Posidonia (better known as Paestum), and the temple of Segesta in north-west Sicily: the former because it is exceptionally well-preserved, and retains in position part of the upper range of its inner columns, the latter because it is unfinished, and gives much information about constructional methods. The Western architects were debarred from the exquisite accuracies of marble, but they had little to learn, in technique or in higher matters, from the greatest masters of old Greece.

Of Ionic, in this period, there is little trace in Sicily or Italy, except for a temple at Locri, founded long before, but rebuilt, with magnificent workmanship, perhaps in the early part of the fifth century. At this stage it was peripteral (seven columns by seventeen), the odd number on the facades being in this case a heritage from its earlier stages, when it had a single row of inner columns. The columns of the fifth-century temple are remarkable for necking-bands, with carved ornament, like those of the Erechtheum.

Returning to Doric, in Greece proper we may first consider the great temple of Zeus at Olympia, not forgetting its debt to such beautiful pioneers as the temple of Aphaia in Aegina, which belongs to the first twenty years of the fifth century. Like Aegina, the two chief Panhellenic sanctuaries escaped Persian destruction, but, while on the slopes of Delphi the Alcmaeonid temple already occupied the only large available site, on the plain of the Altis the lord of the sanctuary still lacked a worthy house. This anomaly was removed about 460 b.c. by the erection of one of the first great examples of classical Doric, it was built almost throughout of rough conglomerate, faced with stucco, and was entirely normal in plan, having an outer colonnade of six columns by thirteen, a cella with pronaos and opisthodomos, each containing two columns, and two inner rows of six columns, twelve in all, on the ground level, with a second tier above. The outer colonnade was deeper at the ends than along the sides, though the temple was not, like the ‘Theseum’ and temple of Bassae, for instance, actually pseudodipteral at front and back. There was an exterior triglyph frieze, but sculptured decoration was confined to the pediments and to the twelve metopes which were placed at each end of the cella, inside the peripteral colonnade. Since not a column still stands, the aesthetic qualities of the architecture are difficult to appreciate, and the temple is famous chiefly for its magnificent sculpture, and for the fact that it housed Pheidias’ chryselephantine Zeus; but it was clearly a masterpiece of simplicity and grandeur, and a model for the architects of the Periclean age.

At this point something must be said of a tiresome mathematical problem which vexed the masters of classical Doric, and later helped Ionic to drive its rival from the field. This problem, which chiefly affects prostyle porches and rectangular peripteral colonnades, arises from the existence of two traditional rules, which gradually became irreconcilable: the rule that one triglyph must be exactly centred over every column, and one over every intercolumniation; and the rule that there must be no gaps, for metopes or part-metopes, between the adjacent pairs of triglyphs at the four corners of the frieze. For various reasons the difficulty of reconciling these rules was little felt in the earliest surviving buildings, but it became acute towards the end of the sixth century, and remained so till the virtual extinction of monumental Doric in Hellenistic and Roman times. The chief cause was perhaps the gradual establishment of the rule that, while triglyphs must be upright oblongs, the metopes, which commonly carried sculptural decoration, must be approximately square. This development made it impossible to place the corner triglyphs at the angles of the frieze, without shifting them to a noticeable degree outside the axes of the corner columns. Theoretically the difficulty could have been met by decreasing the depth, from back to front, of the architrave, for the problem in fact turns exclusively upon the mathematical relation between the width of the triglyphs and the depth of the architrave; but structurally this was impossible, since it would have weakened the whole entablature to a dangerous degree. The architects therefore ac­cepted the necessity of narrow and decentred angle triglyphs, but did their best to minimize the consequent irregularities in the widths of the metopes. At first they were content slightly to decentre one or more of the adjacent triglyphs, but later they began also to shift the angle columns closer together. Usually only one intercolumniation was affected, but sometimes two: the two methods are known as single and double contraction. This device may seem a strange sacrifice of the more important to the less important feature: but, in fact, not only does the eye judge differences in column-spacing less confidently than differ­ences in metope width, but it would also rest by preference on the entablature, with its bright colours and its infinite variety of subtle decoration. It was left for the architects of the fourth and third centuries, with their passion for the mechanically regular, to declare, as Vitruvius records, that the triglyph difficulty made Doric, despite its beauty and grandeur, unfit for temple archi­tecture.

Simple contraction on all four sides seems to occur, surprisingly, in the ancient Heraeum of Olympia: otherwise it first appears, both in Greece and the West, in the second half of the sixth century, and is often, at first, confined to the facades. In the following centuries simple contraction is usual, though double contraction is characteristic of Sicily. Some widening of both triglyphs and metopes near the corners is also common.

