Greek Studies A Series of Essays 9

Greek Studies A Series of Essays 9

There were three ideal forms, as we saw, gradually shaping themselves

in the development of the story of Demeter, waiting only for complete

realisation at the hands of the sculptor; and now, with these forms

in our minds, let us place ourselves in thought before the three

images which once probably occupied the three niches or ambries in

the face of that singular cliff at Cnidus, one of them being then

wrought on a larger scale. Of the three figures, one probably

represents Persephone, as the goddess of the dead; the second,

Demeter enthroned; the third is probably a portrait-statue of a

priestess of Demeter, but may perhaps, even so, represent Demeter

herself, Demeter Achaea, Ceres Deserta, the mater dolorosa of the

Greeks, a type not as yet [145] recognised in any other work of

ancient art. Certainly, it seems hard not to believe that this work

is in some way connected with the legend of the place to which it

belonged, and the main subject of which it realises so completely;

and, at least, it shows how the higher Greek sculpture would have

worked out this motive. If Demeter at all, it is Demeter the

seeker,--Dêô+--as she was called in the mysteries, in some pause of

her restless wandering over the world in search of the lost child,

and become at last an abstract type of the wanderer. The Homeric

hymn, as we saw, had its sculptural motives, the great gestures of

Demeter, who was ever the stately goddess, as she followed the

daughters of Celeus, or sat by the well-side, or went out and in,

through the halls of the palace, expressed in monumental words. With

the sentiment of that monumental Homeric presence this statue is

penetrated, uniting a certain solemnity of attitude and bearing, to a

profound piteousness, an unrivalled pathos of __EXPRESSION__. There is

something of the pity of Michelangelo's mater dolorosa, in the wasted

form and marred countenance, yet with the light breaking faintly over

it from the eyes, which, contrary to the usual practice in ancient

sculpture, are represented as looking upwards. It is the aged woman

who has escaped from pirates, who has but just escaped being sold as

a slave, calling on the young for pity. The sorrows of her long

wanderings seem to have passed into the marble; [146] and in this

too, it meets the demands which the reader of the Homeric hymn, with

its command over the resources of human pathos, makes upon the

sculptor. The tall figure, in proportion above the ordinary height,

is veiled, and clad to the feet in the longer tunic, its numerous

folds hanging in heavy parallel lines, opposing the lines of the

peplus, or cloak, which cross it diagonally over the breast,

enwrapping the upper portion of the body somewhat closely. It is the

very type of the wandering woman, going grandly, indeed, as Homer

describes her, yet so human in her anguish, that we seem to recognise

some far descended shadow of her, in the homely figure of the roughly

clad French peasant woman, who, in one of Corot's pictures, is

hasting along under a sad light, as the day goes out behind the

little hill. We have watched the growth of the merely personal

sentiment in the story; and we may notice that, if this figure be

indeed Demeter, then the conception of her has become wholly

humanised; no trace of the primitive cosmical import of the myth, no

colour or scent of the mystical earth, remains about it.

 

The seated figure, much mutilated, and worn by long exposure, yet

possessing, according to the best critics, marks of the school of

Praxiteles, is almost undoubtedly the image of Demeter enthroned.

Three times in the Homeric hymn she is represented as sitting, once

by the fountain at the wayside, again in the house of Celeus, and

[147] again in the newly finished temple of Eleusis; but always in

sorrow; seated on the petra agelastos,+ which, as Ovid told us, the

people of Attica still called the stone of sorrow. Here she is

represented in her later state of reconciliation, enthroned as the

glorified mother of all things. The delicate plaiting of the tunic

about the throat, the formal curling of the hair, and a certain

weight of over-thoughtfulness in the brows, recall the manner of

Leonardo da Vinci, a master, one of whose characteristics is a very

sensitive __EXPRESSION__ of the sentiment of maternity. It reminds one

especially of a work by one of his scholars, the Virgin of the

Balances, in the Louvre, a picture which has been thought to

represent, under a veil, the blessing of universal nature, and in

which the sleepy-looking heads, with a peculiar grace and refinement

of somewhat advanced life in them, have just this half-weary posture.

