CHAPTER IXATHENS AND GREECE. PORTRAITS

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a wreath. Twice over, on this curious stele, we have the symbolism of the vase employed to indicate the unmarried condition of the defunct.

On another stele (Pl. V) three vases are represented in relief, a marriage vase and two sepulchral lekythi[126]. The central vase bears a relief, a young horseman armed, standing beside his horse, and giving his hand to an elderly man who is wrapped in a cloak. The relief on the vase to left shows us a boy, of somewhat manly form, running with a hoop. It is likely that in the grave to which this monument belonged a father had buried three sons, one of military age and almost marriageable, the other two still young.

No sentiment is more often expressed in epitaphs, none more strongly affected the Greek heart, than the sadness of the fate of those young men and women to whom death came in the place of that marriage which was regarded as the consummation of earthly happiness. When the marriage vase was used for funeral libations, then indeed the bitterness of fate was felt by every bystander. The poets have embodied this feeling in many an epigram; one of these by the poet Meleager[127]I must endeavour, though the task is a hard one, to reproduce in English:—

When Clearista doffed her virgin tire,No bridal but a tomb did she require.The flutes before her door but yesternightTo merry household clatter answered bright;The morrow found them wailing, and the layOf Hymen in lament died sad away.And torches bright that in her bower did glowIllume the passage to the realm below.[128]

It is not, however, most usual to find the tombs of the later fifth and the fourth centuries thus adapted to the circumstances of a special tenant. Some of the stelae of this period, such as those of Tynnias (Pl. X), Aristonautes (Pl. XI), and Amphotto (Pl. XVII) belong especially to individuals; but the great majority of the graves betweenB.C.450 and 300 are of eminently domestic character. The reliefs which they bear represent not one person but many, and the inscriptions contain several names. The simple burial customs of the Athenians made great vaults unnecessary; a handful of ashes could be easily disposed of.

In looking at the sculpture of Attic tombs, we must not forget this domestic and family destination. And there is another point, one of technique, which we must also bear in mind. All decorative reliefs in Greece, whether they belonged to the temple, the public building, or the tomb, depended in a great degree for effect on the colour which was freely used to help out the sculpture. Few traces of colouring now remain on the sepulchral reliefs, but there can be no doubt that originally they were coloured, not perhaps all over, but in many parts. The background would be filled in with blue or other strong colour. The hair of the persons sculptured would be, according to the almost universal custom of Greek sculpture, red. Eyes and eyebrows would be indicated with the brush as well as with the chisel. The garments would commonly be at all events tinted, and in some cases they would bear designs painted to represent embroidery, as is the case with the votive archaic female figures recently discovered at Athens[129]. On our plate, which represents the stele of Aristion (Pl. IX), considerable traces of colour may be observed. And besides colour, metal accessories were in many cases added. In the stele of Dexileos (Pl. XII), reins, sword, and lance were added in metal.

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Thus when we see on our reliefs a lady holding out empty hands (cf.Pl. XXVI), we may be sure that originally those hands had borne a necklace or other jewelry, added in colour. The handles of the marriage vase on Pl. IV must have been marked with colour. The ornaments of the helmet of Aristonautes (Pl. XI) were added in metal, and so on in other cases. To the modern eye the pure white of Greek reliefs as they now are, seems classical and appropriate. And we may be right. Greek life has passed away, and looks upon us as if from another world in the ghostly reflection of Greek art. We see it not in a realistic but in a softened and ideal light. But the Greeks themselves loved strong colour, and in any purely artistic question their eyes are far more to be trusted than ours, which are perverted by the ugly surroundings of our daily life.