VIII.   

PARTHENON AND PROPYLAEA

Fifth-century Doric and Ionic are also marked by the development of certain ‘refinements’ which have occasioned much controversy. Of these the Parthenon is the classical example. It is built of marble and founded on rock, so that later displacements are easily detected, and it has been surveyed with unusual care. It is undoubtedly true that many alleged ‘refinements’ in other temples, and some in the Parthenon, are insufficiently attested, or plainly accidental, but the sweeping scepticism of some archaeologists is unjustifiable. Discussion of ‘refinements’ may conveniently follow a brief description of the Parthenon.

The present building is not the first on its site, though that site, which now dominates the Acropolis and Athens, was naturally, for the most part, a very inconvenient slope. It is probable that a large temple was built here, with the help of a terrace, early in the sixth century: and it is certain that the vast limestone substructure of the existing Parthenon was built before 500 b.c. This substructure, though concealed since the present temple was erected, was apparently designed as a partly visible podium for a marble temple, not covering its whole area, which was only a few feet high when the Persians sacked the Acropolis. It was to have been a hexastyle Doric building, with sixteen columns on its flanks, and tetrastyle prostyle porches at each end of its cella. The ruins were abandoned until the surviving Parthenon was begun in 447 b.c. This new temple was entirely of marble, save for clamps, dowels, roof-timbers, door-frames, and doors. Its plan owes much to its smaller predecessor, and some of the old material was re-used. The pteron was octastyle (eight by seventeen), with a coffered marble ceiling. The cella was in two distinct sections, each entered through a shallow hexastyle prostyle porch. To the east lay a great room, one hundred Attic feet long, which contained Pheidias’ chryselephantine Athena Parthenos, and was surrounded on three sides by a Doric colonnade, in two tiers, which perhaps carried a timber ceiling. The room behind the west porch was shallower, and its roof or ceiling was supported by four large columns, probably Ionic. The Parthenon had other Ionic features, especially a continuous frieze, running, in place of triglyphs and metopes, above the prostyle porches, and right round the outer wall of the cella, inside the peripteral colonnade. The incomparable proportions of this temple, still overwhelmingly impressive, despite the explosion which ruined it late in the seventeenth century, defy simple arithmetical analysis: there is perhaps more hope of explaining them on geometrical lines.

The ‘refinements’ of the Parthenon consist, for the most part, in the substitution of curves for straight lines, and in the tilting inwards or outwards of vertical members. The surface of the stylobate is not flat: it rather resembles the edges of a mat nailed at its four corners and raised from the floor by the wind. This rise amounts to about 4 inches on the long sides, which measure nearly 230 feet, and to about 2'3/4 inches on the short sides, which measure just over 100 feet. The execution here is not perfect, for the corners are not all on the same level, and the lines are not true curves. This horizontal curvature is repeated in the entab­lature. The columns all lean slightly inwards, those at the angles having a double inclination, which incidentally eases the problem of the angle triglyph: the entablature has the same tilt; the antae beside the porches lean forwards. The columns not only taper upwards, as Greek columns almost always did, but do so with a subtle curve, called the ‘entasis’: the angle columns are a little stouter than the rest. Most of these refinements, with some differences, are mentioned by Vitruvius, who drew, in the time of Augustus, on the writings of Greek architects of the Hellenistic age, and it is clear from his words that his authorities believed them to be designed for the correction of optical illusions. This explanation has been disputed, and the scientific facts are far from clear. The various refinements may well have been invented for different purposes, curvature of the stylobate for drainage, tilting and thickening of the columns for strength, entasis for beauty: and though the illusion theory may well be as old as the fifth century, it is likely that architects at that date were in truth chiefly influenced by an instinctive dislike of mechanical straight­ness. These devices are rare before the fifth century, but horizontal curvature of the stylobate can be seen even in the rock-cut foundations of the late sixth-century temple of Corinth, and strong entasis is found at Paestum early in the same century. The refinements of Ionic, which are often very delicate, and seldom, if ever, include tilting of the columns, are first demonstrable in the fifth century, and were perhaps a loan from Doric: in later centuries most of them were the common heritage of all styles, but they were often neglected, for they involved much additional expense and labour. The accuracy of workman­ship required for the erection of an angle column, for instance, with extra thickness, double inclination, diminution, and entasis, will be obvious from a moment’s reflection. Even the Parthenon architects failed in fact to avoid some irregularity in the measure­ments of the entablature which these elaborately designed columns carried.

