IV. APELLES

The highest excellence of the fourth century lay not in literature but in philosophy and art. In art, as in politics, the individual liberated himself from the temple, the state, the tradition, and the school. As patriotic devotion yielded to private loyalties, architecture took on a more modest scale, and became increasingly secular; the great choral forms of music and dance made way for private performances by professionals; painting and sculpture continued to adorn public buildings with the representation of gods or noble human types, but at the same time they entered upon that service and portrayal of living individuals which characterized the succeeding age. Where cities could still afford to patronize art on a national scale it was because—like Cnidus, Halicarnassus, or Ephesus—they had not been deeply touched by war, or, like Syracuse, had found in natural resources and governmental order the means of a rapid recovery.

On the mainland architecture marked time. In 338 Lycurgus rebuilt the Theater of Dionysus, the Stadium, and the Lyceum; and under his administration Philon raised an impressive arsenal at the Piraeus. As the tendency to a delicate refinement increased, the Doric order became less fashionable, it? stern simplicity finding no counterpart in the soul; the Ionic style rose in popularity, and served as an architectural analogue to Praxiteles’ elegance and Plato’s charm; while the Corinthian order made modest conquests in the Tower of the Winds and the choragic monument of Lysicrates. At Arcadian Tegea Scopas raised a temple of Athena in all three styles—one colonnade Doric, another Ionic, another Corinthian²³—and beautified it with statuary from his own masculine hand.

Vaster and more famous was the third temple of Artemis at Ephesus. The second temple had burned down on the day of Alexander’s birth in 356, a coincidence which, says the usually kindly Plutarch, Hegesias of Magnesia “made the occasion of a conceit frigid enough to have stopped the conflagration.”²⁴ The new building was begun soon afterward, and was completed by the end of the century. Alexander offered to bear the whole cost of the work if his name as donor were recorded on the edifice; but the proud Greeks of Ephesus refused for the disarming (or possibly satirical) reason that “it was not meet for one god to build a temple to another.”²⁵ Nevertheless, Alexander’s favorite architect, Dinocrates, designed the temple, on a scale that made it the largest in Hellas. Thirty-six of the columns were carved with bas-reliefs by various sculptors, including the ubiquitous Scopas; one sculptured column drum survives in the British Museum, as if to prove by its drapery alone that Greek sculpture was still near the height of its curve. The heads of the figures are not immobile and idealized types, but individualized faces alive with feeling and character—a premonition of Hellenistic realism.

At the opposite extreme of size the fourth century distinguished itself in terra-cotta statuettes. Boeotian Tanagra made its name synonymous with little figures in baked and unglazed clay, cast in generalized types but then molded and painted by hand into a thousand individual shapes quick with the color and variety of common life. As in earlier centuries, painting was called in to aid other arts; but now it acquired an independent status and dignity, and its masters received commissions from all the Greek world. Pamphilus of Amphipolis, who taught Apelles, refused to take any pupil for less than twelve years, and charged $6000 for the course. Mnason, dictator of Locrian Elatea, paid ten minas for each of the hundred figures in a battle scene by Aristides of Thebes, making $100,000 for one painting; and the same enthusiast gave Asclepiodorus $360,000 for a panel of the twelve major Olympians. Lucullus paid $12,000 for a copy of the portrait that Pausias of Sicyon had painted of Menander’s mistress Glycera.²⁶ A picture by Apelles, says Pliny, sold for a sum equal to the treasuries of whole cities.²⁷

“Apelles of Cos,” says the same enthusiastic amateur, “surpassed all the other painters who either preceded or succeeded him. Singlehanded, he contributed more to painting than all the others together.”²⁸ Apelles must have been supreme in his day and art, since he could afford the rare extravagance of praising other painters. Learning that his greatest rival, Protogenes, was living in poverty, Apelles sailed for Rhodes to visit him. Protogenes, unwarned, was not in his studio when Apelles came. An old woman attendant asked Apelles whom she should name as visitor when her master returned. Apelles replied only by taking a brush and tracing upon a panel, with one stroke, an outline of exceeding fineness. When Protogenes came back the old woman regretted that she could not tell him the name of his departed visitor; but Protogenes, seeing the outline and noting its delicacy, exclaimed: “Only Apelles could have drawn that line.” Then he drew a still finer line within that of Apelles, and bade the woman show it if the stranger should return. Apelles came, marveled at the absent; Protogenes’ skill, but drew, between the two lines, a third of such slenderness and grace that when Protogenes saw it he confessed himself surpassed, and rushed to the harbor to detain and welcome Apelles. The panel was transmitted as a masterpiece from generation to generation, until it was bought by Julius Caesar and perished in the fire that destroyed his palace on the Palatine Hill. Anxious to awaken the Greek world to Protogenes’ worth, Apelles asked him what he wanted for some of his paintings; Protogenes mentioned a modest sum, but Apelles offered him, instead, fifty talents ($300,000), and then circulated a report that he intended to sell these works as his own. The Rhodians, aroused to a better appreciation of their artist, paid Protogenes more than the sum Apelles had named, and kept the pictures among the public treasures of the city.²⁹

Apelles meanwhile had captured the plaudits of the Greek world by his painting of Aphrodite Anadyomene—i.e., Aphrodite rising from the sea. Alexander sent for him, and sat for many portraits. The young conqueror was not satisfied with the representation of his horse Bucephalus in one of these pictures, and had the animal brought closer to the panel for comparison. Bucephalus, looking at the picture, whinnied; whereupon Apelles remarked, “Your Majesty’s horse seems to know more about painting than you do.”³⁰On another occasion, when the King was holding forth about art in Apelles’ studio, Apelles begged him to talk of anything else, lest the boys who were grinding the colors should laugh at him. Alexander took it good-naturedly; and when he engaged the artist to paint his favorite concubine, and Apelles fell in love with her, the King sent her to him as a gift.³¹—Over his finished pictures Apelles painted a thin coat of varnish, which preserved the colors, softened their glare, and yet made them livelier than before. He worked to the last, and death came upon him while he was once more delineating the eternal Aphrodite.