We possess in the Vatican a copy of the original head of the Jupiter, and what a master-piece even this bad copy is! What a power in the bold, arched brows; the large eyes with their benevolent, forgiving, and yet commanding glance; the full, parted lips ready to bless and to forgive; the luxuriant beard, the mighty locks inspiring veneration, and the beautifully-rounded cheeks, expressive of creative force and eternal manly beauty! The independent works of Pheidias were very numerous. Besides the two colossal divinities of bronze (Athene Promachos, 50 feet high, and Athene ἡ Λημνία {hê Lêmnia}), we find twelve others mentioned: of these, six were statues of Athene; one colossal Apollo of bronze, 70 feet high; one marble Hermes; three of Aphrodite (two of marble, and one of ivory and gold); a mother of the gods, material unknown; and an Asklepios (Æsculapius) of gold and ivory. Of sacrificial statues, a group of thirteen bronze figures, in commemoration of the victory of Marathon, is mentioned as having been executed by him. In this work twelve mythical characters surrounded one historical figure—that of Miltiades; a proof that the Greeks attributed their victory far more to the help of the gods than to the exertions of their leaders. They were much more inclined to adorn the courts of their temples and their public places with the statues of orators, wrestlers, poets, artists, and philosophers, than with those of men who, in defending their country against invading hordes of barbarians, did their duty and nothing more. What a scope for our artists if we were to adorn our town-halls, courts of justice, our museums, universities, academies, public places, and churches with the statues of those who had devoted their energies to religion, oratory, science, art, politics, and the general welfare of their country! If gratitude were to prompt us to do this, and not childish vanity or egotistical pride, we should shortly have many Pantheons with excellent sculptures.
In no town in Europe can the artist study the sculptural splendour of ancient Greece with greater ease than in London. Of the ninety-two metopes which adorned the Parthenon on the Akropolis at Athens we possess seventeen; of the frieze of the cella 3–1/5 feet high and 524 feet long, representing the Panathenaic procession, we possess fifty-three plates and casts of the whole western side. In all these sculptures what a clear power of grouping, what a variety of characters, what handsome men and women! The flower of Athens is seen assembled to do homage in joyous excitement to the supreme divinity of the State, the embodiment of wisdom and intellect. Some are crowned with wreaths; others carry sun-shades, chairs, splendid pitchers, ornamented vases, or decorated pateras; some are ready to start; others, preparing in animated haste to take their places, are in the act of mounting their prancing horses, or, already mounted, eagerly await the arrival of their friends. On the eastern side, under the entrance to the temple, there was an admirable group of gods and goddesses, in whose presence peplus, or sacred veil, is delivered to the authorities of the temple; animals are led to be sacrificed—flute and kythara-players follow. Amongst the hundreds and hundreds of figures not one is like the other; the exquisite variety in the folds of the dresses of the sitting, standing, walking, riding, driving groups is in general unsurpassed for beauty of design, and perfection of execution. None of the figures are raised more than three inches from the background, and yet the most correct perspective is observed. There is such a softness and truthfulness, such a firmness and ideal vitality in this frieze, that we may at least attribute the composition to Pheidias himself. Some plates of the western side are less excellent in execution; the forms are marked with roughness and dryness, and some faults in the outlines are also apparent to the critic. Some of the horses have legs too long, and bodies too thin; in one of the horses, which is bending its neck to rub its head against one of its fore feet, the curves are much too stiff. The execution of these reliefs must have been left to some inferior artist. What we must admire is, that there are so few faults. The correct study of this frieze ought to serve us as an example in grouping, and would teach us how to arrange a marble strip round some monument for the sake of decoration. Little of this influence, however, is to be observed in our sculptors. We intend to evolve sculpture from our own inner consciousness, and neglect these ancient books with their glorious poems in Pentelic marble; we prefer ‘going to nature’ as the popular phrase runs, and ignore or despise the study of the antique. Now the Greeks had an opportunity of going to real nature—not with the darkened eye of Asiatic prejudice, despising matter and exalting spirit—but with a prejudice in the very opposite direction, cultivating spirit only so far as it served to embellish and to reproduce form. In this they attained perfection, and to surpass them in sculpture is after all impossible; we can only try to equal them, and to learn from what they have left us, to produce other combinations. In this spirit we ought to study the nine figures from the eastern pediment of the Parthenon, in the British Museum. What forms, what exquisite drapery! The finest tissue of pliable stuff is reproduced in hard Pentelic marble. The drapery disguises, and at the same time reveals, the beautiful forms of the human frame. Softness and sensationalism were equally avoided by Pheidias and his school. The study of anatomy was not yet degraded to coarse realism. It was not yet the aim of Greek sculptors to distort the human body so as to exhibit expanded muscles, over-strained sinews, and swelling veins, as expressions of pain, grief, distress, or contortions of the death-agony. Anatomy served Pheidias as a mould, into which he poured his beautiful conceptions—the spiritualised forms of gods and men. Katharsis was the principle of his school. The very heights of perfection were reached by Pheidias, Polykletus, and Alkemenes. Gods and goddesses were the subjects of their chisels. They were not only the high-priests of art—but inspired prophets, to whom divine beauty was revealed in all its brightness and splendour.
