CHAPTER XVII.

GREEK ART AND ARCHITECTURE

I.

CLASSICAL SCULPTURE: (II) THE FOURTH CENTURY

 

THE sculpture of the fifth century could be divided into three periods or four. In the fourth century also, one may speak of three periods: the early years; the time of Praxiteles and Scopas; and the time of Lysippus. But the bounding-lines are more indeterminate: the first phase is partly reaction from the art of the late fifth century, partly preparation for the second phase; and the second phase is not really superseded by the third, but passes into it, subsists side by side with it, and helps it to engender Hellenistic art. The ancients made the break at Lysippus, and so shall we: the first two phases will be considered together, the third by itself.

We begin as before with the naked male; and with what is for us the most important monument of fourth-century art, the Hermes of Praxiteles. That carries us at once to the middle of the century or even a little past it: but standing there we can look back and see what changes have taken place; and we shall have an opportunity of retracing our steps. The motive, a young god playing with a child, is a light-hearted one. The attitude is one of those easy leaning postures which first appeared in sculpture about the thirties of the fifth century and which are great favourites in the fourth. The build of the figure is lighter than in the fifth century, but there is no touch of effeminate softness in the body, which is beautifully developed. In the head the features are smaller and finer, the bones of the skull, one would say, thinner. Body and face are not mapped out into big clearly- demarcated areas, as they still are even in the late fifth century: the areas are somewhat smaller, though not unduly small, and they slip and play into each other. With this difference goes another difference. Compare the Hermes with a fifth-century original: the fifth-century flesh seems made of some neutral substance, the flesh of the Hermes of muscle and fat: it has not only the surface bloom and sheen of life, but the warm lifted swell of a living organism. If body and face are less patternized than before, drapery and hair are still less.

The Hermes is an original from the chisel of the great Athenian; there are no copies of it, and how much of its high-bred grace, subtle modelling, and gentle turns of head and body would survive in an ordinary copy? Speaking generally, fourth-century works suffer more than fifth-century at the copyist’s hands. The strong and simpler wine of the fifth century travels: the fourth reaches us now dulcified now fortified, and nearly always robbed of its quintessence.

Other Praxitelean males have come down to us in copies. The boy satyr pouring wine, part of a group, is an early work and comparatively insignificant. The boy Apollo, like the Hermes, leans, and the median line of the figure is a pronounced double curve. A third leaner, the resting satyr, has survived in more copies than any other statue, because to the Roman it represented the spirit of the sweet half-wild. Praxiteles was famous for his satyrs and Erotes; of his female figures we shall speak presently. The athlete as such plays no part in his work: athletic youths, like the Hermes, do: but Praxiteles is always turning with special affection to adolescence and late childhood, away from the world to a realm of unshaken hours.

The art of Praxiteles mirrors the life of Athens in his time, or at least the life of many Athenians: an intelligent life, quiet-tempered, fond of pleasure and tasteful in its pleasures, taking things lightly, or as lightly as one can. There are only glimpses of this frame of mind in Plato, for he was too passionate, and too full of hatred; but there is something like it in the poets, comic and other, of the fourth century, as we know them from the pages of Athenaeus.

In the temple of Aphrodite at Megara, Pausanias says, there were statues of Persuasion and another divinity whom they call Consolation, both by Praxiteles; and of Love, Yearning, and Desire, by Scopas. Eros might have been done by either: but the Megarians showed judgment in allocating the other statues—unless indeed it was the sculptors themselves who chose. For passion, which is excluded from the art of Praxiteles, is all in all to his Parian contemporary. We hear of no satyrs by Scopas: but his raging maenad, even in our small and fragmentary copy, takes us back to the stormiest creatures of late archaic painting, and its strong twist on its axis is something new in the sculptural rendering of violent movement. Another of his masterpieces was a great many-figured group of Poseidon and the demi-gods and monsters of the deep: if the triteness from Ostia is a copy of one of those figures, or even if it is only an imitation, Scopas was the first to embody in human form that eternal hunger and unrest1. A battle-scene and a hunting-scene decorated the pediments of the temple of Athena at Tegea: Scopas was the architect, and the sculpture, of which fragments remain, must be of his school and from his designs. The massive heads with their thickish features and the fury in their deep set eyes are the opposite of everything Praxitelean, and remind us that there was another kind of Greek left besides the cultivated Athenian—especially in Arcadia. Such were not all but most of the men who fought against the Macedonian and for him, who swarmed over the east and north, and who brought not only Greek culture, but Greek valour and resolution, wherever they went.

The Christ Church Van der Goes used to bear the label ‘Rembrandt or Mantegna’: and Pliny says of the group of Niobe’s children that authorities differed whether it were by Praxiteles or Scopas. It was doubtless by neither; and the same may be said of several works which have been attributed now to the one and now to the other in modern times. One of these is the Hypnos. The chief copy, in Madrid, lacks the arms: small bronzes show that he held poppies in one hand and poured something from a horn—poppy-juice—over the eyes of the world. Another boy god; not however an adaptation of a boy Apollo, or a boy Dionysus, or a boy satyr, but a new and great imaginative creation: not made into sleep by his head-wings, or by what he scatters or pours, but through and through sleep, with his soft, sleek, well­liking body and his strong and noiseless onward tread.

