History Of Ancient Civilization Part 14

They executed bas-reliefs to adorn the walls of a temple, its facade or its pediment. Of this style of work is the famous frieze of the Panathenaic procession which was carved around the Parthenon, representing young Athenian women on the day of the great festival of the G.o.ddess.[91]

They sculptured statues for the most part, of which some represented G.o.ds and served as idols; others represented athletes victorious in the great games, and these were the recompense of his victory.

The most ancient statues of the Greeks are stiff and rude, quite similar to the a.s.syrian sculptures. They are often colored. Little by little they become graceful and elegant. The greatest works are those of Phidias in the fifth century and of Praxiteles in the fourth. The statues of the following centuries are more graceful, but less n.o.ble and less powerful.

There were thousands of statues in Greece,[92] for every city had its own, and the sculptors produced without cessation for five centuries.

Of all this mult.i.tude there remain to us hardly fifteen complete statues. Not a single example of the masterpieces celebrated among the Greeks has come down to us. Our most famous Greek statues are either copies, like the Venus of Milo, or works of the period of the decadence, like the Apollo of the Belvidere.[93] Still there remains enough, uniting the fragments of statues and of bas-reliefs which are continually being discovered,[94] to give us a general conception of Greek sculpture.

Greek sculptors sought above everything else to represent the most beautiful bodies in a calm and n.o.ble att.i.tude. They had a thousand occasions for viewing beautiful bodies of men in beautiful poses, at the gymnasium, in the army, in the sacred dances and choruses. They studied them and learned to reproduce them; no one has ever better executed the human body.

Usually in a Greek statue the head is small, the face without emotion and dull. The Greeks did not seek, as we do, the expression of the face; they strove for beauty of line and did not sacrifice the limbs for the head. In a Greek statue it is the whole body that is beautiful.

=Pottery.=--The Greeks came to make pottery a real art. They called it Ceramics (the potter's art), and this name is still preserved. Pottery had not the same esteem in Greece as the other arts, but for us it has the great advantage of being better known than the others. While temples and statues fell into ruin, the achievements of Greek potters are preserved in the tombs. This is where they are found today.

Already more than 20,000 specimens have been collected in all the museums of Europe. They are of two sorts:

1. Painted vases, with black or red figures, of all sizes and every form;

2. Statuettes of baked earth; hardly known twenty years ago, they have now attained almost to celebrity since the discovery of the charming figurines of Tanagra in Botia. The most of them are little idols, but some represent children or women.

=Painting.=--There were ill.u.s.trious painters in Greece--Zeuxis, Parrhasius, and Apelles. We know little of them beyond some anecdotes, often doubtful, and some descriptions of pictures. To obtain an impression of Greek painting we are limited to the frescoes found in the houses of Pompeii, an Italian city of the first century of our era. This amounts to the same as saying we know nothing of it.

FOOTNOTES:

[81] The moderns have called this time the Age of Pericles, because Pericles was then governing and was the friend of many of these artists; but the ancients never employed the phrase.

[82] See Aristophanes' "Clouds."

[83] The "Memorabilia" and "Apologia."

[84] Because Plato had lectured in the gardens of a certain Academus.

[85] Because Aristotle had given instruction while moving about. [Or rather from a favorite walk (Peripatus) in the Lyceum.--ED.]

[86] The Greek word for temple signifies "dwelling."

[87] But not by a square opening in the roof as formerly supposed.--ED.

See Gardner, "Ancient Athens," N.Y., 1902, p. 268.

[88] The Parthenon contained vases of gold and silver, a crown of gold, shields, helmets, swords, serpents of gold, an ivory table, eighteen couches, and quivers of ivory.

[89] Boutmy, "Philosophie de l'Architecture en Grece."

[90] The most noted are the Parthenon at Athens and the temple of Poseidon at Paestum, in south Italy.

[91] Knights and other subjects were also shown.--ED.

[92] Even in the second century after the Romans had pillaged Greece to adorn their palaces, there were many thousands of statues in the Greek cities.

[93] It is not certain that the Apollo Belvidere was not a Roman copy.

[94] In the ruins of Olympia has been found a statue of Hermes, the work of Praxiteles.

CHAPTER XV

THE GREEKS IN THE ORIENT

ASIA BEFORE ALEXANDER

=Decadence of the Persian Empire.=--The Greeks, engaged in strife, ceased to attack the Great King; they even received their orders from him. But the Persian empire still continued to become enfeebled. The satraps no longer obeyed the government; each had his court, his treasure, his army, made war according to his fancy, and in short, became a little king in his province. When the Great King desired to remove a satrap, he had scarcely any way of doing it except by a.s.sa.s.sinating him. The Persians themselves were no longer that nation before which all the Asiatic peoples were wont to tremble. Xenophon, a Greek captain, who had been in their pay, describes them as follows: "They recline on tapestries wearing gloves and furs. The n.o.bles, for the sake of the pay, transform their porters, their bakers, and cooks into knights--even the valets who served them at table, dressed them or perfumed them. And so, although their armies were large, they were of no service, as is apparent from the fact that their enemies traversed the empire more freely than their friends. They no longer dared to fight. The infantry as formerly was equipped with buckler, sword, and axe, but they had no courage to use them. The drivers of chariots before facing the enemy basely allowed themselves to be overthrown at once or leaped down from the cars, so that these being no longer under control injured the Persians more than the enemy. For the rest, the Persians do not disguise their military weakness, they concede their inferiority and do not dare to take the field except there are Greeks in their army. They have for their maxim 'never to fight Greeks without Greek auxiliaries on their side.'"