The existence of the Greek State was suddenly shaken to its very foundation. Internal dissensions weakened the safety of the citizens; sophistry destroyed philosophy, and mannerism grasped Greek art, dragged it down from its heights of idealised beauty and hurled it into the abyss of sensational realism. The best specimen of this school is the frieze from the temple of Apollo at Bassæ, near Phigalia in Arkadia. (Found 1812, now in the British Museum.) It represents Kentaurs fighting with Amazons. The old Indian Ghandarvas, the moist and heavy clouds that hinder the sun from breaking forth in all his glory, and are conquered by his fiery shafts, became in time monsters, half-men, half-horses, fighting against loveliness and civilisation. The Amazons in this instance represent fair Greece rushing into civil strife. Passion is predominant in action and expression. Amazons are dragged by the hair and by the legs from their horses; a Kentaur is seen biting a warrior in the shoulder. Bold naturalism and vulgar realism go hand-in-hand in these sculptures. How sensitive art is—how faithfully it reflects the social condition of a nation! and the feelings by which the artists were pervaded may be studied in this frieze. The nude is treated with exquisite truthfulness, but there is heaviness in the sudden, too violent movements. Action and expression lose the balance of the symmetrical. The women are common; their drapery floating and yet stiff, deranged for the sake of effect. The artists worked no more with love and security. The political party spirit troubled their imagination. The chisel trembled with rage or fear, with hatred or passion, in their hands; they saw prophetically the national downfall of their country, and with it science, art, poetry, and philosophy were to be rendered for thousands of years houseless and homeless.
Once more art revived under Skopas, Praxiteles, and Lysippus, but in a totally different shape. Greece had lost through her civil war the proper balance between her moral and intellectual forces. Simplicity and refinement of thought had vanished. In literature metaphors prevailed; in politics Aristides had to yield to the double-tongued Alkibiades; in tragedy Sophokles was superseded by Euripides; in sculpture the immortal Pheidias was followed by Praxiteles. The national spirit of the Greeks, inspired by common interests, swayed by the very highest aspirations in arts and sciences, suddenly collapsed into a narrow-minded, particularising egotism. Tribes cared only for tribes, parties for parties. The public buildings began to be neglected, whilst the private dwellings gained in ornamentation and comfort, what was denied to the grand national enterprises. The public places were no longer adorned with the statues of those who had gained the general approbation of the masses. The artist, doubtful whom to please, tried to please everyone, or to satisfy the individual fancy of a paying patron. Art was no more the chaste virgin sacrificing to beauty, but became a courtesan seeking general and special favour at all hazards. The divinities were no more the representations of a spiritual eîdolon, but a glowing sentiment of sensual love was poured over their frames; they were no longer ideal conceptions in marble, but beautiful flesh forms in stone or bronze. They lost all generalisation, they were more correct in the anatomical outlines, but a passionate sentiment of sensuality thrilled through every point. Kephisodotus (the elder), probably the father of Praxiteles, embodied the change in Greek thought in a beautiful group. Eirene (peace) fondles the child Pluton (riches)—a splendid allegorical representation of the political condition of Greece at this time. ‘Let us put an end to our quarrels; let us have peace, and enjoy life once more.’
Skopas, born on the island of Paros, expressed the modern flow of ideas in Greece with greater clearness. Violent scenes of deadly struggle filled the pediments of the temple of Athene Alea at Tegea. In front, the hunt of the Kalydonian boar by Herakles, at the back Achilles fighting with Telephos was represented. An under-current of thought, a kind of allegory, may be traced in this composition, for the boar to be hunted was the opposition. Art was no longer to exalt the mind unconditionally, but to fulfil another purpose—to irritate, to excite to hatred, and to arouse passion; thus placed, art must lose its civilising influence, and it did this step by step. Even the divinities sculptured by Skopas were not to inspire veneration, but to please by little allegorical additions; his Apollo (Smintheus) stood on a mouse; Apollo, the leader of the muses, the representative of vivifying light in art, science, and the universe, degraded to a beautiful ‘mouse-killer.’ Aphrodite, the mother of humanity, was sculptured sitting on a goat—the vilest emblem of passion in union with the purest eîdolon of tender love. Another Apollo was represented in the long waving robes of an elegant Grecian lady playing the lyre; this was still more objectionable. Though the drapery excites our admiration by its exquisite softness and finish, the statue appears to have been chiselled to show the artist’s skill in carving a heap of waving drapery. Whenever art condescends to such tricks it is on the high-road to degradation. Skopas composed a splendid group for a pediment, representing Achilles receiving from his mother the arms forged by Hephaistos. The principal figures are Thetis, the queen of the bright green waves, Poseidon, and Achilles; they are surrounded by a crowd of Nereids and Tritons, all in harmonious arrangement. Richer in grouping are some marble reliefs (now in the Glyptothek at Münich), representing the wedding of Poseidon and Amphitrite. The mother of the bride, Doris, is seated on a Hippokamp (sea-horse), holding two torches towards the couple; Tritons play on shells and lyres a merry wedding tune. Nereids surround them. One rides on a sea-bull, led by a mischievous-looking Eros, standing on its left fore-foot; another, mounted on a fantastic sea-monster, is accompanied by another, borne by a Triton; other Nereids follow, pointing towards the principal group, one sitting on a Hippokamp, with an Eros on its curled tail; a dragon carrying a Nereid is led with self-conscious pride by another Eros, whilst a Triton carries another sea-nymph on his winding body with placid and contented looks. The composition in general, and in all its details, is perfect. Without over-crowding the allotted space, it could not be better filled up. There is a striking freedom in the lines, and lively contrast of forms. We may consider this relief the prototype of all those fantastic compositions of the pure renaissance style, in which we see dragons and monsters, bulls and horses, entwined with plants and flowers, nymphs and gods, everything real and imaginary, beautiful and graceful, united into one great dissonant harmony. Skopas was the first (so far as we know) who sculptured Venus in the full beauty of her nude body. Pheidias would have considered such a treatment of the mother of mankind blasphemy. In a group of Eros, Himeros, and Pothos (Love, Longing, and Desire), we find a classification of a general feeling into three distinct subdivisions, executed with conscious discernment in order to produce a sensational effect. A raving Bacchante appears to rush away with dishevelled hair, in flowing robes; the head is thrown backwards in delirious delight; the marble lives and breathes maddening joy, but is vivified with sensual feelings, and not inspired with the elevating spirit of artistic simplicity and purity.