The date of Greek sepulchral monuments may be determined by a variety of considerations. The inscriptions which they bear may help us in some cases. We know that the old Attic alphabet, which did not distinguish short from long vowels, confusing O with Î©, and E with H, and which used the form[Image of form unavailable.]for Î› and Î› for Î“, was officially superseded by the alphabet of Asia Minor in the archonship of Euclides 403B.C.But long before this date the Ionian letters had been in frequent use for private documents. Thus any tomb bearing an inscription in the Ionian character can scarcely be later than 400B.C.; but may be considerably earlier. The evidence of date furnished by inscriptions being thus rather vague, we return to the evidence offered by the forms of the stelae and the style of the reliefs.

A certain roughness and want of elaboration in the acroteria, the architectural adornments of the tops of the stelae, indicates fifth-century work. For example, the stelae of Lysander (Pl. XX) and of Mica (Pl. XXI), with their somewhat clumsy ending above, are typical of the fifth century, while a somewhat more elegant top, as in the stele of Damasistrata (Pl. XXIII),is usually an indication of the more luxurious fourth century. But style of sculpture is a safer criterion. Those who are familiar with the style of the Parthenon frieze, and with that of Praxitelean art, will find little difficulty in determining to which of these two very different styles that of any given relief most closely approximates. To the question of the relation of sepulchral reliefs to the works of the great Athenian artists we will return in a later chapter (XI).

The effects of the sumptuary laws of Demetrius Phalereus are clearly visible in the Athenian cemeteries. After 300B.C.we find no more lofty stelae, no more temple-like tombs of great size and beauty. As might be expected from the statement of Cicero above cited, henceforward we find only small and mean monuments, the low stele with reliefs, the stone lekythos, the short pillar, inscribed only with a name. Such tombs are found in extraordinary abundance in the neighbourhood of Athens; but their interest, whether from the point of view of the historian or the artist, is but slight, and we shall be but little concerned with them in these pages.

We must imagine most of the roads leading to great cities as flanked on both sides by the sculptured memorials of the dead. Those who have visited Rome and Pompeii will be familiar with this custom, which seems to us rather depressing. But we must remember that the tombs of the Greeks and Romans had not that air of uniform melancholy which tombs bear among us. The frontispiece shows a part of the great Athenian cemetery of the Cerameicus, which lay just outside the Dipylon Gate. It shows us the line of tombs of various ages and of many forms, which flanked the sacred way leading to Eleusis, the line of which is visible in the foreground. On the left is the relief of Dexileos, which belonged to a sort of shrine, of which the foundations still exist. Close to it is a table or Ï„Ï�Î¬Ï€ÎµÎ¶Î±; below it, a tall stele with rosettes on the face of it, and surmounted by an acanthus. Then come moretables and a flat stele adorned with reliefs. Further are two shrines, Î½Î±Î�ÏƒÎºÎ¿Î¹, and a lofty basis supporting a bull. One or two short pillars of the later age are visible in the background. In some cases stone lekythi, such as that lying broken at the foot of the pedestal of the bull, were inserted, sometimes one and sometimes two, in the flat upper surface of the tables.

To what events this section of the cemetery owes its remarkable preservation is a matter of conjecture. Francis Lenormant suggested that it was covered by the earthenaggerset up against the walls of Athens by Sulla when he attacked the city from this side, and so preserved from the ruin which time brings. Dr. BrÃ¼ckner, however, rejects this view, thinking that the spot was buried with earth by the Athenians themselves on some occasion[130]. Whatever explanation be accepted, it is certainly a great gain to us thus to find preserved, like a fly in amber, a section of a great cemetery of Greece.

The architectural features and decoration of the tombs of Athens may best be spoken of in this place.

First, of the acanthus. The gradual growth of this ornament in complication and variety may be traced in the stelae of successive periods[131]. The general form is always two Ionic volutes, surmounted by a palmette. To this is commonly added, after the fifth centuryB.C., some kind of pattern derived from the leaf of the acanthus, which Callimachus, the inventor or improver of the Corinthian column, at the same period introduced into temple architecture.