The architects of the Parthenon were Ictinus and Callicrates: the Propylaea were the work of Mnesicles. This marvellous structure was begun ten years after the Parthenon, in 437 b.c., and both buildings were far advanced before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. The Propylaea, indeed, remained and remain a torso, for their original plan, which has been gradually recovered by the patient skill of modern students, was curtailed in many ways, partly, perhaps, through financial exhaustion, but partly through conservative opposition to the obliteration of ancient sanctuaries. Fortunately their most important side, that which faced westwards and outwards, at the top of the winding road leading to the Acropolis, was substantially finished, and judicious restoration has made this again one of the most impressive monuments in the world. The material was marble, except for the usual timber elements, and for a very sparing use of black Eleusinian limestone. The plan is too complicated for detailed description. In essence it is of the same ancient type which we find at Troy and Tiryns, an opening in a wall, with a roofed porch within and without: but this simple scheme is here developed with unprecedented magnificence. The wall is pierced with five openings, the middle one over twenty-four feet high and nearly thirteen feet broad: both porches arc treated like the fronts of hexastyle prostyle Doric temples, and the outer one, which is more than thrice as deep as the inner, contains two inner rows of six Ionic columns, which helped to carry a coffered marble ceiling, still unrivalled in the time of Pausanias. The ground rises from west to east, and, while the carriage road passed between the central intercolumniations and the central doorway at a steady slope, pedestrians mounted successive flights of steps first on to the stylobate of the outer porch, and thence to the higher level of the inner one. The facades of the two porches were identical in measurement, so that the roof was stepped at the point of junction: but this rather awkward feature was not noticeable from below. On the outside the approach was flanked on the north by a rectangular hall, which ran at right angles to the main porch, and stood upon an extension of the same stylobate. In plan this hall somewhat resembled a temple, having a porch with three Doric columns, but it had no pediment, and was attached to the north wall of the west porch.

Mnesicles had clearly planned a similar hall to the south, with the difference that for its west wall was to be substituted an open Doric colonnade, to give easy access to the sanctuary of Athena Nike, which already occupied a partly natural bastion at that point: this hall was much curtailed in execution, but enough was built to balance, in a general way, the opposite wing. The plans also included two longer halls, or rather porticoes, open towards the Acropolis, to flank the inner porch to north and south, but neither of these was ever erected. The Doric work of the Propylaea closely resembles that of the Parthenon: the Ionic columns arc among the simplest and grandest ever designed: the capitals stand in the main line of tradition between the archaic and fourth­century work of the Ephesian Artemisium, while the bases furnish an early and tentative example of the Attic type (two large convex mouldings, with a hollow between), which ultimately conquered the world, though it got no footing east of the Aegean for two hundred years. The central intercolumniation of each porch of the Propylaea was exceptionally wide, to give room for the carriage road, so that two triglyphs instead of one rested on this span of the architrave. Various devices were employed to relieve the pressure on these architraves and on the lintel of the great door, including an ingenious cantilever structure in the frieze: the architraves were further reinforced with iron bars. Modern architects have calculated that these precautions were really superfluous, and the Greeks were, of course, unable to calculate strains and stresses with scientific precision. But it must not be forgotten that Greece was and is a land of earthquakes.

There is no space to describe the other Doric works of fifth­century Athens and ilttica: the most important that survives is the ‘Theseum,’ probably a temple of Hephaestus, which is better preserved, so far as the exterior goes, than any other Greek temple. It is rather later than the Parthenon, and is a hexastyle peripteros (six by thirteen). Like the Parthenon it has some Ionic features. The larger of the two temples at Rhamnus was built about the same date: the famous temple whose columns still stand on Sunium is a little later. The temple of Apollo at Bassae in Arcadia will be described at a later point.

IX.     

IONIC AT ATHENS

It was perhaps a consciousness of approaching sterility that led to the reappearance of so many Ionic elements, a symptom of re­awakened desire for the elaboration of ornament. This desire led, before the close of the century, to the erection of the Erechtheum, which despite its richness of detail and the singular beauty of its individual parts is notably inferior to the Parthenon and the Propylaea in grandeur and unity of design. But before we speak of this, the chiefwork of fifth-century Ionic, something must be said of two simpler buildings, the temple of Athena Nike, and the lost temple on the Ilissus.