Of this period we may study another master-piece in the British Museum; the frieze of the tomb of Mausolos at Halikarnassus. The greater part is in London and the remainder at Genoa. The subject is a battle between Greeks and Amazons. The composition is nearly as good as that on the Parthenon. There is a continuous symmetrical stream of action and reaction, as in the dashing waves of a stormy sea. Skopas worked the eastern, Bryaxis the northern, Timeotheos the southern, and Leochares the western side. Many mistakes may be found in the details, but the whole is a master-piece of manly thought;—it may be said to have been the last manly product of the period.
Praxiteles altogether turned the scale; Aphrodite, Demeter, Persephone, Flora, Eros, Dionysius, and Apollo, are the divinities mostly sculptured by him. Everything is smooth, young, and effeminate. All harshness of line is avoided, all loftier ideas discarded. The flesh become stone is placed before us in charming and full roundness. Aphrodite was no longer draped—but with the concealing drapery the higher conception of the divinity fled. Venus, conscious of her charms, with a smile on her lips, and a coquettish movement of her hand, sinks to the level of an every-day woman. Venus had eaten of the tree of knowledge; with the consciousness of her particular womanly charms the ideal of divine universality was gone.
We possess of Praxiteles, an Eros in the Vatican, and his celebrated Apollo with the lizard (Saurokthonos) in the Louvre. Both these statues are more women than men. The lines are too soft; the bodies as though without muscles or bones, composed only of flesh and fat. It is true that the older artists also softened down the too marked lines of the sexes, and in blending them together created ideal forms of beauty; but now the mere surface of the woman’s body was used for both sexes, to affect the senses exclusively.
Three groups (the one probably for the pediment of a temple, the other two forming independent works of art) deserve special mention.
The group of Niobe and her dying children, attributed to Skopas or Praxiteles. Greece was fast sinking. Niobe-Greece sees her children struck down one after the other by the inexorable decree of the gods, who are bent on punishing the proud mother who only cared for the outward beauty of her children, and neglected their moral inner grandeur. Niobe, amidst a harmonious confusion of misery and endless woe, stands erect, and presses the youngest child to herself, turning her proud looks upwards, her eyes filled with tears of heroic resignation—for she knows the gods have willed her downfall, and their will is unalterable. This moment of agony, of mental rather than bodily suffering, makes the group a master-piece of antique beauty and grandeur.
This cannot be said of the sensational Laokoön, the joint work of Agesander, Athenodorus, and Polydoros (of which there is a copy in the Vatican), and the so-called ‘Farnese Bull,’ the joint work of Apollonios and Tauriskos (a copy of which exists in the museum at Naples). Bodily anguish is the dominating element in these two groups. If it were the province of art to depress the soul, and to fill us with pain and horror, nothing could surpass the technical skill with which these two are arranged.
In the first we have:—
1. In the father a stifled death scream.
2. In the younger son, to the right, the last convulsions of a dying boy.
3. In the elder son, to the left, an unbounded horror at witnessing the frightful death of father and brother.
There is no psychological necessity in this group to indemnify us for the pathological and anatomical truthfulness of so great an amount of horrible suffering. Art has never to serve as a hospital ward, and to force us to witness the contortions of a poor family dying poisoned by strychnine or arsenic. Not less objectionable is the revenge of a mother and her two sons on a defenceless woman. In this group we have:—
1. The horror-stricken, half-dying, half-imploring look of poor Dirkê.
2. The merciless glance of the jealous Antiope, wrapt in placid satisfaction to see herself revenged on her rival.
3. The ferocious anger of the two passionate sons; and, lastly,
4. The wild look of the furious bull, ready to dash the beautiful frame of a frail woman to pieces. Dramatic justice is here meted out by the artist in a most revolting way. A bull is called in to help to punish; it is the vulgarity of the cruel revenge that degrades the technically masterly work of art. The free grouping of marble statues is one of the most difficult tasks, and was never attempted during the classic period of ancient art. A mixture of men and animals is even more to be avoided.
As soon as the gods of Egypt changed their architectural and monumental position, they lost their sway over the superstitious masses; as soon as the Greeks lost that balance of morality, which, in the form of the beautiful, regulated their life, science, and art, they lost at the same time their productive power. Form and idea as in Asia came into conflict; the formal had attained the extreme of perfection, and the new ideas had not yet ripened.
Art was either to touch the feelings or to speak to reason—it was to be based on a mere imitation of nature, or to be the expression of some thought in some form. This ‘either,’—‘or,’—or this ‘neither,’—‘nor,’ which divided art-critics during this period, made an end of art altogether. The Asiatics rent the universe asunder with conflicting abstractions based on the phenomena of nature; the Greeks lost their power, when they once recognised that there was something higher than the mere form. A new sphere was felt to open new spiritual beauties—but this sphere was to be attained through totally different means. The formal was however so highly developed by the Greeks that we shall see the new spirit, after more than a thousand years, become incarnate in those forms.