Turning to female figures we are able to glance at two sculptors who although they overlapped with Praxiteles and Scopas were older men. The drapery-style of the late fifth century—or one of the drapery-styles—garments now clinging and transparent now tossing in the wind—is continued by an artist of great charm, the Athenian Timotheus. Timotheus, an inscription informs us, made the acroteria for the east front of the temple of Asclepius at Epidaurus, and furnished models for the pedimental sculpture. Fragments of both acroteria and pediments remain, and enable us to connect with Timotheus two works which survive in copies only, the Leda of the Capitol, and the Rospigliosi Athena in Florence. Both statues have much of the late fifth century in drapery, in big features, in strong-waved hair, but the fourth century shows itself in the emotion of the far-away upward gaze; and the early fourth century, rather than the later, in a certain delicacy and even frailty of form. Cephisodotus, another Athenian, also looks both backwards and forwards. His Eirene—Peace with the infant Wealth in her arms—was set up at Athens shortly after 375, and symbolizes the revival of Athenian prosperity after the great disaster and the generation of despair and half-hopes which succeeded it. The Eirene harks back, in the simpler fall of its drapery, not to the grandiose goddesses of the late fifth century, but to those of the Parthenonian period and before. On the other hand, the tender intimate feeling is of the fourth century; and has the face not something ethereal which belongs to the spring of the period and not to the full bloom? Wealth is nothing without Health: and another famous Attic statue of the same time as the Eirene was the original of the Deepdene Hygieia; she also not one of the great deities, but a strong and kindly presence with a solid boon to bestow.

External evidence as well as internal points to a connection between Cephisodotus and Praxiteles: Cephisodotus was perhaps an elder brother, certainly the forerunner. The note of simplicity which he strikes persists in the draped figures that go back to Praxiteles and his circle: a different simplicity, of course, from that of the Hestia Giustiniani or Amelung’s goddess; for it bears the imprint of a more conscious art. One of the chief ingredients in it is the toning-down of the two contrasts which had dominated the drapery of the later fifth century: the contrast between clinging parts and parts flying free; and the contrast between parts which reveal and parts which conceal. The garments now tend to wind equably round the body or hang equably over it, neither cleaving to it nor masking it, but swathing —or clothing it. This principle is not confined to Praxiteles, but appears for instance in the Hygieia, and in one of the noblest originals which have reached us from the fourth century, the seated figure of Demeter, from Cnidus, in the British Museum. The deep impression which the Demeter leaves, as of the mother acquainted with grief, and enduring under it, is not due to the head alone, but in part also to the draped body—the garments drawn about it, and the legs turned with a suggestion of self­constraint.

Praxitelean drapery is not to be reduced to a formula: and one of the most charming of Praxitelean statues, the Artemis from Gabii in the Louvre, stands somewhat aside, for the motive of the girlish figure is the actual adjustment of the drapery. The most celebrated of the statues by Praxiteles was not a draped figure, but a naked one, the Aphrodite at Cnidus. Naked or half-naked female statues, rare in the fifth century, begin to be common in the fourth: but it has been suggested that the nakedness of the Cnidian, and her gesture as well, had a special authorization—were borrowed from some hallowed and primitive image preserved in the sanctuary from the dim past. The gesture of the hand, and the shrinking of the whole body which accompanies it, are reported to be instinctive expressions of modesty. In themselves they are mean; but from trivial or even disgusting motives, provided they beautifully unfurled the body, the sculptor of the Lizard-slayer was hardly the man to recoil. Such copies as we have of the Cnidian make it difficult to understand the reputation of the statue in antiquity. Here, if anywhere, we miss the sculptor’s hand: judging from the Hermes, we must suppose that in the original these dull heavy forms were fused into a figure instinct with glowing life.

Let us not end this section on this note, but with a glance at three modest originals which belong to Praxiteles or to his school. The first two take us back to our starting-point the Hermes: the exquisite statuette of Artemis, from Cyprus, in Vienna, by its attitude; the head of a girl goddess, from Chios, in Boston, by the large architecture which keeps its surface-delicacy from cloying. The third, another head in Boston, this time from Athens, makes one think of the sons of Praxiteles, of whose style, a continuation of their father’s, we now know a little from fragments found at Cos.

Aegina, Olympia, Parthenon: they summed the achievements of their epochs. There is no fourth-century monument corresponding to these. The Mausoleum comes nearest: but the difference is immense. Even if the Mausoleum were completely extant, how could the super-sepulchre of a hellenized Carian, even though the work of the most eminent Greek artists, be more than a ‘wild enormity of ancient magnanimity’ compared with the great civic and national monuments of Greece? Its importance is nevertheless considerable, especially as its date is known, for Mausolus died in 353 and his widow, who ordered the tomb, two years later. Four great sculptors are said to have worked on the building, Timotheus and Scopas, Bryaxis and Leochares, each taking one side: but the apportionment of the fragments is not yet beyond doubt. The most significant slabs of the amazonomachy, though not the best-preserved, are those which by a curious coincidence have been skied into the fancy restoration of the order and replaced on the level of the eye by casts. These slabs with their lean and terrifying figures and their novel whirl of movement already speak the language of the later fourth century, and are presumably Leocharean.

Another work done by a Greek for a foreigner is the so-called Alexander sarcophagus in Constantinople, made for a Sidonian prince; remarkable for its marvellous preservation, colour and all, for the admirable portraits of Alexander and his war-marked marshal Parmenion, and for the intense animation of its hunting and fighting scenes. There is nothing Lysippean in it, although the date must be well on in the second half of the century; but something of the spirit of Scopas and his Tegean pediments.

The greatest figure in the sculpture of the second half of the fourth century is Lysippus of Sicyon: our literary sources represent him as a great realist, and the inventor of a new system of proportions. The athlete scraping himself, in the Vatican, is in all probability a copy of his bronze Apoxyomenus, and it is something new in sculpture. The head is smaller, the legs longer than before, so that the whole figure looks slenderer and taller: this agrees with the description of Lysippean proportions in Pliny. In the treatment of flesh it goes along with the Hermes of Praxiteles as against the fifth century: but waist and joints are more compressed than in the Hermes, and the muscles harder and more prominent: in a word there is less fat: this is the siccity or dryness of which Pliny speaks. The attitude of the body has something momentary about it: it is not planted solidly with the weight on one leg as in the fifth century: one leg is the supporting leg and one is the free; but the contrast between the two is no longer the dominant motive: the weight seems almost to be in process of transference from the one to the other. Again, the figure as a whole is not so much in one plane as earlier figures; which are more or less flattened out before us, relief-like, so that we can enjoy, in a select view, the clarity and harmony of the contour which contains the figure. The position of the scraper in space is more like that of an actual person discovered in the dressing-room. The plane is constantly shifting as the eye passes from one part to the other; and the right arm stretches out straight towards us in strong foreshortening. This tridimensionalism is one of the last words in realism: and has been described as ‘the final step taken by sculpture in the achievement of its specific perfection.’ It opens up a fresh world of possibilities: but there is seldom gain without loss; and the new age produces too many statues which have many quite good views, but no perfect view; like the Lysippean Lansdowne Hermes, or the later Eros bending his bow.