The acanthus is said by some to be introduced into tomb decoration because it grew on the rocky spurs which the Greeks generally used as burying-places. And in favour of this view may be cited the curious fact that in the vase-paintings we often see on the top of a tomb, in place of a sculptured acanthus,

FIG. 41.HEAD OF ASSYRIAN STELE.FIG. 42.HEAD OF GREEK STELE.

FIG. 41.HEAD OF ASSYRIAN STELE.

FIG. 42.HEAD OF GREEK STELE.

one growing naturally. But there is, on the other side, a piece of evidence the value of which must be acknowledged. At Khorsabad in Assyria[132], M. Place discovered a tall square stele, fluted on all four sides, and surmounted by a device which is really a palmette, but which bears a strong resemblance to the so-called acanthus pattern of Greek art. The meaning and purpose of this pillar are obscure; but whatever they may be, it is scarcely open to doubt that in an artistic sense it lies in the line of descent of the Hellenic stele. And it naturallysuggests the question whether the finial ornament of Greek gravestones was originally meant for an acanthus at all, or whether it is only a variety of the Ionic scroll and the Assyrian palmette. We engrave side by side the top of this column (Fig. 41), and for comparison with it, an archaic anthemion from a Greek stele[133](Fig. 42).

After the archaic period the anthemion on the top of the Attic stele goes on developing in complexity as well as in beauty. We give three characteristic treatments of the fourth century, which may be compared with the example already figured. Of these monuments, one (43)[134]is adorned with rosettes only; the second (43A)[135]with a group of three persons, father, mother, and daughter; the third (43B)[136]with a marriage vase.

FIG. 43. ANTHEMION OF STELE.

The acanthus is not the only ornament used as a finial for Greek stelae: other devices sometimes appear in the same place; and their meaning is a matter worthy of consideration.

On some of the early monuments of Attica there stood a sphinx. The instance figured (44) is from an early tomb at Spata, near Athens[137]. The monster is archaic in form: her hair falls in long formal curls, her breast is covered with

FIG. 43 A. ANTHEMION.

feathers: on her head is a round crown. The history of the sphinx has been traced by Milchhoefer[138]and other writers. Its origin is certainly to be sought in Egypt, in which country sphinxes were set up in lines as guardians of the temples. The Egyptian sphinx is unwinged and male, as the beard which it commonly wears clearly shows; but when the people of Asia Minor and Syria imitated the form, they added wings. The significance of the monster was in Egypt quite vague; and it was probably even more vague in Asia. Thus when the Greeks adopted the strange form, it cannot have brought with it much meaning. They had to give it a meaning of their own. In fact, it was quite characteristic in the Greeks that they

FIG. 43 B. ANTHEMION.

FIG. 44. SPHINX OF SPATA.

FIG. 45. TERRA-COTTA: SPHINX AND YOUTH.

borrowed forms and gave to them their own meaning. They took the forms and sounds of the letters of the alphabet from the Phoenicians, but used those letters to express their own thoughts, and the same thing took place when they received from the East an established pattern or form in art. To the Greeks, then, the sphinx is a monster, sometimes fierce and hostile, sometimes more kindly and gentle, who brings men and women to an early death; a spiritual force, like the Siren, which bears away souls. On a terra-cotta (Fig. 45) published by Stackelberg[139], a sphinx, this time with human arms, is represented as standing on the body of a dead youth. Some such group must have been before the mind of Aeschylus when he describes the shield of Parthenopaeus as adorned with a sphinxbearing in her claws a man of Thebes[140]. But in the sphinx of our engraving there is no sign of fierceness or ravening.

FIG. 46. STELE OF LAMPTRAE, RESTORED.