We see then clearly that art, the product of the creative force of men, requires a certain moral and intellectual condition, under which alone it can actively live. Change the moral temperature through the superstitions of a terrified populace, the aspect of nature, the despotic organisation of government, or the rule of a wild, uneducated mob, and the artistic force will also change or die out altogether. The artist acts only to a certain degree on the public; the public reacts with a greater combined vis inertiæ on the artist, who is merely the reflection of certain ideas floating in the intellectual atmosphere around him. Is a man who sees nothing but emaciated, beggarly, or sanctimonious faces, thin limbs, hungry looks, dwellings bare of all domestic comfort, decayed brick-houses and crumbling walls, to paint convivial scenes of happiness and joy? Or let him change this atmosphere and live in a sphere of so-called respectability; having always the same bland smile before him, the same trimmed whiskers, the same business-like self-contentment, the same stiff collars and cuffs; hearing the same stereotyped, insignificant phrases about the weather or the funds, the price of coals or meat—will he, influenced by such an atmosphere, not draw or paint only caricatures, and never grand and heart-stirring historical paintings, recording in glowing colours scenes full of life, excitement, passion, and dramatic action? In such surroundings it is necessary for an artist to create for himself a world of his own—an intellectual world—by turning to the glorious records of the past, and devoting every spare hour to the study of the ancients and the reading of history. His imagination, deadened by reality, must be fed and nourished by the poets, poetry, works of art, and historical facts of the past. Our meagreness and poverty in artistic productions take their origin in our unpardonable neglect of the study of history; through this neglect we have deprived art altogether of its firmest basis.
The very moment that the Greek artists lost their historical and poetical ground, they took to and excelled in painting barbers’ and shoemakers’ shops; oyster shells, vases, little combinations of chairs and musical instruments, and small things, with great accuracy. In fact the same causes produced the same pictorial effects; the mind of the Greek nation had dwindled, and their works of art embraced decorations of household furniture and pottery. In these ornamentations the reminiscences of a by-gone age may be traced; they are still symmetrical to the highest degree, plants are still treated with great conventional freedom, but the Greeks only worked as skilful workmen—artists they produced no more.
The first question that here suggests itself is, who were the Etruskans? Their name Tuskan, from Tuisko, points at once to an Aryan branch of Teutonic race. But ethnologists differ. Some say they were Phœnicians, others assert they were Egyptians; some that they were pure Teutons, and others that they were pure Kelts. Taking their old pottery into consideration, as given in Lord Hamilton’s admirable plates, or in the collection of the Museum at Clusium (Chiusi), we are induced to pronounce the aborigines of Etruria to have been Turanians, conquered by immigrant Aryans. This mixture of Aryans and Mongols under the influence of a totally different aspect of nature, on a different soil, under different social and religious conditions, produced a type quite different from the Greek—a kind of transition link between the Pelasgians and the Romans.
Two distinct immigrations of Aryans into Etruria are recorded. The first about 1650 B.C., when Pelasgians and Thyrrenians settled amongst the aborigines; and the second, 400 years before Herodotus, about the times of Thales and Lykurgus. Of the first immigration we have scarcely any relics; the second time the immigrants succeeded in forming an organised social state; they brought with them Greek mythological notions, and a kind of Greek writing. Their language and writing died out after Augustus, and disappeared altogether before Julian, fourth century A.D. Nature forced them to industry and enterprise. The Etruskans had to cultivate their fields by individual exertion; in spring they had to ward off the devastating waters of overflowing rivers, and in summer they had to provide water for their parched valleys. They consequently became masters in constructing aqueducts and irrigating the land, at an early period.
Their mythology was composed of Assyrian, Persian, and Egyptian notions, strongly tinged with gloomy superstitions. Petrifactions of the most astonishing forms abound in the plains where they settled. Near Cortona the bones of a whale have been found. The Arno valley resembles a vast elephant burial-place; and the bones of the mastodon, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus, are scattered broadcast all over old Etruria, and are still used to fence in the fields. Besides the bones of these huge monsters, those of hyænas, panthers, bears, and wolves are found in such abundance, that the peasants to this very day believe they grew like mushrooms over night, having been sown by invisible spirits to give the poor the trouble of picking them up. The aspect of nature and the remains of an antediluvian world gave the Etruskan priesthood an irresistible sway over the minds of the people. Whilst in Greece, under the influence of a happy aspect of nature, the Indian, Assyrian, and Egyptian embodiments of the forces of nature lost their fearful forms; in Etruria they gained even more gloomy and melancholy figures in the presence of everlasting thunder and lightning, and volcanic disturbances.
The Etruskans had two sets of gods.
a. The veiled gods, with ‘Asar’ at their head, representing the cosmognical forces of nature; especially fire, water, earth, and ether, like the divinities of India and Egypt.
b. Twelve lower divinities presiding over the order of existing and visible things. Their gods have a great resemblance to those of the Scandinavians, uniting in one distinct chain the Aryans on the Ganges, those on the Nile, and those round the Delphic oracle, with the Hyperboreans of the farthest north. They all believed in an ‘inferno,’ only with the Greeks this was an Elysium, a land of shadows, a land of happiness. The divinities of the Etruskans were phantoms of horror. The whole of their creed was devoid of a comforting union between gods and men. This despairing faith impressed the people with a ferocious character. Their art under such impressions never could reach the beautiful. A tribe of whom it has been said that their priests attacked the Romans with hissing serpents and burning torches—a tribe that crouched in fear before invisible gods, and hated every other tribe—could never take an interest in the gentler emotions produced by poetry or art. They remembered the Greek expedition against Thebes, and adorned their burial urns with scenes from the battle at Marathon; they commemorated the heroic deed of a ploughman, who, in the midst of the battle, took up his plough and drove the Persians before him like a flock of frightened sheep, whilst the Greeks remembered the deed in mentioning Echetlos in connection with Marathon, but possessed no record of the fact on any of their monuments. The Etruscans, however, delighted in such scenes. At their funerals they had no dances, but sanguinary fights.