From all these causes the Apoxyomenus is the very antithesis of the Doryphorus in aspect and tone. In tone, for although he is not facing an opponent but simply scraping himself, yet there is excitement not only in his face but in every limb. This is one form of the pathos of the fourth century, as contrasted with the ethos of the fifth. There is the same excitement in the Lansdowne Hermes, and the same in the athlete Agias from Delphi. The Agias has been compared with the Lansdowne Heracles, which is a copy of a Scopaic work. There is a superficial resemblance in pose, and the Agias is not yet tridimensional like the Apoxyomenus. But there the resemblance ends: the Agias has the new proportions, the new balance on the legs, and the new emotion running through the figure from top to toe. The Agias is a fourth-century work, and has been thought with good reason to be a free copy of a bronze, though an early bronze, by Lysippus. Whether it is or not, it belongs to the new age, and the Scopaic Heracles—even if we replace the head by the better copy, in bronze, from Herculaneum—to the old.

Lysippus was an extraordinarily prolific artist, and there are a good many other statues which seem to be copies of works by him. The silen with the infant Dionysus3, from the subject, and because it is a leaning figure, makes one think of the Hermes of Praxiteles, of his resting satyr: but there is as strong a contrast between these and the Lysippean silen, with his oldened and coarsened forms, his not graceful attitude, and the deeper and more sombre tone of the whole work, as between the smiling figures of late archaic art and the gravity of early classical sculpture.

Apoxyomenus and Agias are athlete statues, and the Lansdowne Hermes is perhaps an athlete rather than Hermes. Athlete statues were made throughout the fourth century, but it is not surprising that they should be more significant in the time of Lysippus than in the earlier part of the period. Nor is it to be wondered at that Lysippus was famous for his portraits. Portraiture flourished throughout the century, and a realistic element, unfamiliar to earlier portraiture, was introduced by Demetrius of Alopece in the first decades. Many copies of fourth-century portraits have reached us, but usually only the head was copied, and that with the individuality exaggerated to caricature. Of the full-length portraits that have survived entire or nearly—and it is only in these that we can appreciate the achievements of the fourth century in portraiture—neither the Aeschines nor the Sophocles can have been a masterpiece of characterization: the Socrates, now known from the London statuette, must have been1. The greatest of all is the Demosthenes: its date is 280, so that it lies outside our period; but without Lysippus it would have been impossible.

In the treatment of drapery, the fourth century, as it advances, turns once more to contrast for its effects: to the old contrast of clinging and flying, as in the Florence Niobids, poor copies of a somewhat theatrical group of statues made in the late part of our period; and to the new contrasts set up, either by a heavy swag of massed drapery across the middle of the body, as in the Artemisia from the Mausoleum, or by the taut bands, made by the hand holding and pulling part of the garment, which dominate the drapery of the women from Herculaneum in Dresden. A realism in drapery, corresponding to Lysippean realism in the rendering of the body, it is difficult to find in the fourth century itself: for the maid of Antium, with her wonderful realistic drapery, seems to belong to the beginning of the next period.

We may conclude with a glance at the reliefs on the Attic tombstones of the fourth century. The series ends, owing to the sumptuary law of Demetrius of Phalerum, in 317. In the early part of the period fifth-century tradition persists: low relief with strong perpendiculars and horizontals; and a subdued tone. But the emotion of the fourth century soon makes its way in, and the right angles give place to curves and diagonals as mother yearns to son or daughter to mother. The relief becomes higher, and sheers backwards into depth, until in the late fourth century the figures are almost in the round, and the background, at first neutral, becomes a sort of dark shed-like room in which the figures have their being. In the last stage, the new realism deepens the pathos. The survival of the fifth-century tradition, with only the beginning of change, may be illustrated by the wonderful stele of Sostrate in New York1: she looking at her father, who sits in the middle like a god, while her mother stands behind him holding her granddaughter, Sostrate’s child, by the hand. Athens 870 shows the full fourth-century style: the two quiet figures of the earlier tombstones, the seated and the standing woman, have become all gesture, action, and emotion: so that the meeting of older woman and younger, mother and daughter, takes one’s mind to the great Visitations of Christian art. The feeling is enhanced by a third figure, the third age, the girl, not much more than a child, who watches and understands. In the stele from the Ilissus the pathos is of a different kind3: the young man, who has died, and the old man gazing at him and trying to fathom why such things happen: corresponding to the child in the last piece, a twofold foil—the dog alive and distressed, the little servant sleeping. The vigil for the dead, marvellously trans­figured. Finally, the stele Athens 731. The motive resembles that of the stele from the Ilissus, but is very differently treated. A young man, this time a soldier, and his father. No care for the old beauty of harmonious line or attitude, but all the beauty and force of the new realism.

 

II. 

CLASSICAL PAINTING: (II) THE FOURTH CENTURY

 

Greek painting was thought by the ancients to have reached its highest point in the fourth century, and Apelles was acclaimed the greatest of Greek painters. Apelles was an Ionian from Colophon, but the two great centres were those districts which had always been the eyes of artistic Greece: Athens and Sicyon. The topic was still figurework, narrative or representational; there was also portraiture, especially of the heroic kind: still-life, that is still­life for its own sake, was hardly beginning; there were landscape elements in pictures, but no landscape-painting. By the perfection of the encaustic process, painters could obtain subtler effects than before.