A sphinx probably stood on the top of one of the most interesting of early Athenian monuments, the stele of Lamptrae, of which I give a restoration (Fig. 46) by Dr. Winter[141]. It consisted of a thick slab with elegantly adorned cornice. On the top is a deep cutting, made to hold either the sphinx of the engraving, or, possibly, a portrait. Three sides ofthe slab bear low reliefs which are much injured, but the subjects of which are of interest. On the front is a young horseman, evidently the denizen of the tomb, who rides to the right on a horse, holding spear and shield: a second horse is represented by a mere doubling of the outlines. On one of the narrower sides stands the father of the horseman, in an attitude of grief: on the other side are two mourning women, no doubt his near relatives. To these mourning relatives we may find abundant parallels among the vases which represent the lying in state of the corpse and its removal to the place of burial[142].

It will be observed that the sphinx of the terra-cotta has human arms. This, and her female sex, bring her into close connexion with other female monsters, who also are winged and have the arms of women, the Harpies and the Sirens. Harpy and Siren are, in fact, not clearly distinguished in art; both are human-headed birds. And both are daemons destructive to human life, since, according to the legends, the Harpies were notable for foul and ravenous habits, the Sirens for a passion for the blood of the sailors whom they drew to them by the sweetness of their singing. As sphinx and Siren were thus both alike the ministers of early or untimely death, it will not greatly surprise us to find that on later monuments Sirens appear in the place of sphinxes. An instance from the museum at Athens is figured (Fig. 47)[143]; the woman-bird is human from head to waist, and is occupied with playing on her lyre. The tomb on which she stood perhaps belonged to some young girl or boy who perished by an untimely death.

Yet this is by no means certain. For the Siren of Attic tombs has greatly modified her nature under the kindly influence of Attic poetry and art. She came from the East,almost certainly as a malicious and devouring daemon. But in the ordinary custom of Attic tombs of the fifth and fourth centuries she becomes friendly and sympathetic. Sometimes, as in our example, she plays on a musical instrument. Sometimes she seems to express grief by the movements of her arms, beating her breast, or tearing her hair (see Pl. IV). A passage in theHelena[144]of Euripides represents the Sirens quite in the same sympathetic light. Helen, when wailing over the calamities at Troy calls on the Sirens, winged maidens, daughters of the earth, to come and join to her lamentations the music in which they were skilled.

FIG. 47. SIREN, FROM TOMB.

The sphinx and the Siren may have originally found their place on tombs as á¼€Ï€Î¿Ï„Ï�ÏŒÏ€Î±Î¹Î±, stone images of daemons to drive away the real daemons. But they retain their place on the tombs of a more refined age to express sympathy with the mourners, and to add a gentle touch of sorrow to the delightful domestic scenes which usually occupy the front of the monuments. Sophocles calls the Sirens the daughters of Phorcys, who sing the ways of Hades; it cannot therefore seem inappropriate that the tomb of Sophocles himself was adorned with the figure of one of these spirits.

FIG. 48. HEAD OF STELE.

More obscure devices are sometimes mingled with the acanthus over the tomb. In a few cases (Fig. 48) we find a pair of goats butting one another over a drinking-cup[145]. The cup seems to show that there must be here some Dionysiac reference or meaning, though what it is we cannotsay. In one case a female figure (Fig. 49), the import of which is hard to determine[146], stands over a tomb, with the acanthus-leaves for a background.

FIG. 49. HEAD OF STELE.

It is not rare in most periods of Greek art to place on a tomb, instead of a portrait, the image of an animal, or some other device, the meaning of which has to be discoveredby the spectator. Sometimes it contains an allusion, usually to his name. We engrave (Fig. 50) a stele on which is represented a lion in relief[147], and as the name of the person whom the tomb commemorates is Leon, the allusion is clear. We may compare an epigram of Simonides[148], written for a tomb, which runs thus:—

Most brave of beasts am I; of men most braveHe whom I guard, reclining on his grave.Leon his name, yet save he had possessedThe lion nature, here I should not rest.

FIG. 50. STELE OF LEON.