=Expedition of the Ten Thousand.=--This weakness was very apparent when in 400 Cyrus, brother of the Great King Artaxerxes, marched against him to secure his throne. There were then some thousands of adventurers or Greek exiles who hired themselves as mercenaries. Cyrus retained ten thousand of them. Xenophon, one of their number, has written the story of their expedition.

This army crossed the whole of Asia even to the Euphrates without resistance from any one.[95] They at last came to battle near Babylon.

The Greeks according to their habit broke into a run, raising the war-cry. The barbarians took flight before the Greeks had come even within bow-shot. The Greeks followed in pursuit urging one another to keep ranks.

When the war-chariots attacked them, they opened their ranks and let them through. Not a Greek received the least stroke with the exception of one only who was wounded with an arrow. Cyrus was killed; his army disbanded without fighting, and the Greeks remained alone in the heart of a hostile country threatened by a large army. And yet the Persians did not dare to attack them, but treacherously killed their five generals, twenty captains, and two hundred soldiers who had come to conclude a truce.

The friendless mercenaries elected new chiefs, burned their tents and their chariots, and began their retreat. They broke into the rugged mountains of Armenia, and notwithstanding famine, snow, and the arrows of the natives who did not wish to let them pa.s.s, they came to the Black Sea and returned to Greece after traversing the whole Persian empire. At their return (399) their number amounted still to 8,000.

=Agesilaus.=--Three years after, Agesilaus, king of Sparta, with a small army invaded the rich country of Asia Minor, Lydia, and Phrygia.

He fought the satraps and was about to invade Asia when the Spartans ordered his return to fight the armies of Thebes and Athens. Agesilaus was the first of the Greeks to dream of conquering Persia. He was distressed to see the Greeks fighting among themselves. When they announced to him the victory at Corinth where but eight Spartans had perished and 10,000 of the enemy, instead of rejoicing he sighed and said, "Alas, unhappy Greece, to have lost enough men to have subjugated all the barbarians!" He refused one day to destroy a Greek city. "If we exterminate all the Greeks who fail of their duty," said he, "where shall we find the men to vanquish the barbarians?" This feeling was rare at that time. In relating these words of Agesilaus Xenophon, his biographer, exclaims, "Who else regarded it as a misfortune to conquer when he was making war on peoples of his own race?"

CONQUEST OF ASIA BY ALEXANDER

=Macedon.=--Sparta and Athens, exhausted by a century of wars, had abandoned the contest against the king of Persia. A new people resumed it and brought it to an end; these were the Macedonians. They were a very rude people, crude, similar to the ancient Dorians, a people of shepherds and soldiers. They lived far to the north of Greece in two great valleys that opened to the sea. The Greeks had little regard for them, rating them as half barbarians; but since the kings of Macedon called themselves sons of Herakles they had been permitted to run their horses in the races of the Olympian games. This gave them standing as Greeks.

=Philip of Macedon.=--These kings ruling in the interior, remote from the sea, had had but little part in the wars of the Greeks. But in 359 B.C. Philip ascended the throne of Macedon, a man young, active, bold, and ambitious. Philip had three aims:

1. To develop a strong army;

2. To conquer all the ports on the coast of Macedon;

3. To force all the other Greeks to unite under his command against the Persians.

He consumed twenty-four years in fulfilling these purposes and succeeded in all. The Greeks let him alone, often even aided him; in every city he bribed partisans who spoke in his favor. "No fortress is impregnable," said he, "if only one can introduce within it a mule laden with gold." And by these means he took one after another all the cities of northern Greece.

=Demosthenes.=--The most ill.u.s.trious opponent of Philip was the orator Demosthenes. The son of an armorer, he was left an orphan at the age of seven, and his guardians had embezzled a part of his fortune. As soon as he gained his majority he entered a case against them and compelled them to restore the property. He studied the orations of Isaeus and the history of Thucydides which he knew by heart. But when he spoke at the public tribune he was received with shouts of laughter; his voice was too feeble and his breath too short. For several years he labored to discipline his voice. It is said that he shut himself up for months with head half shaved that he might not be tempted to go out, that he declaimed with pebbles in his mouth, and on the sea-sh.o.r.e, in order that his voice might rise above the uproar of the crowd. When he reappeared on the tribune, he was master of his voice, and, as he preserved the habit of carefully preparing all his orations, he became the most finished and most potent orator of Greece.

The party that then governed Athens, whose chief was Phocion, wished to maintain the peace: Athens had neither soldiers nor money enough to withstand the king of Macedon. "I should counsel you to make war,"

said Phocion, "when you are ready for it." Demosthenes, however, misunderstood Philip, whom he regarded as a barbarian; he placed himself at the service of the party that wished to make war on him and employed all his eloquence to move the Athenians from their policy of peace. For fifteen years he seized every occasion to incite them to war; many of his speeches have no other object than an attack on Philip. He himself called these Philippics, and there are three of them. (The name Olynthiacs has been applied to the orations delivered with the purpose of enlisting the Athenians in the aid of Olynthus when it was besieged by Philip.) The first Philippic is in 352. "When, then, O Athenians, will you be about your duty? Will you always roam about the public places asking one of another: What is the news? Ah!

How can there be anything newer than the sight of a Macedonian conquering Athens and dominating Greece? I say, then, that you ought to equip fifty galleys and resolve, if necessary, to man them yourselves. Do not talk to me of an army of 10,000 or of 20,000 aliens that exists only on paper. I would have only citizen soldiers."