The works of Apelles and his peers have all perished; and our monumental sources of information are scanty and unsatisfactory. The vases tell us the story of vases, and something about con­temporary painting as a whole: but the art of vase-painting is in full decline, and besides, it remains linear, whereas the great painters were now masters of light and colour, and thought in those as well as in line. One masterpiece survives in a copy, the Battle of Alexander and Darius. Roman decorative painting preserves something of others, but almost inextricably overgrown.

Attic vase-painting touches bottom in the early part of the fourth century. It subsists on the Meidian tradition diluted; and is so insipid and vulgar that it is not always recognized as Attic. In the second quarter of the century a revival begins. In the Kerch vases—as these latest of Attic red-figure vases are often called—there are flickers of beauty. The tall, dignified figures are a relief from the debased roly-polies of the sub-Meidian period; but they in their turn are often vacuous and mannered, and with its predilection for three-quartered faces and three-quartered and frontal figures, and its neglect of the speaking contour, the style is not really suitable to vase-painting. It is not confined to vases, but appears in drawings on ivory and bronze: it is the manner of some great painter or school of painting.

In Italy the prospect is not much more pleasing. Some of the phlyax vases, with their scenes from farces, are delightful. The Dolon in London is not a farce, but a burlesque of epic: in its pattern of men and trees, it is worthy to set beside Pollaiuolo’s Battle of the Nudes; in its mastery of the comic, beside the Heracles and Busiris of the old Ionian. When we turn to the big Apulian vases of the second half of the century, we note the slickness of hand, and we can put up with a square inch or so here and there: but it is really time that vase-painting ceased; and practically it ceases, in Italy as well as in Attica, at the end of the century.

Our copy of the Battle of Alexander and Darius—doubtless the Issus, freely treated—must be fullsize, and it bears every token of being an accurate copy: but it is mutilated; and it is in mosaic, and how much of the rush and terror of the original must have been lost! Think of the Miracle of St Mark in mosaic, or Rubens’s Battle of the Amazons. Of the sober colour-scheme we have spoken before, and of the technical devices—modelling in light and dark, use of cast-shadows, high-lights, reflected lights: in so serried a composition, aerial perspective can have . little place; but these seem to be traces of it; and Plato’s censure shows that the art of diminishing the figures according to the supposed distance from the eye was familiar to the painters of his time. The extraordinary complexity of the composition has often been remarked; the wealth of graphic and pictorial interest in detail; and the devastating total effect. The beauty of the actual painting-work we can guess, and we know that fourth­century painters and critics paid the closest attention to material and texture. The great figure-pieces of Velasquez come to the mind—not only because of the lances: but because of the colour­scheme and the colours, because there are no stopgaps or dead filling in the picture, and because the grand and purposed contrast of West and East plays as essential a part in the Battle of Alexander, as that of South and North in the Surrender of Breda.

The wall-paintings from Pompeii, Herculaneum, and elsewhere are more treacherous ground. The problem is different from that of sculptural copies: for there is nothing in painting which is parallel to the cast, and the statue is not part of a decoration but a work by itself. The Achilles and Briseis must go back to a painting by a fourth-century artist: but how much of the colouring and values is his? and what corresponded in the original to the vapid Briseis, or to the bores with trick helmets in the background? Elsewhere we have more than one imitation of a single original, but the imitations agree in only the broadest outlines: so in the Paris and Helen, so in the Odysseus and Penelope. The patient study of Campanian wall-painting has taught us something about the painting of the classical period and will teach us more: but of the works inspired by fourth-century painting, there is not one which does not contain a disturbing number of elements that cannot be fourth-century.

Analogies from sculpture help, but must not be laboured. No one who reads about Apelles can help thinking of Praxiteles. But Apelles cannot have been a Praxiteles in painting: for the greater the artist the more he differs from all other artists. In the Greek paintings of the fourth century we have lost a world.

 

III. 

FOURTH-CENTURY DORIC ARCHITECTURE

 

In considering the architecture of the fifth century, our attention was chiefly centred upon Athens, but it will be otherwise when we turn to the fourth. It is not surprising that after the amazing activity of the half century before Aegospotami the impoverished city was content, for the most part, to enjoy the legacy of her golden age. Nor can much work of importance now be traced in Sicily or Italy. For Doric we must look chiefly to Delphi and to the Peloponnese, for Ionic to Asia Minor. Corinthian was creeping into importance, but in this period it never ventured beyond interiors, except in such small and barely architectural works as the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates.

At Delphi the chief work of the fourth century was the sixth temple of Apollo, which replaced the Alcmaeonid building, ruined, it would seem, by rain and subsidence, between 360 and 330 BC: but, though we know from inscriptions a great deal about its history, its remains are scanty and difficult to understand. As a type of fourth-century Doric on the grand scale it will be better to take the temple of Athena Aiea at Tegeaf the largest and noblest in the Peloponnese, after that of Zeus at Olympia. Closely connected with Tegea is the temple of Zeus at Nemea, and since at Nemea three columns still stand, bearing part of the architrave, while Tegea is wholly ruined, it might seem wiser to choose the better preserved building as our text. The Tegean temple, however, has been better explored and published; moreover it was far more famous in antiquity, and probably served as Nemea’s model. At Tegea certainly, and possibly at Nemea, the architect was the sculptor Scopas.

In one respect only the Tegean temple was old-fashioned, for it was narrower in proportion than any other temple of the fourth century. In fineness of workmanship it is almost unrivalled, except by the Erechtheum. The material was local marble. There were refinements in the setting of walls and columns, and the stylobate had horizontal curvature, which began in the foun­dations. Externally the chief definite sign of lateness was the slenderness of the columns, which can hardly be paralleled except at Nemea, long famous as the best example of this Ionic tendency in fourth-century Doric. The Nemean columns, indeed, are even slighter than the Tegean, but the resemblance between the two sets is very close, not only in slenderness, but in the lowness and straightness of the echinus, which has lost almost the last trace of that strong archaic curve, whose influence was still subtly perceptible in the Parthenon.

