V. ARTS

Now that we come at last to the most perfect products of Greek civilization we find ourselves tragically limited in the quantity of the remains. The devastation caused in Greek literature by time and bigotry and mental fashions is negligible compared with the destruction of Greek art. One classic bronze survives—the Charioteer of Delphi; one classic marble statue—the Hermes of Praxiteles; not one temple—not even the Theseum—has come down to us in the form and color that it had for ancient Greece. Greek work in textiles, in wood, in ivory, silver, or gold, is nearly all gone; the material was too perishable or too precious to escape vandalism and time. We must reconstruct the ship from a few planks of the wreckage.

The sources of Greek art were the impulses to representation and decoration, the anthropomorphic quality of Greek religion, and the athletic character and ideal. The early Greek, like other primitives, when he outgrew the custom of sacrificing living beings to accompany and serve the dead, buried carved or painted figures as substitutes. Later he placed images of his ancestors in his home; or he dedicated in the temple likenesses of himself, or of those whom he loved, as votive figurines that might magically win for their models the protection of the god. Minoan religion, Mycenaean religion, even the chthonic cults of Greece, were too vague and impersonal, sometimes too horrible and grotesque, to lend themselves to esthetic form; but the frank humanity of the Olympian gods, and their need of temple homes for their earthly stays, opened a wide road for sculpture, architecture, and a hundred ancillary arts. No other religion—possibly excepting Catholicism—has so stimulated and influenced literature and art: almost every book or play, statue or building or vase, that has come down to us from ancient Greece touches upon religion in subject, purpose, or inspiration.

But inspiration alone would not have made Greek art great. There was needed a technical excellence rising out of cultural contacts and the transmission and development of crafts; indeed art to the Greek was a form of handicraft, and the artist grew so naturally out of the artisan that Greece never quite distinguished them. There was needed a knowledge of the human body, as in its healthy development the norm of proportion, symmetry, and beauty; there was needed a sensuous, passionate love of beauty, that would hold no toil too great that might give to the living moment of loveliness a lasting form. The women of Sparta placed in their sleeping chambers figures of Apollo, Narcissus, Hyacinthus, or some other handsome deity, in order that they might bear beautiful children.⁵⁰ Cypselus established a beauty contest among women far back in the seventh century; and according to Athenaeus this periodical competition continued down to the Christian era.⁵¹ In some places, says Theophrastus, “there are contests between the women in respect of modesty and good management . . .; and also there are contests about beauty, as for instance . . . in Tenedos and Lesbos.”⁵²