The traditional character of the lion, which was known to the Greeks rather from theIliadthan from personal experience,made his figure a fitting adornment for the tombs of those who had died in battle for their country. Two gigantic lions still survive which adorned Greek tombs of historical celebrity. One stood over the remains of the Theban band which fell at Chaeroneia. The other, brought by Sir Charles Newton from Cnidus, probably marked the burial-place of the Athenians who fell in the battle of Cnidus, 394B.C.The lioness on tombs seems to have scarcely had such dignified associations. On the tomb of Lais at Corinth stood a lioness, holding in her paws a ram[149], a symbol of the destructive force of the charms of the courtezan. A lioness without a tongue is said also to have stood on the tomb of Leaena, the Athenian courtezan who was a friend of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, and refused to betray the conspirators against the Tyrants.

A bull or cow sometimes also stood on a grave. In the British Museum is a bull of this class[150]. A heifer is said to have stood on the tomb of Boidion, concubine of Chares, who followed him in his expedition against Philip of Macedon[151]. On the grave of Diogenes of Sinope was a dog, to mark his cynic nature. But the dog which appears on the summit of a tomb in the Athenian cemetery need not have anything to do with cynicism. He may have his place as a trusty watcher and guardian; or he may be connected with the cultus of the dead, as we have already suggested. On the grave of Philager his teacher, Metellus Nepos, set a raven, which Cicero declared to be most appropriate to a master who taught how to fly better than how to speak[152]. Of course the raven, as the bird sacred to Apollo, was very appropriate on the tombs of learned men. In an epitaph in theAnthology[153]it is saidthat the grave of the poet Sophocles was surmounted by a satyr, holding in his hand a female mask. As, however, we are told by other authorities that a Siren stood on his tomb, we must suppose the satyr to have surmounted a cenotaph erected to the poet by his admirers in some other city than Athens. From another epigram[154]we learn that on the grave of Plato an eagle was sculptured: here we are clearly in the realm of poetic symbolism.

Inthe Spartan group of sepulchral monuments we found one of the two fountain-heads of Greek sepulchral reliefs, springing directly out of the ancestor-worship of the Dorian race. For the other main source, which is much less religious and more artistic in origin, we turn to Athens and to Ionia. It arises out of the custom of setting up portraits of the dead.

The earliest sepulchral monuments which reach us from Attica, setting aside the merely decorative or symbolical sphinx, are portraits of the dead. In these portraits there is something of artistic and something of religious purpose. As we shall presently see, no hard and fast line can be drawn between the image used in ancestor-worship and the portrait which is merely a memorial. In fact we may see two lines of tendency taking their rise in the mere image of the dead. The one tendency is to bring it nearer to the images of the gods; to identify the departed ancestor or friend with Hades, the ruler of the world of shades. The other tendency is to render the portrait a characteristic memorial of the life which is past. In almost all existing sculptural remains we may see something of both tendencies, and it is by no means easy to determine what features in them properly belong to the past life, and what features to the life which begins with death. At Sparta, as we have seen, there is almost no reference to the past. In Lycia, past and future are closely blended. At Athens, and in severaldistricts of Greece, the past has a tendency to eclipse the future. Yet at least in the earlier stelae the religious, the human, and the artistic are all actively working elements.

From the middle of the sixth century onwards the custom prevailed of placing upon the tomb a portrait of the occupant, who is represented in characteristic attitude and employment[155]. A man in middle life is commonly represented in arms; a youth appears as an athlete holding strigil or discus. A married woman appears with the basket of wool, which signifies her most usual employment to be spinning; a young girl carries a doll, or plays with a pet bird or dog. Sometimes this portrait is sculptured in the round; sometimes it appears in relief, on a larger or a smaller scale.

