The Historians' History of the World 03

Art is a natural instinct which is to be found even amongst the last of the savages who were the prehistoric inhabitants of Gaul, and which the most intelligent of animals do not possess. This instinct is developed or arrested, not, as has been said, according to race, but in response to the social influences to which a people is subjected amidst melancholy and severe or peaceful and smiling scenes which extinguish or call forth the creative imagination. These influences, working through the centuries, predisposed Hellas to change the paths which art had been pursuing in the East; and habits which were easily acclimatised in Greece, but which could not have had their birth on the banks of the Nile and Euphrates, favoured this slow evolution.

Thanks to a good system of education, to long-continued gymnastic exercises and to a life in the open air, often without clothing and always without a dress which could hamper the harmonious development of the body, the Greeks became the most beautiful race under the sun. As they had always before their eyes the ephebi

, so agile in the race, the wrestlers and the athletes, who displayed so much virile grace, the æsthetic sense developed in them with a strength which, when nature had given genius to the artists, produced masterpieces. Religion still further increased this tendency. Their gods having been conceived in the image of man, as a superior humanity, the sculptors, as the religious conscience grew more elevated and taste was purified, took their ideal for the representations of the dwellers on Olympus from human beauty carried to perfection. The people even looked upon it as a gift of heaven, and after death men were accorded heroic honours on account of their beauty.

Minerva

(From a statue)

Herodotus has preserved us a fact which exhibits the Greek character: Philip of Croton was venerated as a hero after his death, in a small building erected to him because he was the most beautiful man of his time, and the old historian agrees with the Egestans who had made this singular kind of god. He does not ask if Xerxes had truly royal qualities. “In his vast army,” he says, “none was more worthy by his beauty of the sovereign power.” In one of the choregiæ in which he often triumphed by his magnificence, Nicias had given the part of Dionysus to a young slave so perfectly handsome and so nobly attired that on his appearance the people broke into applause. Nicias liberated him at once, considering, he said, that it was an impiety to retain in servitude a man who had been hailed by the Athenians in the character of a god. Nicias indeed was performing a very popular act; it was the handsome ephebus, not the god, who had excited the admiration of the spectators.