No less than twelve different thunderbolts were known to them. They believed in a thunderbolt of prophecy, one of authority, one of law, one of wish, one of admonition, one of approval, one of help, one of prosperity, one of falsehood, one of plague, one of threats, and one of murder. Every transaction in life, with the best or the worst of mankind, might have been accompanied by an approving or disapproving thunder-clap. They firmly believed the thunderbolts used by the Supreme Deity were all manufactured in the fiery interior of Mount Ætna. They possessed no ritual of the dead like the Egyptians, but a thunderbolt ritual. Every day of the year that brought thunder had its special signification. All the veiled gods, and nine of the secondary gods, had the power of thundering.
Their conception of angry, jealous, persecuting, thundering, and lightning divinities has much in common with the Jewish and Phœnician ideals of the Supreme Deity. This peculiarity the Northerns shared in their conception of Thor. The Etruskan belief, that aërolites were thunderbolts sent by the angels against the Titans, has a great analogy with the Persian legends assuming these to have been hurled by the Fervers against the Devas.
Their superior divinities are, like the kings or priests of Persia, Assyria, and Babylon, provided with wings. Jupiter, Diana, Minerva (a kind of female Mercury with the Etruskans, who had wings not only on her shoulders, but also on her feet) and Venus were all winged; others, like Proserpina (Persephone), Amor (Eros), and the Furies, had wings on their heads. White and black winged genii (angels and demons) are plentiful in the subterranean tombs of the old Etruskan town, Tarquinium. According to Dempster, their cars even are often provided with wings. What was a metaphor with the Greeks was turned by the Etruskans into matter-of-fact. Euripides in his ‘Orestes’ speaks of the winged car of Phœbus, and on some Eleusian coins Ceres is seen sitting in a winged car, drawn by two serpents.
From a gloomy contemplation of supernatural matters the Etruskans turned their minds to extremely worldly and practical purposes. They wished to secure their towns and to protect them against real and imaginary monsters, and they constructed excellent walls and most comfortable houses. The ‘cavœdium’ (‘cavum œdium’), with the impluvium and compluvium (the one for collecting and the other for preserving water), was altogether an Etruskan invention, and was called by the Romans who adopted it, Tuscanicum. They constructed temples differing only in some details from those of the Greeks. The cella was generally square; sometimes they had more than one cella; one in the Postica and one in the Antica (the rear and front of the temple). The portico was often filled with columns. The architectural style was a rough and primitive Doric. They never attained the majestic simplicity which distinguished this order in Greece. The columns had a base, were more slender (about fourteen moduli), stood more apart, and supported a wooden roof with clumsily-protruding beams, an unwieldy cornice, and a high pediment.
Cinerary chests they had in abundance with divinities on them, worked in reliefs of a decidedly Egyptian type. They used brazen tablets representing Osiris and Isis. Little clay figures were put into the graves to protect the dead. Amongst these has been found a winged Harpokrates or Horus, with the fore-finger of one hand on his lips, a lotus on his head, and a cornucopia in his other hand.
Their ancient pottery is more in the Egyptian than the Greek style. Their jars represent sphinxes and women; their drinking cups are in the form of human legs, with human faces replacing the knee; some are in the form of Mercury with a pointed, attached beard, like those to be seen in Egyptian divinities. Some of the patterns of their ornamentation, in general as well as in detail, are perfectly Mexican. On one of their lamps we have a winged Kentaur holding a rabbit, whilst four rabbits running after one another, form the spirited ornamentation of the border, intermixed with triangles, rosettes, or solar circles.
With their religious notions, it is not surprising that the Etruskans should have devoted the greatest care to their tombs and burial-places.
These tombs were:—
1. Subterranean; hewn into the tufa on plains. Steps led underground, where a vestibulum, consisting of several chambers, sometimes provided with columns, led into the vault. The ceiling of this was either horizontal or pointed, in imitation of a wooden roof. Many such tombs are found at Volci, Clusium, and Volaterra.
2. A second species of their subterranean tombs consisted of those provided with tumuli above-ground; simple graves as found in Scandinavia and the north of the Western hemisphere, the corpses lying on simple stone beds.
3. Burial chambers (cucumella) with artificial hills above them, and provided with a tower-like construction, or with conical columns. They are found near Volci, Tarquinii, and Viterbo.
4. Chambers, vertically hewn into the rocks, with a simple or decorated entrance near Tuskania.
5. Rock-hewn chambers with façades screening the entrance, as at Aria, or with Doric fronts as at Orchia. Asia furnished patterns for the decoration and construction of these tombs. The reliefs are full of lively scenes, reminding us of Assyrian and Babylonian sculptures. The figures are heavy, the legs short and thick; the upper part of the statues is placed ‘en face,’ whilst the legs and feet are in profile. The monstrous element predominates. Harpies, chimeras, winged lions, sphinxes, and griffins abound; but they are void of any symmetrical arrangement, and are dry, stiff, and as revolting as possible in their coarse outlines.