The small temple of Athena Nike (or ‘Wingless Victory') stands upon a rock bastion, natural but artificially enlarged, at the south-west corner of the Acropolis, to the west of the incomplete south-west wing of the Propylaea. The architect Callicrates, Ictinus’ colleague on the Parthenon, was instructed to build a temple on this site soon after 450 b.c., but it would seem that most of it was not in fact built till the Propylaea were practically complete, perhaps after the Peace of Nicias. Lake most works of the Periclean age, the Nike temple is of marble. It stood till late in the seventeenth century, but was then pulled down to make a Turkish battery. Luckily little of the material was lost, though some was removed by Lord Elgin, and it was rebuilt, with many mistakes but with substantial accuracy, in 1835: what survives of the frieze is now in the British Museum, being replaced on the spot by casts, and no attempt has been made to rebuild the pediments, though parts of the cornice and sima have now been identified. The temple is tetrastyle amphiprostyle, and was entered, as usual, from the east, which is here the side of the Acropolis. As in the sixth-century treasuries of Delphi, there is a continuous frieze, but no dentils. The capitals resemble those of the inner columns of the Propylaea: but the bases show a different phase of the experimentation which produced in the Erechtheum the first orthodox examples of the Attic type. The whole building has a fairy lightness and grace.

Rather older, it would seem, was the very similar, but rather heavier temple on the Ilissus, which was carefully drawn and described by early visitors, but was destroyed about the close of the eighteenth century, a fact which should give pause to Lord Elgin’s critics. Some surviving slabs of its sculptured frieze have lately been identified.

The Erechtheumf is one of the strangest works of Greek architecture: its plan is so irregular that it has been regarded, probably without reason, as only the half of an uncompleted design. Its peculiarities seem to be due to the necessity of including a number of ancient sanctuaries on a very irregular piece of ground. It was begun, at earliest, just before the Peloponnesian War—perhaps not before the Peace of Nicias—and was finished, after a long interval, between 409 and 406: it was then damaged almost at once by fire, but was immediately restored.

The kernel of the structure is a rectangular cella running east and west. This cella has at the east end a prostyle porch of six Ionic columns in one row: the door was flanked by two windows. The south side of the cella is externally on the same level as the east porch, the level of the old Polias temple immediately to its south, but the north side is nine feet lower. The two levels arc joined at the north-east corner by a broad flight of steps stretching from the temple to the Acropolis wall. At the south-west corner there is no external connection, the higher level being continued westwards as a terrace, which is in fact the substructure of the pteron of the old Polias temple. The interior was cut into two chief divisions by a cross-wall nearer the east than the west end: at this point the levels changed.

The west end had no porch: the difference of ground-level, combined with the fact that the architrave, frieze, and cornice ran all round the cella, made a difficult problem, which was aesthetically complicated by the proximity of two features not yet mentioned, the large north porch on the lower level, and the small porch of the Maidens on the higher, each at the extreme west end of the cella. The architect did not try to make the western facade a replica of the eastern, but treated the angles as pilasters, and placed between them four columns or half-columns, all resting on a ledge rather higher than the eastern stylobate. The exact character of the original scheme is uncertain, for what survives is a Roman reconstruction, with half-columns engaged in a wall pierced with windows: but it seems clear that the columns or half-columns were at first connected only by a wooden grille. There is evidence that the west wall was originally designed to stand two feet further to the west, and that the change has compressed some features of the temple, especially the design of the Maiden porch.

The north porch was very like the eastern, except that its six columns were arranged in a front row’ of four with one more on each side between the antae and the angle columns. The columns of the north porch were more than four feet taller than those at the east, but, since its stylobate was nine feet lower, the peak of its pediment met the northern wall of the cella just below its horizontal cornice. This porch actually overlapped the north­western angle of the cella, and would have done so by some seven feet, even had the west wall been built at the point originally planned. The open space, on the lower level, just west of the Erechtheum, was the precinct of Pandrosos, and it could be entered both from the temple, by a plain door on the ground level, below the ledge which supported the half-columns, and by a small door at the south-west corner of the northern porch. The porch of the Maidens overlapped the stylobate of the old Polias temple, and contained a staircase leading down to the lower level of the western part of the interior. This porch consisted of six female figures arranged like the columns of the northern porch. They stood upon a continuous pedestal and supported on their heads an entablature of architrave, dentils, and cornice, with no pediment.

The architect of the Propylaea and the architect of the Erechtheum were both harassed by religious difficulties, but they met them in very different ways. Mnesicles fought every inch of the ground, and proclaimed his final disappointment by deliberately emphasizing the imperfections of his accomplished work: the other bowed to the storm, and hardly even attempted to produce a harmonious whole. He was content to make the main features of his temple individually beautiful, and to elaborate the details of the decoration, which are of incomparable elegance and charm: but for all its beauty, it is depressing to look at the Erechtheum after the Parthenon and the Propylaea. About those details a few words must be said.