At Tegea the plan of the cella was simple, with pronaos and opisthodomos each distyle in antis. As at Bassae, and in the temple of Zeus at Olympia, no metopes were decorated with sculpture except those inside the colonnade, at each end of the cella: a notable severity in a sculptor’s building, where seemingly no expense was spared. In the interior the whole decoration was purely Ionic in character, if Corinthian capitals may be treated as a development of Ionic. This decoration was used with aus­terity and restraint, though in detail its richness and complexity rival even the Erechtheum and the sixth-century Ionic treasuries of Delphi. The general disposition of the interior was a further development of the arrangements of Bassae. Here again half-columns were used, but they did not stand, as at Bassae, at the ends of projecting cross-walls, being engaged in the cella wall. There were fourteen Corinthian half-columns— seven on each side—and pilasters with elaborately moulded capitals in the four inner angles. All alike rested upon a beautiful base moulding, which ran round the wall and the feet of the half­columns and pilasters, as did the exterior base moulding of the Olympieum of Acragas. A side-door led into the cella from the middle of the northern peripteral colonnade. The bases of the Corinthian half-columns somewhat resembled those of the Ionic half-columns of Bassae: it will be convenient to discuss their capitals at a later point. The exact date of the Tegean temple is uncertain, but we know that its predecessor was burnt in 395 It may perhaps be placed in the second third of the fourth century.

Two more mainland Doric buildings of the early fourth century deserve more than a passing reference, the circular peripteral tholoi of Delphi and Epidaurus, both externally Doric but intern­ally Corinthian. This was an old type of ground-plan though it never became common. The fourth-century Delphian tholos was close to the ‘Massaliote’ Treasury in the small sanctuary of Athena Pronaia, and would seem to have been famous in anti­quity, for Vitruvius records that Theodorus of Phocaea wrote a book ‘de tholo qui est Delphis’: it is far more likely that Theodorus wrote of this later work, than of the less remarkable sixth-century Doric tholos^ peripteral, with thirteen old-fashioned columns, which stood in the sanctuary proper. The later tholos is one of the most carefully designed and perfectly executed works of antiquity. The single door faces exactly south. The visible parts of the building were all of marble or timber, except for a sparing use of black Eleusinian limestone. On a stylobate of three steps it had twenty exterior Doric columns, each with twenty flutes, and this outer colonnade carried a coffered marble ceiling, of simple and beautiful design. The restoration of the upper parts is doubtful in detail. There are remains of larger and smaller sets of triglyphs, sculptured metopes, and simae. The smaller triglyphs were at the top of the cella wall, inside the peripteral colonnade. It has been suggested that the cella walls  rose above the roof of the outer colonnade and carried a separate cornice. This solution, however, raises technical difficulties, and no satisfactory place has been found for the smaller sima. Inside was a podium, moulded above and below, and faced with Eleusinian stone. It carried a series of Corinthian columns, slightly engaged. They were probably ten in number. Their capitals, which are important, will be discussed at a later point. The ceiling and roof were of timber, the tiles of marble: there is evidence that the architrave carried by the engaged columns was itself wooden. The date of this tholos is disputed. It is usually assigned to the early fourth century, but some authorities would place it in the last quarter of the fifth.

The date of the more famous Epidaurian tholos, is fairly certain from the evidence of inscriptions: it was probably built between 360 and 330. The architect, according to Pausanias, was Polyclitus; clearly the younger artist of that name, a sculptor-architect like Scopas. It was probably inspired by the Delphian building, but surpassed it in size and in elaboration, though not in beauty and restraint. At Delphi the diameter of the stylobate was about 45 feet, but at Epidaurus it was about 107, and the other dimensions were, of course, proportionately greater. Unlike the Delphian tholos, which stands on a solid limestone foundation, the Epidaurian building rested on concentric rings of masonry, whose maze-like design has provoked much speculation of religious rather than architectural interest. In general plan it closely resembled the Delphian tholos, except that the exterior Doric columns, which were of limestone, num­bered twenty-six, and the interior Corinthian columns, which were of marble, numbered fourteen, and were not engaged but free. The cella wall was mostly of limestone, but marble and Eleusinian stone were used at its crown and foot: its outer face did not, as at Delphi, carry a triglyph frieze. The ceiling was partly of marble and partly of wood. The nature of the roof is uncertain.

The metopes of the outer colonnade were decorated not with figured sculpture but with rosettes. The marble cofferings of the pteron ceiling were very elaborate, and the innermost pavement was composed of a diamond pattern of white marble and black Eleusinian stone. The most interesting things in the building are the Corinthian capitals, one of which, unused, was found buried, for unknown reasons, a yard under the ancient surface: but these also must be discussed at a later point.

That these two tholoi have much in common is obvious: but there is something less obvious that links them both with Tegea, with Nemea, and with many other Doric works of the late fifth or fourth century of which there is here no space to speak: the Metroum at Olympia, for instance, and the temples of Asclepius and Artemis at Epidaurus. In all we feel that Doric has become a new thing. In some way not easily defined—it is deeper than slenderness of proportion or richness of detail—Doric has drunk the spirit of Ionic, and a new style has been born. Yet these exquisite masterpieces were almost the last incarnation of monumental Doric. The great temples of the next generation were pure Ionic, in the Asiatic tradition.

In truth Doric was dying. It was still to produce a few delight­ful temples, like that of Cori in Latium, but its spirit lived chiefly in less ambitious works—in market porticoes for instance, and in the charming colonnades of domestic peristyles. Yet the sculptor-architects of this late Doric bequeathed to their Ionic successors one momentous gift. The Corinthian capital, Ionic in origin, but evolved by Doric artists as a subtle refinement of interior decoration, was destined to drive both its rivals from the field, and to remain for all time the most characteristic feature of classical architecture.