We see here, then, the Here of the world below, the Stygian Juno, the

chief of those Elysian matrons who come crowding, in the poem of

Claudian, to the marriage toilet of Proserpine, the goddess of the

fertility of the earth and of all creatures, but still of fertility

as arisen out of death;* and therefore she is not without a certain

pensiveness, having seen the seed fall into the ground and die, many

times. Persephone is returned to her, and the hair [148] spreads,

like a rich harvest, over her shoulders; but she is still veiled, and

knows that the seed must fall into the ground again, and Persephone

descend again from her.

 

The statues of the supposed priestess, and of the enthroned Demeter,

are of more than the size of life; the figure of Persephone is but

seventeen inches high, a daintily handled toy of Parian marble, the

miniature copy perhaps of a much larger work, which might well be

reproduced on a magnified scale. The conception of Demeter is

throughout chiefly human, and even domestic, though never without a

hieratic interest, because she is not a goddess only, but also a

priestess. In contrast, Persephone is wholly unearthly, the close

companion, and even the confused double, of Hecate, the goddess of

midnight terrors,--Despoena,--the final mistress of all that lives;

and as sorrow is the characteristic sentiment of Demeter, so awe of

Persephone. She is compact of sleep, and death, and flowers, but of

narcotic flowers especially,--a revenant, who in the garden of

Aidoneus has eaten of the pomegranate, and bears always the secret of

decay in her, of return to the grave, in the mystery of those

swallowed seeds; sometimes, in later work, holding in her hand the

key of the great prison-house, but which unlocks all secrets also;

(there, finally, or through oracles revealed in dreams;) sometimes,

like Demeter, the poppy, emblem of sleep and death by its [149]

narcotic juices, of life and resurrection by its innumerable seeds,

of the dreams, therefore, that may intervene between falling asleep

and waking. Treated as it is in the Homeric hymn, and still more in

this statue, the image of Persephone may be regarded as the result of

many efforts to lift the old Chthonian gloom, still lingering on in

heavier souls, concerning the grave, to connect it with impressions

of dignity and beauty, and a certain sweetness even; it is meant to

make men in love, or at least at peace, with death. The Persephone

of Praxiteles' school, then, is Aphrodite-Persephone, Venus-Libitina.

Her shadowy eyes have gazed upon the fainter colouring of the under-

world, and the tranquillity, born of it, has "passed into her face";

for the Greek Hades is, after all, but a quiet, twilight place, not

very different from that House of Fame where Dante places the great

souls of the classical world; Aidoneus himself being conceived, in

the highest Greek sculpture, as but a gentler Zeus, the great

innkeeper; so that when a certain Greek sculptor had failed in his

portraiture of Zeus, because it had too little hilarity, too little,

in the eyes and brow, of the open and cheerful sky, he only changed

its title, and the thing passed excellently, with its heavy locks and

shadowy eyebrows, for the god of the dead. The image of Persephone,

then, as it is here composed, with the tall, tower-like head-dress,

from which the veil depends--the corn-basket, [150] originally

carried thus by the Greek women, balanced on the head--giving the

figure unusual length, has the air of a body bound about with grave-

clothes; while the archaic hands and feet, and a certain stiffness in

the folds of the drapery, give it something of a hieratic character,

and to the modern observer may suggest a sort of kinship with the

more chastened kind of Gothic work. But quite of the school of

Praxiteles is the general character of the composition; the graceful

waving of the hair, the fine shadows of the little face, of the eyes

and lips especially, like the shadows of a flower--a flower risen

noiselessly from its dwelling in the dust--though still with that

fulness or heaviness in the brow, as of sleepy people, which, in the

delicate gradations of Greek sculpture, distinguish the infernal

deities from their Olympian kindred. The object placed in the hand

may be, perhaps, a stiff, archaic flower, but is probably the partly

consumed pomegranate--one morsel gone; the most usual emblem of

Persephone being this mystical fruit, which, because of the multitude

of its seeds, was to the Romans a symbol of fecundity, and was sold

at the doors of the temple of Ceres, that the women might offer it

there, and bear numerous children; and so, to the middle age, became

a symbol of the fruitful earth itself; and then of that other seed

sown in the dark under-world; and at last of that whole hidden

region, so thickly sown, which Dante visited, Michelino painting him,

[151] in the Duomo of Florence, with this fruit in his hand, and

Botticelli putting it into the childish hands of Him, who, if men "go

down into hell, is there also."