The columns, which rest on fully developed Attic bases, have necking-bands adorned with a complicated pattern, and the actual capitals are extremely elaborate. Their most unusual features are the addition of a convex moulding, carved with a plait-band, above the echinus, and the complication of the volute member by the addition of extra mouldings, which cross the usually plain surface of the channel between the echinus and abacus and lose themselves in the revolutions of the side spirals. Besides being painted and gilt, the capitals were adorned with inlaid glass and gilt bronze. The other mouldings of the temple were similarly carved and enriched, and the ground of frieze was of black Eleusinian stone, to which white marble figures in relief were attached. The frame of the large north door, though in its present state partly an ancient restoration, is a work of extraordinary grandeur, and has served, directly or indirectly, as a model for countless later examples. Richly ornamented doors were no novelty in Ionic, but this is the first Attic work of its kind, for the Parthenon and the other earlier temples, including the Ionic temple on the Ilissus, had wooden door-frames, probably cased in bronze. A notable feature of the Erechtheum decoration is the appearance, perhaps for the first time, of the acanthus ornament, which was destined to win so great a place in ancient art.

It is possible to exaggerate the richness of the Erechtheum, in contrast to such buildings as the Parthenon and the Propylaea: we must not forget that these Doric works were also brightly, painted with elaborate ornament and that the difference lies partly in the fact that it was the tradition of the Ionic craftsmen, due, perhaps, to their early familiarity with marble, to carve patterns which in Doric were merely painted. It is notable that, whereas the large porches lack dentils, but have a continuous frieze, the Maiden porch has dentils, but no frieze. The frieze of the east porch was carried round the cella wall.

X.      

BASSAE AND THE CORINTHIAN CAPITAL

The temple of Apollo in his mountain sanctuary at Bassae, near Phialea in Arcadia, is interesting in many respects, but above all because it contained the first known Corinthian column. Though from the outside it had the look of a normal peripteral Doric temple, its internal arrangements were most unusual and merit description. Pausanias says that it was built by Ictinus, the architect of the Parthenon, in 430 b.c. This date is almost certainly too early, and we can feel no confidence about Ictinus. But though some archaeologists would lower its date to the fourth century, the evidence of style strongly suggests the last decades of the fifth.

The temple, which runs north and south, because of the lie of the ground, was mainly built of limestone. It was hexastyle and of narrow proportions, its outer colonnade having six columns by fifteen, with normal porches at each end of the cella: but the cella itself, which was entered from the north, is quite abnormal. For about three-quarters of its length it is flanked on each side by five Ionic columns engaged to the ends of short cross-walls, projecting inwards from the main wall: eight of these cross-walls project at right angles, but the two farthest from the door are inclined towards it at an angle of 45 degrees, and between them stood a free Corinthian column. The remaining quarter of the cella forms a partially isolated room, a sort of holy of holies, which has the very rare feature of a small side-door, opening into the western peripteral colonnade. This room forms, in effect, a small shrine, with the proper orientation, inside the larger structure: the god doubtless stood opposite the side-door, facing east. It is certain, however, that the earlier temple, of which some fragments have been found, did not, as some have supposed, occupy the site of this portion of the later one. The inner columns of the later temple were higher than those of the pteron, and carried an architrave and a marble frieze inside the cella, carved with reliefs. It is possible that the central part of the roof was modified or omitted, in order to light the frieze. The ceilings of the porticoes, the capitals of the inner columns, and the rooftiles were of marble,

The temple has suffered much damage since it was first excavated in 1812, and for the exact forms of the capitals of the inner columns we are largely dependent upon drawings and engravings, supplemented by recent excavation and by careful measurement on the spot. The Ionic engaged columns were of a very rare type, quite outside the main line of development. The shafts have an unusually wide spread at the bottom: below that is a torus moulding, and then a tall spreading concave member, with a low one below it. These bases appear to be a free adaptation of the old Asiatic type found in the Hcraeum of Samos. We may suppose that the architect was anxious to give these tongue-walls and engaged columns an individual character, and to avoid the appearance of having simply attached normal columns to the walls. The capitals were not less unusual than the bases. Their form is an extension of that of the ordinary angle capital, which has two faces juxtaposed at right angles, the volute between being carried out an angle of 45 degrees. It is obviously possible to treat all four faces and all four angles in this way, and that was in fact often done in Hellenistic Italy and at Rome: these Bassae capitals are really such four-sided capitals engaged, but only the front face was complete, the two side ones being stopped dead half-way back. The design of the capitals was abnormal in other respects: the eyes of the volutes were unusually close together, the profiles and decoration of the parts between shaft and channel were also abnormal, and the upper line of the channel was hunched up into a continuous curve. The evidence for the nature of the abacus is conflicting.