With regard to the construction of their walls it is remarkable that they improved very early on the Kyklopean mode, and constructed the very best regular freestone walls. They had arched gates, built with wedge-shaped stones, which produced by their span a firmly-vaulted construction. The Etruskans thus acquired a lasting merit in the history of art by the new epoch which they inaugurated with the introduction of this decidedly progressive element in the technical construction of architectural works. As potters and metal-workers they distinguished themselves more than either as architects or sculptors. As the Chinese are considered as the potters par excellence of the farthest East, the Etruskans may be called the potters of the West. In burning, painting, and fashioning clay they appear to have acquired a speciality, so that their trade in vases extended all over the then known world, and even the Greeks furnished their houses with Etruskan pottery in preference to their own. The gloomy mythology of the Etruskans was far better suited to potters, manufacturing black vases with red figures, or red vases with black figures, or for casting dark bronze figures, than to sculptors handling white marble. They also distinguished themselves in chiselling and founding metal. Innumerable chests, candelabra, metal frames for looking-glasses, and other utensils show their cleverness in working gold, silver, and bronze. Some ivory carvings, described in a report of the Archæological Society at Rome, 1862, are of great interest. They were found at Præneste (Palestrina), where also silver vessels in the purest Egyptian style, and an ivory tablet with Assyrian patterns, were excavated. More important even than these discoveries are four ivory tablets found at Corneto, showing traces of gilding and painting. The carvings represent scenes of every-day life, mixed with mystic figures. We see on the tablets a lady and gentleman sitting at dinner, served by a little boy; a huntsman chasing game; a kind of sea-divinity holding in each hand a fish; and a man in a biga driving winged horses. These figures might have formed representations concerning the zodiac, namely: the Twins, Sagittarius, Pisces, and the Sun (Phœbus or Horus). The receding forehead of the driver and his manner of holding the whip are types which we constantly meet in Egyptian sculptures and reliefs.
About 660 B.C. Eucheir, Diopos, Eugrammos and Demeratos were driven from Korinthum into Etruria, and from that date we note a decided improvement in the artistic productions. The Etruskans began to excel in terra-cotta and bronze works. Their vases, amphoræ, statuettes, cinerary and mystic chests, prove this. Their mystic chests (cistæ mysticæ, corresponding to the quippa-chests of the Mexicans) were made of embossed bronze. The lids were ornamented with mysterious animals, and the legs formed of the claws or paws of mythical brutes. Foliage and Greek frets in good arrangement were also used. Their candelabra are of a superior design. Other works of art, such as ornamented backs and handles for mystic mirrors, in gold, silver, or bronze, are of excellent technical execution.
There was, however, too much of the aborigine Turanian element left in the Etruskans. The noble and elevating rhythmus of Greek idealisation is everywhere wanting. Cooking utensils, small pieces of furniture, tables, chairs, and couches, aqueducts and viaducts, and even cloacas, were made and constructed to perfection, but as soon as they attempted the production of human forms, or of higher works in architecture, they did not succeed. The heads of their figures are either too small or too large. The legs are short; the drapery in stiff lines hangs down with rope-like regularity. Animals are much better executed; but the human form, in consequence of a scrupulous and constrained conception, and an exaggerated attention to detail, had a cold, lifeless appearance, void of all spiritual animation. Their imagination was one-sidedly directed by nature and religion to take a gloomy and distorted view of creation, and their products bear this spiritual stamp. In everything they touched we recognise the Egyptian mythology with its stifling breath, and the influence of the volcanic ground on which the Aryans were thrown, amongst a number of superstitious Turanians. The rumbling, fire-spitting Vesuvius and Ætna worked on the brains of the new immigrants. The sudden, devastating bursts of fire and water filled their minds with horror; they were forced to ponder over the instability of human things. The beauty of the Italian sky, the exuberant luxury of the vegetation, heightened in them a feeling of dumb despair. The contrast between life and death was too striking, and filled the souls of the artists with awe and dread, reflected in their artistic compositions.
Their representations were often divided into two distinct compartments. On one side were scenes from the lower regions. Mantus, Mania, and furies pursuing the deceased with hammers. Mantus of the Etruskans, probably a descendant of Radamanthus, was an infernal divinity. Mania (whose name we have preserved in the words mania and maniac) was the mother of the Lares and persecuted the dead. Our readers must begin to see whence many of the horrifying scenes of the middle ages took their origin. On the other side were scenes from life in the upper regions—joyous, triumphal processions and festivities. Drunkenness and licentiousness are always twin-sisters of superstition and bigotry. These arrangements recall the same custom of dividing subjects in antithetical groups observed in Assyria, where we find on the slabs hunts in the upper compartments, and joyous festivities in the row below. The subjects chosen with the Assyrians were undoubtedly much healthier. Hard work first, and joy and happiness afterwards. The Etruskans kept to the old Egyptian customs, reminding man continually of the short duration of his life. The mummy placed in Egyptian banqueting halls, with the inscription: ‘Eat and drink; such a one wilt thou be,’ had a pernicious ethical effect; instead of sobering man down, it drove him to reckless and despairing gaiety and extravagance. The Etruskans, though filling their imaginations with horrors, could never master art in life. They had the savage fondness for adorning their persons with innumerable trinkets. The desire to shine conspicuously for the short and uncertain time of their existence absorbed their artistic endeavours, and this fashion prevails amongst the peasants in Italy at the present day. The patterns are now filigree Moresque; in ancient times they were in a clumsy Greek style. To wear a ring was considered essential to man’s and woman’s existence.
This led them very early to cultivate glyptics, or the art of stone-cutting. The subjects were partly mythological, partly heroic; the artists delighted in strong muscles, attitudinizing groups, and theatrical postures.
In the paintings and mosaics, with which they adorned their burial chambers, we may distinguish, in reference to their treatment:
a. An Archaic style;
b. An Etruskan style.
A. In the Archaic Style they exhibit a thorough acquaintance with Greek mythology and classical poetry. Orpheus, Homer, Hesiod and Pindar furnish the scenes, but the dead play the most conspicuous part. We have, in another world, festivities in vine bowers and blooming gardens; processions, gymnastic games and races amongst the departed. The grouping is spirited so far as variety is concerned, but the execution is rough, and bare of all higher artistic feeling.