 

IV. 

THE CORINTHIAN CAPITAL

 

It will be fitting here to say something of the development of the Corinthian capital in the fourth century. This can be traced chiefly in the buildings at Delphi, Tegea and Epidaurus already described, in the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates at Athens and in the Philippeum of Olympia. Of these the Delphian capitals are perhaps the earliest. Only fragments survive, but they closely resemble in many respects the pioneer capital of Bassae described in the last volume. Much of the bell was bare and there were large pairs of inner spirals placed low, with a big palmette between them entirely below the abacus. It would seem however that these spirals did not spring from the double ring of acanthus leaves which surrounded the base of the capital but were continuous with the angle spirals under the abacus. This scheme is not found in any other Greek Corinthian capital, but recalls that of a unique archaic pillar capital from Megara Hyblaea in Sicily.

The striking and attractive Tegean capitals are hardly less curious, and show how little the type was yet fixed. They are unusually low and squat in proportion. At the base of the bell is a double row of shaggy acanthus leaves: the angle spirals each spring from a fluted sheath or cauliculus crowned with an acanthus leaf, of the type which became orthodox, but appears here for the first time. There were, however, no inner spirals, and the central palmette was replaced by a single acanthus leaf, reaching to the bottom of the abacus.

The capitals of the Epidaurian tholos are extraordinarily pleasing in a quite new way. The chief impression of the earliest capitals—at Bassae, Delphi, Tegea—is an impression of strength: the members are large and relatively simple, and the whole treatment is broad and forcible. At Epidaurus Polyclitus aimed above all at delicacy and grace. The capitals look almost like beautiful flowers; it is no accident that the central ornament, which has climbed one stage further towards its destined seat on the side of the abacus, is not here a palmette or an acanthus leaf, but a blossom. The spirals are slender and tall, and their slight­ness is enhanced by the fact that their stems are quite bare and separate, and do not spring from a cauliculus. Yet there is much that links these capitals with their predecessors, especially the bareness of the bell, and the solidity of the abacus. The acanthus leaves at the base, alternately short and tall, are orthodox in character.

Next in date come two sets of capitals carved in the third quarter of the fourth century, those of the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, and those of the Philippeum at Olympia. The Choragic Monument (erected in 334) is one of the best known works of antiquity. It is a small circular structure of Pentelic marble, standing on a quadrangular basement. The circular part is of marble, and consists of a sort of cella, hollow but not accessible, with six engaged Corinthian columns. These have Attic-Ionic bases, and an Ionic entablature, which shows the perhaps unprecedented combination of a continuous frieze, sculptured in relief, with dentils under the cornice. The roof is a single block of marble, carved to suggest a sort of tiling of laurel leaves. It was crowned with a magnificent finial of acanthus ornament, which originally carried the tripod of victory. The diameter of the circular structure is about nine feet. The capitals, which here chiefly concern us, are much mutilated, but their forms are fairly certain. In spirit they resemble those of Epi­daurus, for they aim chiefly at richness and delicacy, but in certain important details they are nearer to the orthodox type of later times. Not only do the inner and outer volutes spring, as at Tegea, from a single sheath, but the central ornament, a palmette, is almost on the abacus, which is elaborately moulded. The treatment of the leaves at the base is individual. The charm of these capitals, as of the whole structure, springs largely from the pleasant irresponsibility of an artist playing at architecture. The monument is a delightful toy.

The circular Philippeum at Olympia, probably erected by Alexander the Great, more nearly resembled the tholos of Delphi. It was a peripteral limestone structure, on a base of three marble steps, with marble cornice and tiles: the diameter on the top step was about fifty feet. The outer colonnade was of eighteen limestone Ionic columns, while inside were twelve engaged Corinthian columns, which seem to have supported a second row, similar but smaller. The inner columns had no bases. Their capitals have many features which later became orthodox, such as large acanthus leaves in two rows, and angle spirals springing from fluted cauliculi, but the inner spirals and the central ornament were entirely omitted, this part of the bell being covered with upright leaves in relief.

This is not the place to discuss in detail the later development of the Corinthian capital. The third-century capitals of the Olympieum of Athens, with their fluted cauliculi, became the great models of Roman orthodoxy, but the Epidaurian type, with independent spirals, was popular in the Hellenistic age, and many other forms were employed, especially in Sicily and Italy. In the Roman Imperial period, however, abnormal capitals were usually conscious and often fantastic variations from the orthodox type.

In Asia, temple architecture was almost exclusively Ionic. Of the few exceptions one only, the temple of Athena Polias Nikephoros at Pergamum, has been assigned to the fourth century B.C. This dating rests chiefly upon the lettering of certain dedicatory inscriptions. It is likely from its position in the city, and from points of material and technique, that the temple is earlier than the bulk of Pergamene work, but the general style would scarcely point to a date earlier than 300 BC. Moreover, the temple had double the traditional number of triglyphs, usually a late Hellenistic feature. It was a simple hexastyle peripteros, having six columns by ten, a late type of proportion. The columns were unfluted, except for a strip below the echinus.

 

V. 