The Corinthian capital of Bassae has almost entirely vanished, but we have various sources of information about it, especially the beautiful drawings made at the time of excavation by Hailer von Hallerstein, and its main features are quite certain. Though it differed in many respects from all later examples, it was indisputably Corinthian. It consisted of a basket-like bell, crowned with an abacus, shaped, in plan, as a square with its four sides concave. There was a ring of acanthus leaves round the bottom of the bell, from which sprang upwards eight small spirals which supported the abacus at its four corners. There was also on each face a pair of spirals curling inwards, with an ornament between them. These are all normal Corinthian features, but their relative proportions here were not normal, since the leaves covered only a small part of the bell, which was unusually bare, despite the abnormal largeness of the inner spirals, and despite the fact that the ornament between them—a big palmette—was on the bell, instead of on the abacus. The spirals did not spring from fluted cauliculiy as they did usually, though not always, in later work. The abacus was unusually high, and the whole effect was solid and heavy. The next stages in the development of the Corinthian capital belong to the fourth century, and will be described in a later chapter.

The origin of this type of capital is uncertain. In general scheme it seems to owe something to the Egyptian palm-capital, which we saw imitated at Delphi in the sixth century. It seems also to be indebted to the Ionic angle capital, and perhaps even to the ‘Aeolic’ type of Neandria, while the use of acanthus leaves was perhaps suggested by such necking bands as those of the Erechtheum. Tradition ascribes the invention of Corinthian to the sculptor and metal-worker Callimachus, who lived at about this date, and this may well be true. Its delicate and fragile forms certainly suggest metal models.

It is usual to criticize the Corinthian capital as over-ornate, and to blame the Romans for their devotion to it. But its lines are in truth more expressive of its function than those of Ionic, and the expulsion of the Ionic angle capital was pure gain. The practical verdict of posterity, in mediaeval, Renaissance, and modern times, has been overwhelmingly in favour of Corinthian.

We do not know enough of fifth-century architecture in Asia Minor for confident generalization. It is likely that at Sardes, the capital of the satrapy of Lydia, the huge temple of Artemis was rebuilt, in purely Ionic fashion, soon after the destruction of a Lydian predecessor (itself probably Greek in style) in the Ionian Revolt of 499 b.c. The surviving temple seems to date from a complete reconstruction begun in the fourth century, but the foundations of the pteron columns, and some columns and capitals, appear to date from the fifth. These capitals in several respects represent a stage between those of the earlier and later Ephesian Artemisia. They are of beautiful workmanship, and, though normal in general design, have the rare feature of carved floral ornament in the channel between echinus and abacus: one even has palmettes carved on the eggs of the echinus, an enrichment paralleled only in the archaic temple of Apollo Phanaios in Chios.

A striking Asiatic work, the Nereid Monument at Xanthos in Lycia, a tomb in temple form, has been variously dated, but can scarcely be earlier than the close of the fifth century. Its columns have Asiatic bases, but show in their capitals such close resemblance to the Erechtheum, that it is difficult to believe in their independence, though in our deep ignorance of early Ionic, the possibility of some lost common model cannot be ignored. The building, of Parian marble, stood on a high podium, and was in the form of a tetrastyle peripteral temple (four by six); the cella had a pronaos and an opisthodomos, each fairly deep, but with no supports between the antae. There was no frieze between the architrave and the very bold dentils, but the pediment contained sculpture, and the architrave itself, as at Assos, was treated as a carved frieze. There were also two friezes of different height on the podium, which was crowned with a double egg-and-tongue resting on a bead-and-reel. There were statues between the columns.

XI.

   THEATRES, HALLS AND HOUSES

Hitherto nothing has been said except of temples and buildings closely resembling them, and we know far more of these than of any other type: but in the fifth century, besides private houses, many important buildings of quite different kinds were erected, some traces of which still survive. The most interesting are perhaps those designed for the accommodation of large assemblies. They fall into two main types, the political meeting-place, on more or less level ground, and the theatre scooped out of the hill­side. Neither of these was normally roofed, but they combined to produce a new type of roofed building, which became in various forms an important feature of most Hellenistic cities.