B. In the Etruskan Style, stern simplicity and roughness yield to a freer treatment of the human form. The thick-set, short figures are replaced by better drawn and lighter forms; the subjects are exclusively taken from Etruskan mythology. White and black spirits (angels and devils), armed with big hammers, are represented as fighting for the souls of the departed. In one of the graves (see Dempster and Agincourt) we have a soul hanged, and tormented with iron instruments, roasting over a brisk fire. In these products, in spite of the intervention of the Roman period of history, we find the direct connecting link between the old Assyrian, Egyptian, Etruskan, and early Christian arts.
The Etruskans indulged in fantastic conceptions, and rejoiced in forced and cruel scenes, and in bizarre compositions. Art with them was exclusively technical. We may arrange their works into the following five groups:—
1. The original Tuscanica (as Strabo has it) or Etruskan works. Heavy in form and details; dresses very stiff; figures without beards. Of this group we have many bronze figures, very few sculptures in stone, some gems, and some very old wall-paintings.
2. The Oriental group. Imitations of Egyptian, Assyrian, and Babylonian patterns. Tapestry, for floor and wall-decorations, was much used. The imitations were good, but without any effort at originality. Remains plentiful.
3. Caricatures distinguished by grotesque quaintness. This style predominates at periods, when nations look upon art as superfluous; not as one of the most important factors of civilization. Taste degenerates, and the higher aspirations of art are crippled by distorted products. The quaint is preferred to the beautiful, and the dynamic force of the artistic element, driven into this direction, loses itself in a broad grin at everything sacred and elevated in State, religion, and science, fostering a deplorable spirit of vulgar egotism, which looks down upon the sublime exertions of artists, as the mere vagaries of simpletons or madmen.
4. Works in the best Greek style, but only in bronze, as frames and handles of mirrors. Whenever the higher spirit of art is neglected, the power of the artist is directed to small matters; he serves trade and nothing but trade. We have in these ‘Articles of Etruria’ the prototypes of our ‘Articles de Paris.’
5. Mechanical products, such as helmets, weapons, swords, shields, hatchets, clubs, wall-breakers, cooking utensils, pots, pans, and saucers, were of exquisite workmanship, but without any attempt at artistic forms. The utilitarian incubus is as bad as the hierarchical canon; both expel all higher aspirations from the realm of art.
The Etruskans thought, with many of us, that if the house were only built of dry bricks, the carpet thick, the furniture solid and heavy, and the knife sharp, it was unnecessary to care for anything else. Whilst such ideas exist, art, in a higher sense, will remain as little possible, as it was with the Etruskans.
The Greeks, from a poetical, artistic, and esthetical, and the Romans, from a social, legal, and political point of view, are still our masters. Historical art-critics, and a certain class of writers, who would wish to see the whole universe one great court of justice with an infinite variety of crimes, subdivided into felony, misdemeanour, petty larceny, &c., will never agree as to the place that should be assigned to the Romans in the world’s history. We are bold enough to assert that the whole of the criminal and sanguinary history of Rome, with her products in literature and art, might be wiped out, and yet philosophically, poetically, and artistically, not the slightest gap in the progressive development of humanity would be found. Socially and legally, we should be sorry to miss a state, which had a mission of its own, which, if well understood, may teach us the causes why the gentler feelings of morality were oppressed, imagination defiled, and every higher artistic aspiration deadened in Rome.
From beginning to end, Roma, read backwards Amor, was an ambiguous ‘state-abstraction,’ which absorbed the individual. The State with the Greeks was a concrete association of freemen. With the Romans, it was the abstract principle of an imaginary union of heterogeneous citizens. The Greeks fostered science and art, poetry and philosophy. The Romans despised science, mocked art, scorned poetry, and never condescended to trouble themselves about philosophy. The Greeks colonised and civilised their colonies, which became the free daughters of a free mother-country, attached to it by the ties of a common worship of beauty and intellectual enjoyment. The Romans conquered, and the conquered provinces were to furnish soldiers or labourers, and were tied by means of despotism to the wheels of the proud state-carriage. The Greeks humanised; the Romans demoralised and organised. The Greeks played at soldiers in a spirit of glorious patriotism. The Romans were soldiers for the sake of conquest, plunder, and vain glory. Spirited youthfulness was the Greek element. Stern and calculating manliness the essence of the Roman. The Greek was free in life, in art, in the worship of his gods, in poetry and philosophy. The Roman was cowed down in religion, politics and life, by the inexorable despotic force of legal phantoms, which turned men into mere machines. The despotism of the East was the despotism of some invisible god, or some visible ruler; and it often overlooked the individual in its almighty position. The democracy of Greece gave fair play to individual talent and genius in art and science; but the Roman self-constituted aristocracy, or rather triple theocracy, invented the inexorable and meddlesome monster authority, to which everything was to be sacrificed. Under the tragi-comical sobriquet, Salus reipublicæ suprema lex (in free translation, ‘whatever we in authority find good, is good’), they committed the blackest crimes, which no historian could venture to commit to paper in their whole truthfulness.
This triple theocracy presented itself in the shape of seven mythical kings; in the form of a nominal republic, which was in reality a military and theocratic aristocracy; and lastly in the theocracy of the Cæsars, which in course of time was changed into a papal theocracy.