 

There is an attractiveness in these goddesses of the earth, akin to

the influence of cool places, quiet houses, subdued light,

tranquillising voices. What is there in this phase of ancient

religion for us, at the present day? The myth of Demeter and

Persephone, then, illustrates the power of the Greek religion as a

religion of pure ideas--of conceptions, which having no link on

historical fact, yet, because they arose naturally out of the spirit

of man, and embodied, in adequate symbols, his deepest thoughts

concerning the conditions of his physical and spiritual life,

maintained their hold through many changes, and are still not without

a solemnising power even for the modern mind, which has once admitted

them as recognised and habitual inhabitants; and, abiding thus for

the elevation and purifying of our sentiments, long after the earlier

and simpler races of their worshippers have passed away, they may be

a pledge to us of the place in our culture, at once legitimate and

possible, of the associations, the conceptions, the imagery, of Greek

religious poetry in general, of the poetry of all religions.

 

NOTES

 

117. +Transliteration: kalykôpis. Liddell and Scott definition:

"Like a flower-bud, blushing, roseate."

 

118. +Transliteration: charis. Liddell and Scott definition:

"favour, grace ... loveliness."

 

118. +Transliteration: theai semnai. Translation: "august

goddesses."

 

124. *The great Greek myths are, in truth, like abstract forces,

which ally themselves to various conditions.

 

129. +Transliteration: korê arrêtos. Translation: "Korê the

mysterious, the horrible." Another meaning of arrêtos, as Pater

points out, is "unsaid, not to be spoken."

 

136. *With this may be connected another passage of Ovid--

Metamorphoses, v. 391-408.

 

138. *On these small objects the mother and daughter are hard to

distinguish, the latter being recognisable only by a greater delicacy

in the features and the more evident stamp of youth.

 

140. *A History of Discoveries at Halicarnassus, Cnidus, and

Branchidae.

 

141. +Transliteration: hoi theoi para Damatri. Pater's translation:

"the gods with Demeter."

 

143. +Transliteration: katadesmoi. Liddell and Scott definition: "a

tie or band: a magic knot, love-knot."

 

145. +Transliteration: Dêô. Liddell and Scott definition: the verb

dêô means "I shall find," while the proper noun refers to Demeter.

 

147. +Transliteration: petra agelastos. Translation: "sullen rock."

 

147. *Pallere ligustra, / Exspirare rosas, decrescere lilia vidi.

 

 

 

HIPPOLYTUS VEILED: A STUDY FROM EURIPIDES

 

[152] CENTURIES of zealous archaeology notwithstanding, many phases

of the so varied Greek genius are recorded for the modern student in

a kind of shorthand only, or not at all. Even for Pausanias,

visiting Greece before its direct part in affairs was quite played

out, much had perished or grown dim--of its art, of the truth of its

outward history, above all of its religion as a credible or

practicable thing. And yet Pausanias visits Greece under

conditions as favourable for observation as those under which later

travellers, Addison or Eustace, proceed to Italy. For him the

impress of life in those old Greek cities is not less vivid and

entire than that of medieval Italy to ourselves; at Siena, for

instance, with its ancient palaces still in occupation, its public

edifices as serviceable as if the old republic had but just now

vacated them, the tradition of their primitive worship still unbroken

in its churches. Had the opportunities in which Pausanias was [153]

fortunate been ours, how many haunts of the antique Greek life

unnoticed by him we should have peeped into, minutely systematic in

our painstaking! how many a view would broaden out where he notes

hardly anything at all on his map of Greece!

 

One of the most curious phases of Greek civilisation which has thus

perished for us, and regarding which, as we may fancy, we should have

made better use of that old traveller's facilities, is the early

Attic deme-life--its picturesque, intensely localised variety, in the

hollow or on the spur of mountain or sea-shore; and with it many a

relic of primitive religion, many an early growth of art parallel to

what Vasari records of artistic beginnings in the smaller cities of

Italy. Colonus and Acharnae, surviving still so vividly by the magic

of Sophocles, of Aristophanes, are but isolated examples of a

widespread manner of life, in which, amid many provincial

peculiarities, the first, yet perhaps the most costly and telling

steps were made in all the various departments of Greek culture.