The Athenian Pnyx, which is not unique, may serve as a type of the roofless political meeting-place: a bema or rostrum, and some seats, were carved from the rock of a hill, but most of the citizens stood or sat upon the ground, which was in part artificially levelled or raised. The theatre is a much more complicated matter, and raises some of the most difficult problems in Greek architectural history. The auditorium was usually based upon a natural slope, as in the theatre of Dionysus at Athens, which was backed by the south face of the Acropolis. In its oldest traceable form, which is ascribed to the sixth century, this theatre seems to have had the tounditions of the auditorium cut in a series of straight lines, apparently for the reception of wooden seats, but seats were normally of stone, and cut in continuous curves. The flanks of a hillside auditorium usually needed artificial support, especially as the Greeks liked the seats to occupy rather more than a semicircle. Below, in the centre, lay the circular orchestra, sometimes bounded by a stone ring, flush with the ground. Behind the orchestra stood the rectangular skene, or stage-building. It was an isolated structure, separated from the auditorium by two open passages, the parodoi. It was usually in two storeys, and was sometimes longer than the diameter of the orchestra. A short wing often projected from each of its front ends. It is unlikely that any known skene is as old as the fifth century, but there is evidence that wooden skenai preceded some of those in stone which have survived. In front of the skene there projected, in Hellenistic times, a one-storey structure known as the proskenion. Nothing in Greek architecture has been so hotly debated as the construction, function and antiquity of this feature of the Greek theatre. Was it a stage, and did it exist in the fifth century? The Hellenistic proskenion was a row of stone columns, or pillars with columns engaged, standing on a low stylobate, two or three yards in front of the skene. These supports carried a stone entablature—architrave, frieze and cornice—which was joined by stone or wooden beams to the skene wall: the beams were covered with a platform of wooden planks, usually from seven to thirteen feet above the ground, level with the upper storey of the skene, and connected with it by at least one door. Between the pillars or columns of the proskenion was removeable panelling, for which doors were substituted in the central opening and sometimes in two of the others.

In most theatres the whole stage-building has been repeatedly remodelled in Hellenistic and Roman times, so that facts are difficult to ascertain and difficult to interpret. It is practically certain, however, that no extant stone proskenion is earlier than the close of the fourth century; nor is there good evidence for the previous use of wooden ones. It is clear therefore that our answer to the question whether or not the proskenion was a stage cannot at present solve the problem of the presentation of fifth­century drama, and in detail the proskenion question is hardly relevant to the present chapter. But it is interesting to observe that recent investigation of one of the best-preserved Greek theatres, that of Priene, has made it likely that in that case at least the proskenion became a stage (as it was for Vitruvius) only during the second century b.c., having apparently served, since the foundation of the theatre at the end of the fourth century, as a background for players on the orchestra level. On the whole, the archaeological evidence seems unfavourable to a high stage in the fifth century, and there is no external evidence for the low stage which some critics have, quite legitimately, postulated, to satisfy the internal evidence drawn from fifth-century plays.

The few known covered halls of the fifth century are more like a roofed Pnyx than a roofed theatre, though a type more like a roofed theatre appears in the fourth century, and is common in Hellenistic times. The oldest of all seems to be the Telesterion at Eleusis; nor is this surprising, for the celebration of the Mysteries called for a combination of privacy and spaciousness which no existing type of temple or meeting-place could provide. The oldest traceable form of the Telesterion appears to date from the sixth century, and this was probably burnt by the Persians. It was approximately square, with sides a little over eighty feet long, and its roof was supported, directly or indirectly, by five rows of five columns (twenty-five in all) placed at the points of intersection of a series of equidistant lines, parallel to the side-walls: there was no specially marked central space. A prostyle porch ran along the whole length of the eastern side. The evidence for the later history of the hall is complicated. It was rebuilt in Roman times, and was then very similar in plan to its archaic predecessor, though the sides were more than doubled in length. It had forty-two columns (six rows of seven) arranged as before, and also eight tiers of seats, partly rock-cut, inside the outer walls. There were six entrances, two on every side except the western, where the building ran into the Acropolis rock. In its main lines this Roman hall almost certainly reproduced the very famous fifth-century building, ascribed by Strabo and Vitruvius to Ictinus. It appears likely, from recent excavations, that Ictinus inherited plans dating from the time of Cimon, and that he was relieved of his post when Pericles fell into disfavour, being replaced by the three architects named by Plutarch, Coroebus, Metagenes, and Xenocles. There are traces of at least two schemes for the interior supports, different in detail from those of the Roman hall, though similar in idea, brom Plutarch’s words it appears that in the fifth-century building the inner columns, or some of them, were joined by architraves carrying an upper row, but this does not necessarily imply a com­plete upper storey. A great Doric prostyle porch was added to the east side in the second half of the fourth century b.c.

