The Historians' History of the World 03

From first to last Greece thought thus. Many a time in the Odyssey, Ulysses and Telemachus fancy that they see a god when they unexpectedly encounter a tall and beautiful man; and the cold and severe Aristotle writes: “If amongst mortals any were born resembling the images of the gods, the rest of mankind would agree in swearing to them an eternal obedience.” Simonides, without going so far, made beauty the second of the four conditions necessary to happiness, and Isocrates said: “Virtue is so honoured only because it is moral beauty.” It was because he was the most beautiful of the ephebi that Sophocles was charged, after Salamis, with the task of leading the chorus which sung the hymn of victory; and it is said Phidias engraved on the finger of Zeus at Olympia: “Pantarces is beautiful”—a sacrilege which might have exposed him to great danger. We no longer possess this inscription, but we find a similar one on a painted vase, where Victory is offering a crown to a handsome

ephebus. The gods themselves had the reputation of being sensible of this advantage, which had procured many mortals the honour of their love. At Ægium Jupiter desired that his priests should be chosen from among the young men who had carried off the prize for beauty; for this merit Ganymede was snatched up to heaven, that he might serve as cup-bearer to the gods, and Apollo admitted into his sanctuary the statue of Phryne, the most admired of the courtesans of Greece. It is notorious how Hyperides saved the beautiful hetæra from a capital charge, when she was standing before the judges, by simply tearing away at an appropriate moment the veil which hid her beauty. The recollection of these facts serves to explain the divine honours paid to Antinoüs by the most Grecian of the Roman emperors; but they also show how much this worship of beauty, of which the Greeks had made a religion and from which Plato was to weave a theory, went to form the artists, and, to a certain extent, the philosophers of Greece. Did not Plato utter words whence has been legitimately derived the famous saying that Beauty is the splendour of goodness? The jurisconsults of the Roman empire called themselves the priests of law; Phidias and Polyclitus might have styled themselves the priests of the beautiful; and this trait suffices to mark the difference between the two civilisations, the Greek and the Roman. Beauty is the perpetual aspiration of the French spirit which seeks it in everything, in the great spectacles of nature or in the works of famous writers and artists.

Amongst the statues of which the ancients were most proud, are some which amaze us by their colossal height, and others which shock our taste by the diversity of the colours and materials employed. The Egyptians treated their Pharaohs and their gods in a similar fashion, as did the Persians their kings, the Athenians the people or the senate personified, and we ourselves do the same to translate certain ideas: the Saint Borromeo of Lake Maggiore and the Liberty of New York are colossi. Executed to be seen from afar, they strike the eye by their mass, and are the expression in stone of elevated sentiments: of holiness, patriotism, or independence. On the promontory where they are placed between earth and heaven they appear as the very genius of the people which erected them, a shining witness of their gratitude, and the figurative representation of their inmost thought.

Apollo

(From a Statue now in the Museum at Naples)

The art of colossal sculpture was at the service of the gods, and was in its place in or near their temples. It was the same with the chryselephantine sculpture, and for the same reasons. The most celebrated of these sculptures and those which from ancient descriptions we know the best, were the Athene of the Parthenon and the Zeus of Olympia.

Reaching with her pedestal to a height of fifteen metres (about 49 ft.), Minerva stood erect, enveloped in a talaric tunic, the dress of virgins. In one hand she held a Victory, in the other the spear round which the serpent Erichthonius was coiled. The draperies were of gold, the naked parts of ivory, the head of Medusa, on the Ægis, in silver, the eyes being of precious stones.

How did this Minerva, which was seen by Julian as late as the fourth century of our era, finally perish? The Christians have been charged with this, but the accusation should be brought against her wealth. So much gold could not escape the barbarians, whoever they were, whether invaders from the north, needy princes, or ordinary thieves. The pillage of the Parthenon had already begun in the time of Isocrates and the Athene of Julian must have been only a ruin.