Even in the days of Pausanias, Piraeus was still traceable as a

distinct township, once the possible rival of Athens, with its little

old covered market by the seaside, and the symbolical picture of the

place, its Genius, visible on the wall. And that is but the type of

what there had been to know of threescore and more village

communities, each having its own altars, its special worship and

[154] place of civic assembly, its trade and crafts, its name drawn

from physical peculiarity or famous incident, its body of heroic

tradition. Lingering on while Athens, the great deme, gradually

absorbed into itself more and more of their achievements, and passing

away almost completely as political factors in the Peloponnesian war,

they were still felt, we can hardly doubt, in the actual physiognomy

of Greece. That variety in unity, which its singular geographical

formation secured to Greece as a whole, was at its utmost in these

minute reflexions of the national character, with all the relish

of local difference--new art, new poetry, fresh ventures in political

combination, in the conception of life, springing as if straight from

the soil, like the thorn-blossom of early spring in magic lines over

all that rocky land. On the other hand, it was just here that

ancient habits clung most tenaciously--that old-fashioned, homely,

delightful existence, to which the refugee, pent up in Athens in the

years of the Peloponnesian war, looked back so fondly. If the

impression of Greece generally is but enhanced by the littleness of

the physical scene of events intellectually so great--such a system

of grand lines, restrained within so narrow a compass, as in one of

its fine coins--still more would this be true of those centres of

country life. Here, certainly, was that assertion of seemingly small

interests, which brings into free play, and gives his utmost value

[155] to, the individual; making his warfare, equally with his more

peaceful rivalries, deme against deme, the mountain against the

plain, the sea-shore, (as in our own old Border life, but played out

here by wonderfully gifted people) tangible as a personal history, to

the doubling of its fascination for those whose business is with the

survey of the dramatic side of life.

 

As with civil matters, so it was also, we may fairly suppose, with

religion; the deme-life was a manifestation of religious custom and

sentiment, in all their primitive local variety. As Athens,

gradually drawing into itself the various elements of provincial

culture, developed, with authority, the central religious position,

the demes-men did but add the worship of Athene Polias, the goddess

of the capital, to their own pre-existent ritual uses. Of local and

central religion alike, time and circumstance had obliterated much

when Pausanias came. A devout spirit, with religion for his chief

interest, eager for the trace of a divine footstep, anxious even in

the days of Lucian to deal seriously with what had counted for so

much to serious men, he has, indeed, to lament that "Pan is dead":--

"They come no longer!"--"These things happen no longer!" But the

Greek--his very name also, Hellen, was the title of a priesthood--had

been religious abundantly, sanctifying every detail of his actual

life with the religious idea; and as Pausanias goes on his way he

finds many a remnant of that [156] earlier estate of religion, when,

as he fancied, it had been nearer the gods, as it was certainly

nearer the earth. It is marked, even in decay, with varieties of

place; and is not only continuous but in situ. At Phigaleia he

makes his offerings to Demeter, agreeably to the paternal rites of

the inhabitants, wax, fruit, undressed wool "still full of the sordes

of the sheep." A dream from heaven cuts short his notice of the

mysteries of Eleusis. He sees the stone, "big enough for a little

man," on which Silenus was used to sit and rest; at Athens, the

tombs of the Amazons, of the purple-haired Nisus, of Deucalion;--"it

is a manifest token that he had dwelt there." The worshippers of

Poseidon, even at his temple among the hills, might still feel the

earth fluctuating beneath their feet. And in care for divine things,

he tells us, the Athenians outdid all other Greeks. Even in the days

of Nero it revealed itself oddly; and it is natural to suppose that

of this temper the demes, as the proper home of conservatism, were

exceptionally expressive. Scattered in those remote, romantic

villages, among their olives or sea-weeds, lay the heroic graves, the

relics, the sacred images, often rude enough amid the delicate

tribute of later art; this too oftentimes finding in such retirement

its best inspirations, as in some Attic Fiesole. Like a network over

the land of gracious poetic tradition, as also of undisturbed

ceremonial usage surviving late for those who cared to seek it, the

[157] local religions had been never wholly superseded by the worship

of the great national temples. They were, in truth, the most

characteristic developments of a faith essentially earth-born or

indigenous.