One of the surprises of recent years has been the discovery that the Odeum or Music Hall of Pericles, which adjoined the theatre of Dionysus, was not a circular building, as a passage of Plutarch seemed to imply, but a great rectangular hall closely resembling the Eleusinian Telesterion and nearly twice as large. It probably measured about 240 feet each way, and seems to have contained about eighty columns (perhaps nine rows of nine), arranged much as in the buildings already described. Here again what survives is a later reconstruction, for the original building, which was largely of timber, was burnt in 86 b.c., and rebuilt, on the same plan, by Ariobarzanes II of Cappadocia. The chief entrance was perhaps to the South, but this has not yet been excavated. There was a conical or pyramidal roof, copied from Xerxes’ captured tent, but the details of its construction and the nature of the upper parts of the building are quite uncertain.

In all these buildings the arrangement of the inner supports, which has Egyptian and Persian precedents, must greatly have interfered with their usefulness. From the fourth century onwards, various attempts were made to remove or minimize this inconvenience, notably in the Thersilion of Megalopolis and in the Ecclesiasterion of Priene: but these fall outside the limits of this section.

Among other public buildings of unusual plan erected during the fifth century may be mentioned the Lesche of the Cnidians at Delphi. This was a rectangular room, probably entered by a door in the middle of one long side, and divided by eight wooden columns on stone bases into a central space and a surrounding passage. The inner face of the walls was adorned with frescoes by Polygnotus. There was probably a complete roof, with some sort of clerestory.

For the private houses of the fifth century the chief evidence must be extracted from casual literary allusions, though many imperfect examples survive. Town-houses seem, for the most part, to have been unpretentious, built of such materials as sun-dried bricks and timber, with flat terrace roofs. It would seem that they usually had an inner courtyard, and that in the better houses these courtyards often had colonnades on one or more sides: but complete interior peristyles do not seem to have been the rule. Two storeys were probably customary, and the upper sometimes at least served as the women’s quarters. In country­houses at least it was sometimes possible to isolate the women’s quarters completely by the locking of a single door. The orator Lysias speaks of a small town-house where the upper storey was seemingly reserved for the women; but his language is not very clear. In the Oeconomicus of Xenophon Ischomachus explains to his bride that the chief reason for the isolation of the women’s quarters in his country-house is the separation of the male and female slaves. For two courtyards in one house there seems to be little or no evidence. Thucydides mentions expensive country-houses at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, and Isocrates remarks that such houses were finer and richer than those confined within town walls: but we know little about them.

The invention of formal rectangular town-planning is traditionally ascribed to Hippodamus of Miletus, who is said to have designed the Piraeus at an uncertain date, Thurii in 443 B.C., and Rhodes in 408 b.c. If all these statements are true, he cannot well have been born before 475 b.c., but there is evidence which makes it almost certain that the planning of Rhodes is wrongly ascribed to him, and that he was really born at the very beginning of the fifth century. It is a plausible conjecture that regular town-planning may have started in the colonics of the seventh and sixth centuries, where the land had to be equally divided between the settlers, but the oldest real evidence is for fifth­century Miletus. Before her destruction in 494 b.c. Miletus seems to have been as irregular as other ancient towns of gradual development, but after Mycale in 479 b.c. the new city was laid out on a grand scale and on strictly geometrical lines. It is probable that the young Hippodamus learnt his work in this practical school, and that he owes his exaggerated reputation to the fact that later in life he carried these unfamiliar ideas to Periclean Athens. He seems to have written on the theory of town-planning, and doubtless introduced some original improvements.

Before leaving fifth-century architecture we may attempt to define some of its characteristics. In its broader features the art during this period remained almost stationary. The traditional forms were lightened and refined, but, despite such innovations as the Attic base and the Corinthian capital, there was no substantial change, and little sign that architects were feeling for new lines of development. It is true that there was some increase in mechanical ingenuity, but it was used only to extend artificially the possibilities of traditional construction: there was no attempt to exploit new materials or new methods. Only in the Propylaea a new spirit appears, not indeed in construction, but in general design. There is a boldness in the grouping and combination of these great halls and porches that was scarcely equalled even in Roman days. But Mnesicles came before his time, and little in the following centuries breathes a similar spirit. His true heirs were the great masters of the Italian Renaissance.

CHAPTER XVI

ARISTOPHANES AND THE WAR PARTY