But no one at all well acquainted with the religious feelings and artistic tendencies of the Greeks will expect that portraits thus erected will be portraits in any modern or naturalistic sense, at all events until after the fourth century. When an honorary statue was erected in the neighbourhood of a temple or set up in a market-place in the likeness of some statesman or poet or athlete, it would represent the actual features of the person so commemorated, in the manner in which the sculptors of the time understood the art of portraiture. Greater vagueness and generality always in Greece characterized the sepulchral portrait. It was a radical feeling of the Greek mind that he who died put away the accidents of his personal individuality, and became in some degree a mere phase of the deity of the lower world. Thus, though he would not lose what was most essential in his personality, sex, youth or age, warlike or peaceful character, and the like, he would become typical of a class rather than individual,thewarrior, the athlete, or the girl, rather than a particular man or woman. Besides this deep-seated tendency, it must often have happened that the sculptor who made theeffigy had scarcely seen the person to be represented, and was quite incapable of making from memory a life-like portrait, whereas taking a mould from the dead face was a process invented, we are told[156], by Lysistratus, brother of Lysippus, the contemporary of Alexander the Great, and unknown at an earlier period.

FIG. 51. PORTRAIT FROM TOMB, THERA[157].

We find in Greece proper as early as the sixth century portrait statues from tombs. Male figures stand naked, female figures are closely wrapped in archaic drapery. It is very probable that some of the stiff archaic statues of men which figure in the earlier chapters of the histories of Greeksculpture really come from tombs. They commonly pass under the name of Apollo, as the Apollo of Thera, of Orchomenus, of Tenea, and so forth. But at the very early stage of Greek art to which they belong, the figures of gods and men were distinguished one from the other rather by circumstance and attribute than by any marked feature of the statues themselves. And thus some writers[158]have maintained that these so-called Apollos are really portraits of athletes. In regard to one of them, the Apollo of Thera, Professor Loeschcke has argued from its find-spot, in the neighbourhood of the rocky cemetery of that island, that it probably stood on a tomb. To bring before the eyes of the reader the character of these early portrait-statues I have given an engraving of the head of this statue (Fig. 51). The long locks fall over the shoulders, and the hair over the forehead is close curled in the decorative Ionian fashion. The upturned corners of the mouth, and the almost Chinese obliquity of the eyes, are well-known features of the most primitive art of Greece.

In the same paper Professor Loeschcke publishes[159]a fragment of an archaic equestrian statue (Fig. 52), which comes from the graveyard of Vari in Attica, and was probably a memorial of a cavalier buried there. The equestrian figure on Greek tombs had, as we have found in an earlier chapter, usually a special meaning; but here it seems to be a mere portrait of one who had served in the cavalry, or perhaps had won a victory at the great games of Greece with a racehorse. Noteworthy are the long rigidly cut figure of the horse, and the seat of the rider, whose legs stretch along the flanks of the horse. This may result from the greater sculptural difficulty of carving the legs in a detached attitude.

We possess also certain seated female figures of the same

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FIG. 52. HORSEMAN FROM TOMB.

early age which appear to have adorned tombs. A fragment of one of these was found built into the wall which Themistocles constructed round Athens soon after the battle of Salamis, a wall erected, as Thucydides[160]tells us, in such haste that men spared neither public nor private edifice in its construction. But the best evidence as to the character of the early sepulchral portraits of Athenian ladies reaches us by a less direct route. Many people are familiar with the charming seated figure in the Vatican which goes by the name of Penelope, a veiled woman seated in pensive attitude, with her head resting on one hand, while the other hand lies on the rock on which she sits (Pl. VI). This rock, however, is a restoration[161], and replicas prove that in place of it we must suppose a chair, under which stood a large work-basket, to have supported the lady. She is, in all likelihood, no mythic heroine, but an ordinary Greek mistress of the house, resting for a while from the active toils of the loom in an attitude which gives the impression that the thoughtof approaching death has come over her with saddening power. Both the attitude and the basket of work recur frequently in the reliefs of early stelae[162], and there is good reason to suppose that the so-called Penelope is an excerpt from some Greek cemetery, though the statue itself dates only from the Roman age. The original from which it is copied would date from the early part of the fifth century.