IONIC ARCHITECTURE IN ASIA

 

The chief sites of fourth-century Ionic architecture in Asia are Ephesus, Priene, Halicarnassus, Miletus, and Sardes. The old Artemisium of Ephesus was burnt in the fourth century BC The best-known tradition, derived from Theopompus, assigns this disaster to the night of Alexander’s birth, in 356, but the new temple seems to have inspired so much of the architecture of the second half of the fourth century that it is more likely that Eusebius is right in giving 395 as the date of the fire. In general plan this temple was almost identical with its gigantic sixth-century predecessor, being dipteral (eight columns by twenty in the outer row), and measuring about 164 by about 342 feet on the stylobate: but the raising of the floor level by some seven feet necessitated a great extension of the surrounding steps. There are no remains of a continuous frieze, and probably there was none: but the ruins are scanty, and fragments of dentils are likewise lacking. The height of the columns is unknown, but there are remains of bases, shafts and capitals, as well as of various mouldings, and of architrave, sima, roof-tiles and acroteria. The bases are of Asiatic-Ionic type, and probably rested on rectangular plinths. The capitals show a slightly later stage of development than those from Sardes which are assigned to the fifth century. The most characteristic features of these Ephesian capitals are the strong projection of the echinus, the deep cutting round its eggs, the curved hollow of the volute-band, and the position of the eye, at once well out­side the perpendicular of the upper diameter of the shaft and well above the horizontal of the bottom of the echinus. The general tendency in later work was for the capital to shrink both in height and width, or that the eye approached or touched the point where these lines intersect.

The most striking peculiarity of the Ephesian columns was the presence in many, but not in all, of tall drums carved with figures in relief: there were also some quadrangular pedestals of the same height and similarly carved, which evidently replaced the lowest portion of some of the columns. Both these features were inherited from the older temple. The exact arrangement of the carved pedestals and drums has been much disputed: the elder Pliny states that the total number of columns in the temple was 127, of which 36 had carving.

It is exceedingly difficult to judge of the original appearance of this temple, or of those that are now to be described, especially as some of them were not finished till Roman days: but, despite their careful planning and magnificent decoration, it is impossible not to suspect that they were uninteresting. The old freshness has vanished, and the splendour that has replaced it is barren and empty. The vulgarity so obvious in later Ionic is already perceptible before the close of the fourth century.

The temple of Athena Polias at Priene was comparatively small, measuring about 64 feet by about 122 feet on the stylobate: but it was very famous, and its architect Pythios wrote a book about it, as Vitruvius twice remarks. It was most carefully planned: the cella, for instance, was 100 Greek feet long, the plinths below the column bases 1 foot high, 6 feet square, and 6 feet apart. It was a simple peripteros, six by eleven, like several fourth century Doric temples in Greece. The architectural forms seem to be indebted to those of the later Ephesian temple. There were dentils but almost certainly no continuous frieze. The temple was dedicated by Alexander the Great, as an extant inscription from the south anta of the pronaos states.

An even more famous work, built and described (in a lost treatise) by the same architect, was the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, the tomb begun by Mausolus of Caria, and finished by his wife Artemisia, after his death in 353. The greatest sculptors of the day are said to have competed in its decoration; but its construction was no less renowned than its adornment. Abundant remains have been recovered and the elder Pliny professes to give many of its measurements, but the problem of its restoration is still hotly debated, and fresh schemes appear almost every year. The language of ancient descriptions has led some critics, even in recent times, to postulate a miracle of construction, which suspended a heavy marble pyramid upon an open colon­nade. It seems, however, almost certain that the monument consisted of a huge rectangular basis, carrying a rectangular cella surrounded by thirty-six Ionic columns, nine by eleven. The cella and colonnade carried a rather low stepped pyramid, which was crowned by a chariot-group. The stylobate seems to have measured about 100 feet by 80 feet: the height of the various parts is uncertain, for Pliny’s figures are both doubtful and obscure, and modern discussions have not been conclusive. The architectural style closely resembles that of the Priene temple, and there was certainly no frieze between architrave and dentils. There were, however, three sculptured friezes, of which notable remains survive: two were perhaps on the basis, one on the cella wall.

The oracular temple of Apollo at Didyma near Miletus was one of the largest and most magnificent structures of the ancient world: it measured about 359 by 168 feet on the stylobate. An earlier temple on the site was burnt bv the Persians in 494 and abandoned till the conquests of Alexander the Great. The oracle was reopened by 331, and some parts of the building seem to belong to the second half of the fourth century: Seleucus Nicator and his son Antiochus Soter were certainly active in its construction before 294, but the work dragged on till the time of Hadrian. The temple was dipteral, having ten columns by twenty in the outer row: it had a deep pronaos, containing twelve columns, but no opisthodomos. The greater part of the cella hardly deserves that name, for it was a court open to the sky; it was nearly fifteen feet lower in level than the peripteral colonnade and the pronaos, and contained the famous oracular spring. There was an intermediate room between pronaos and cella, at a still higher level than the pronaos; it was directly accessible only from the cella floor, by a great flight of steps. The pronaos was connected with the cella only by two descending passages with arched ceilings, on each side of the intermediate room: for though there was a huge door between the pronaos and the intermediate room, its threshold was nearly five feet high, and it must have served for the proclamation of oracles to visitors in the pronaos. The inner wall of the cella was adorned with pilasters standing on a dado at the level of the floor of the intermediate room. Little or none of this work, however, can confi­dently, be assigned to the earliest period of construction, and the only part which calls for a detailed description in this chapter is the naiskos, or inner shrine, a little isolated temple within the cella, which seems definitely to belong to the fourth century. It was a tetrastyle amphiprostyle structure, measuring about 28 by 48 feet. There was a pronaos but no opisthodomos. The en­tablature had a very low frieze, with formal ornament, between architrave and dentils. This shrine housed the famous statue by Canachus, which Seleucus Nicator sent back from Ecbatana, whither the Persians had carried it in the fifth century.

One more Asiatic temple calls for a few words here, the well-preserved temple of Artemis at Sardesf5. Its fifth-century form has already been briefly described. In its surviving state, like the Didymaeum, it is of many dates, difficult to disentangle, but its general scheme appears to belong to the last quarter of the fourth century. Externally it had eight columns by twenty. It was pseudo-dipteral at the sides, but not at the ends, where very deep prostyle porches projected from the cella to within one inter-columniation of the peripteral colonnade. The peripteral columns on the facades were so spaced as to produce inter-columniations widening gradually towards the centre, from about 17 feet to about 23 feet: the flank inter-columniations were a little narrower than the narrowest of those on the facades. Such unequal spacing on the facades was probably usual in Asiatic Ionic till Hellenistic times. At Ephesus it is thought that the central inter-columniations measured roughly twenty-eight feet.