 

And how often must the student of fine art, again, wish he had the

same sort of knowledge about its earlier growth in Greece, that he

actually possesses in the case of Italian art! Given any development

at all in this matter, there must have been phases of art, which, if

immature, were also veritable __EXPRESSION__s of power to come,

intermediate discoveries of beauty, such as are by no means a mere

anticipation, and of service only as explaining historically larger

subsequent achievements, but of permanent attractiveness in

themselves, being often, indeed, the true maturity of certain amiable

artistic qualities. And in regard to Greek art at its best--the

Parthenon--no less than to the art of the Renaissance at its best--

the Sistine Chapel--the more instructive light would be derived

rather from what precedes than what follows such central success,

from the determination to apprehend the fulfilment of past effort

rather than the eve of decline, in the critical, central moment which

partakes of both. Of such early promise, early achievement, we have

in the case of Greek art little to compare with what is extant of the

youth of the arts in Italy. Overbeck's careful gleanings of its

history form indeed [158] a sorry relic as contrasted with Vasari's

intimations of the beginnings of the Renaissance. Fired by certain

fragments of its earlier days, of a beauty, in truth, absolute, and

vainly longing for more, the student of Greek sculpture indulges the

thought of an ideal of youthful energy therein, yet withal of

youthful self-restraint; and again, as with survivals of old

religion, the privileged home, he fancies, of that ideal must have

been in those venerable Attic townships, as to a large extent it

passed away with them.

 

The budding of new art, the survival of old religion, at isolated

centres of provincial life, where varieties of human character also

were keen, abundant, asserted in correspondingly effective incident--

this is what irresistible fancy superinduces on historic details,

themselves meagre enough. The sentiment of antiquity is indeed a

characteristic of all cultivated people, even in what may seem the

freshest ages, and not exclusively a humour of our later world. In

the earliest notices about them, as we know, the people of Attica

appear already impressed by the immense antiquity of their occupation

of its soil, of which they claim to be the very first flower. Some

at least of those old demes-men we may well fancy sentimentally

reluctant to change their habits, fearful of losing too much of

themselves in the larger stream of life, clinging to what is

antiquated as the work of centralisation goes on, needful as that

work was, [159] with the great "Eastern difficulty" already ever in

the distance. The fear of Asia, barbaric, splendid, hardly known,

yet haunting the curious imagination of those who had borrowed thence

the art in which they were rapidly excelling it, developing, as we

now see, in the interest of Greek humanity, crafts begotten of

tyrannic and illiberal luxury, was finally to suppress the rivalries

of those primitive centres of activity, when the "invincible armada"

of the common foe came into sight.

 

At a later period civil strife was to destroy their last traces. The

old hoplite, from Rhamnus or Acharnae, pent up in beleaguered Athens

during that first summer of the Peloponnesian war, occupying with his

household a turret of the wall, as Thucydides describes--one of many

picturesque touches in that severe historian--could well remember the

ancient provincial life which this conflict with Sparta was bringing

to an end. He could recall his boyish, half-scared curiosity

concerning those Persian ships, coming first as merchantmen, or with

pirates on occasion, in the half-savage, wicked splendours of their

decoration, the monstrous figure-heads, their glittering freightage.

Men would hardly have trusted their women or children with that

suspicious crew, hovering through the dusk. There were soothsayers,

indeed, who had long foretold what happened soon after, giving shape

to vague, supernatural terrors. And then he had crept [160] from his

hiding-place with other lads to go view the enemies' slain at

Marathon, beside those belated Spartans, this new war with whom

seemed to be reviving the fierce local feuds of his younger days.

Paraloi and Diacrioi had ever been rivals. Very distant it all

seemed now, with all the stories he could tell; for in those

crumbling little towns, as heroic life had lingered on into the

actual, so, at an earlier date, the supernatural into the heroic.

Like mist at dawn, the last traces of its divine visitors had then

vanished from the land, where, however, they had already begotten

"our best and oldest families."

 

It was Theseus, uncompromising young master of the situation, in

fearless application of "the modern spirit" of his day to every phase

of life where it was applicable, who, at the expense of Attica, had

given Athens a people, reluctant enough, in truth, as Plutarch

suggests, to desert "their homes and religious usages and many good

and gracious kings of their own" for this elect youth, who thus

figures, passably, as a kind of mythic shorthand for civilisation,

making roads and the like, facilitating travel, suppressing various

forms of violence, but many innocent things as well. So it must

needs be in a world where, even hand in hand with a god-assisted

hero, Justice goes b