Before going on to speak of the stelae with reliefs, which are our main business, it may be well to follow down to a later time the lines which start with figures like the â€˜Apolloâ€™ of Tenea and the â€˜Penelopeâ€™ of the Vatican.

It is by no means unlikely that in later days tombs in Greece may sometimes have been adorned with life-like portraits of their occupants, executed by some of the great sculptors of the day, such as the noble figures of Mausolus and Artemisia, which stood in the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. But certainly this was not the only, probably not the usual, line followed in memorial statues. The idea of generalization and of deification of the dead, of which I have already spoken, was by no means inoperative in this province.

Pl. VII represents one of two figures found in the island of Andros, and now placed in the museum at Athens[163]. This male figure obviously appears in the guise of Hermes, and indeed bears a resemblance which is more than superficial to the celebrated Olympian Hermes of Praxiteles. Very probably it may have grasped the heraldâ€™s staff of Hermes. But the snake which twines round the tree-trunk, which is a necessary support to the marble statue, has no connexion with Hermes, but seems to indicate rather a connexion with

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the grave, that in fact the statue is rather of a mortal in the similitude of Hermes than of the god himself. And this suspicion becomes a certainty when we consider other facts. Close to it was found its companion, a female figure, which does not seem to stand for a goddess, but for an ordinary woman[164]; and as male and female were thus found together, they had probably both stood on one tomb. There are other pairs of figures, of later and ruder work, at Athens, which in general character resemble the pair from Andros. Thus we seem to be on the track of a clear and defined sepulchral custom prevailing from the fourth century onwards. The successors of Alexander in Egypt, Syria, and Macedon appear on their coins in the guise of various deities, Hermes, Apollo, and Dionysus particularly; and it can scarcely surprise us that a distinguished private person should by the ennobling touch of death be raised to the same level, and take the form of Hermes, the messenger of the world of shades. We find that in Thessaly tombstones quite usually are inscribed, not only with the name of the occupant of the grave, but also with a formula dedicating them to Hermes Chthonius[165].

The Museum of Berlin has acquired, from the Sabouroff Collection, two interesting statues of women, seated in an attitude of grief, which almost certainly belong to tombs, and challenge comparison with the â€˜Penelope.â€™ One is figured in Pl. VIII. Their date is probably the fourth century; but they certainly do not come from the hands of the great sculptors of that century; the work of them is poor, and their style has been well termed that of domestic art. Their dress is not that of the Athenian lady, but that of the maidservants who so often appear on the stelae in attendance on theirmistress[166], a dress of coarse material with long sleeves reaching to the wrist. They are clearly mourning slave-girls, who were placed on the grave of their mistress to commemorate her wealth and her kindness to her dependants.

We next approach the rich series of sepulchral reliefs, in which, as we have already shown, three periods are to be distinguished: first, that before the Persian War; second, the fifth and fourth centuries; and third, the later age. In this chapter we deal with the representations which are primarily portraits, leaving more complicated scenes for the next chapter.

Among the best-known of the works of early Athenian art is the stele of Aristion, which was found in 1838 in the midst of a tumulus at Velanideza in Attica. Simple and in details clumsy, the figure of the warrior (Pl. IXA) on that stele is singularly pleasing as a whole, and the unrivalled eye of Brunn saw in it, at a time when very little was known as to the early art of Athens, the whole promise of the Attic art of the future, more especially in the way in which it occupied the field of the relief, and was wrought into a composition which showed in all itsnaÃ¯vetÃ©a fine sense of proportion and of the relation of the part to the whole. As if on a parade, the soldier stands in helmet and cuirass, grasping his spear, and waiting the word of command. The hair and the right hand especially show the limitations imposed on the artist by the undeveloped character of his technique. Yet the relief is justly a favourite with lovers of art. One of its charms our plate imperfectly reproduces, the delicate remains of colouring, which may still be traced on the marble, and which are repeated on the casts in our cast collections.

From the same cemetery as this work of the sculptor Aristocles comes another stele adorned, not with relief, but

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