The cella contained twelve columns in two rows, and behind it lay an inner chamber, containing two columns. The building had several curious features. The space, at each end, between the front columns of the porch and its back wall, measured more than 44 feet, and the clear width of the porch was more than 57 feet. Unlike the cella, these huge rectangles had no interior supports, and it is doubtful if they can have been roofed. Again, at the east end a simple flight of low steps, between balustrades, gave access to the stylobate, as in most of these colossal temples, whose principal steps were far too high for practical use: but at the back the remains of steps round the porch and outside the pteron suggest that here some of the columns at the angles of the pteron stood upon pedestals, a most unusual scheme. In any case four of the porch columns certainly stood upon square pedestals, namely the two at each end in the middle of the front row. These columns were smaller than any of the rest, and were probably reused relics of the fifth-century temple. The pedestals have a rough band, intended for relief-sculpture, but this was never carried out.

 

VI. 

CIVIL BUILDINGS: THERSILION AND PHILON’S ARSENAL

 

It remains to speak of buildings other than temples. For private houses there is little to add to what was said of fifth-century practice in the last volume . There is, however, at Olympia one large official residence, which deserves a word, the Leonidaeum. This was remodelled in Roman times, but its original plan can be traced. It was a huge rectangle, 263 by 243 feet, consisting of an open court surrounded by rooms. There was an inner peristyle of 44 Doric columns and a low outer colonnade of 138 Ionic ones.

Of purely public buildings the most interesting are the Thersilion at Megalopolis and Philon’s arsenal at the Piraeus. The Thersilionf6 was the assembly hall of that Arcadian league which sprang from the Theban victory at Leuctra : Pausanias saw it already in ruins. Like Pericles’ Odeum and the Telesterion at Eleusis it was a large rectangular building, with a forest of columns to carry its roof, but these were cleverly arranged in radiating lines, to minimize interference with sight and hearing. The columns were of stone, and probably Doric. The ground sloped downwards and inwards from north, east, and west, towards the space from which the lines of columns radiated, which lay south of the true centre of the building: the whole was perhaps floored with wood. The arrangements south of the central space are obscure. A large prostyle Doric porch, with fourteen columns in the front row, occupied the centre of the south front, facing the theatre, which was part of the same architectural scheme. Four columns originally divided the porch from the hall, but this was later replaced by a wall with doors. This change, with others designed to strengthen the fabric, was perhaps made in the third century. In the original design some of the wooden architraves had a span of 34 feet. The Thersilion measured 218 by 173 feet. The influence of the theatre type upon its general plan is unmistakable.

The Piraeus arsenal, for the storage of naval tackle, was built soon after the middle of the fourth century by the same Philon who added the great porch to the Telesterion at Eleusis. The building was destroyed by Sulla, but a surviving inscription gives such full details of its construction and dimensions that few existing works are so completely intelligible. It was a long narrow structure, measuring externally 400 by 55 Attic feet, a little less than the corresponding English measures. There were no porches, and the external decoration was confined to plain pediments at the ends, and a triglyph frieze all round. Seventy stone columns thirty feet high, divided the interior into nave and aisles, and each aisle contained a wooden gallery. There was a plain window, 2 feet by 3, in the outer wall, behind each inter-columniation, and three more at each end. The roof was of a heavy and wasteful type: thick timber architraves connected the columns longitudinally, and beams of the same size joined each pair of opposite columns across the nave. Wooden blocks on the centres of the cross-beams supported a ridge-beam, and the framework of the roof, tiled with terra cotta, clay-bedded, rested upon outer walls, architrave, and ridge-beam. The principle of the trussed roof was wholly absent.

Of fourth-century theatres little need here be said, for remodelling, in almost every case, has obscured or destroyed their most interesting features, and a general account of the subject was given in the last volume. At Athens the surviving auditorium is fundamentally the work of Lycurgus, towards the close of the fourth century; it replaced an unfinished Periclean scheme. Lycurgus also built the first stone skene, but we know little of this, except that it had wings (paraskenia), probably colonnaded, projecting forwards at each end. The skene of the fourth-century theatre at Eretria seems to have been of the same general type. The beautiful theatre at Epidaurus also dates from this period, but of its original stone skene we know practically nothing, and at Megalopolis the skene was of wood. Some theatres in Asia Minor, such as those of Priene and Magnesia, may date from the very close of the fourth century, but they belong essentially to the Hellenistic period: while the fourth­century theatre at Syracuse in Sicily preserves no clear remains of its original scenic arrangements.

In general, the architecture of this period was stationary and unenterprising. There was little use of new materials or methods. Alexander’s conquests familiarized the Greeks with the burnt brick of Mesopotamia, but this material hardly appeared in Greece till Roman times; nor was concrete adopted, though Theophrastus knew and appreciated the strength of the gypsum mortar employed especially in Cyprus and Phoenicia. The arch alone, immemorial in Egypt and Mesopotamia, was creeping into prominence at the end of the fourth century. It had been used long before for town-gates in Acarnania and for minor purposes elsewhere, but the architects of Priene, about 300 BC, were seemingly the first to employ it in important positions in a great city with high artistic standards. One of their town-gates had an arch with a span of thirteen feet.

Yet the systematic development and combination of these new materials and methods, destined in the hands of Roman engineers to revolutionize architectural construction, still lay far in the future. The prestige of the past was overwhelming. The fourth­century architects offered their successors no vision of new worlds to conquer. They bequeathed them nothing but a tradition, noble, indeed, and dignified, but stiffening into academic rigour, and already fatally touched with pretentiousness and vulgarity.

 

THE END .