The Romans had to reverence and submit to theocracy under the form of a triple authority—the political authority; the paternal authority; and the legal authority. Wherever the Roman turned to, in that vast empire, which was bounded in the west by the Atlantic, in the north by the Rhine and the Danube, in the east by the Euphrates, and in the south by the deserts of Arabia and Africa, he met his triple crown of authority. He was confronted by some consul or proconsul, some law, some edict, some whim or caprice of an invisible something, that always had a visible lictor at its command with a bundle of sticks, ready for flogging, or, in urgent cases, with a well-sharpened axe to sever the head from the trunk. He had to obey a power, with innumerable soldiers, ready to punish whole provinces if they resisted that ever present, ever vigilant, and ever-active State abstraction. Whilst in Greece, the individual man was developed with all his bodily and intellectual faculties in science and art, Rome disturbed and hindered this individual development, concentrating the static and dynamic forces of her citizens on brutal military enterprises.
Rome, through its theocratical spirit, oppressed the conquered by the conqueror, the poor by the rich, the ‘nihil habentes’ by the ‘possedentes,’ the client by the patron, the plebeian by the patrician, humanity by priests and gods, and the individual by the State. The Roman as individual was never a self-acting, self-conscious, and free-thinking entity, but a mere cipher after the State unit; a wheel in a large and complicated machine; a drop of water in an ocean; an atom in the universe. The Greek recognised in the State only an agglomeration of men like himself; this sum total of citizens had to serve him; the State was to him a means, not an aim. The Greek demanded of the State that it should protect him in the free and perfect use of his bodily and intellectual faculties. He was, if he liked, poet, magistrate, athlete, judge, dancer, philosopher, fighter, priest, wrestler, tragedian, soldier, or singer; all for his own sake, without ever becoming an over-regulated or over-regulating pedant. He worshipped his gods without restraining dogmas; he never allowed his individuality to be absorbed by some incomprehensible, shapeless, universal theocracy; his whole scientific and artistic national career was one glorious struggle against such an accomplishment. All this was the very reverse with the Romans. That Rome had no art or science of her own, was the effect of those causes which we have here tried to sketch in a general way.
The Romans, like the Greeks, were a mixture of Aryans and Turanians, with this difference, that with the Greeks the Aryan element predominated, whilst with the Romans the Turanian, and even the black elements formed a considerable portion of the national State body. The Greek element, which, at the time of the earliest formation of the Roman State, was very powerful, soon became absorbed in the Gallic, Iberian, African, Egyptian, and Syrian elements. The enervating south was not counterbalanced by the energetic north, but, on the contrary, the south predominated; and as in the south-east theocratic despotism flourished, the same principle was adopted by the Romans, and worked into a perfect system.
That the language of the Romans had a common origin with that of the Greeks, Persians, and Indians is evident from the consideration even of a few words. The verbs sum (I am), do (I give), and the words pater, mater, frater, are Sanskrit. The most important pastoral and agricultural expressions are Sanskrit, showing that a certain degree of civilisation must have been brought with them by the settlers, after their separation from their Trans-Himâlâyan brethren, when they peopled the shores of the Mediterranean, and occupied that small coast-land which was probably once connected with the African continent through Sicily.
Pecus, sus, taurus, and canis are Sanskrit words. The Sanskrit agras (meadow) is the Latin ager (Germ. acker, acre). The Sanskrit kurnu (Germ. korn, corn, grain) is the Latin granum. The settlers were undoubtedly acquainted with even higher elements of a steady and civilised life. The Sanskrit word aritram (ship and oar), survived as aratrum the plough, cutting through the ground like the aritram through the waves. The Sanskrit damas, δόμος {domos} is the Latin domus; naus is navis; akshas is axis (Germ. achse) a coach or cart; and we have in the Sanskrit vastra, the Latin vestis (vestment), not only a proof of the connection between the Aryans of the Ganges, and those on the shores of the Tiber, but a living testimony that the former had left off tattooing their bodies and used textile fabrics. The Romans were first called Ramnes. Three races may be said to have furnished the first settlers on the Seven Hills, the Ramnes, Titians, and Lukeres. From this threefold confederation we have the word tribuere, tribus (tribe). Later Pelasgians, Sabines, Albans, Etruskans, and Hellenes joined the first settlers, and formed by degrees the Roman State.
As the Britons at one time earnestly believed that they were the direct descendants of Brutus, the son of Æneas, we need not wonder that the Romans should have indulged in the flattering faith that they were the direct descendants of Æneas himself. They had scarcely attained a settled state, when they began to work out their legends and myths, concerning the divine foundation of their town, which had taken place under seven kings.
1. Romulus, a god-man, for he and his brother, Remus, were incarnations of the war-god Mars and miraculously born of a virgin. Their uncle Amulius, fearing that they might deprive him of his throne, had them exposed in the swollen Tiber in a cradle. The river subsided, and the cradle was caught by a sacred fig-tree at the foot of the Palatine hill, and a she-wolf had pity on the boys, and suckled them. The founders of Rome thus mythically imbibed, with their foster-mother’s milk, that savage brutality and thirst for blood which distinguished the citizens of the Holy City for thousands of years. Romulus and Remus were found by shepherds, and brought up by them. Subsequently a town was founded by the twins, and Romulus then killed his brother and ruled alone. He divided the people into curiæ.
2. Numa Pompilius enlarged the town and introduced a settled form of worship, not out of piety, but in order to subject the citizens to the will of the State.
3. Tullus Hostilius improved upon the theocratical institutions of Numa, and gave Rome a military organisation, as the secret tool with which her will was to be enforced throughout a vast part of the globe.
4. Ancus Martius commanded the citizens to have taste and to beautify the town, or rather had this done, superintending the improvements himself. He is stated to have been a grandson of Numa.
5. Tarquinius Priscus, of a Korinthian family, showed in his very infancy that he was destined by supernatural influences to become a benefactor of the chosen people, the Romans. When a tender boy sleeping in his cradle, his head was surrounded by a brilliant halo of flames. He conquered many Latin and Sabine towns, and showed himself worthy of his exalted position. He introduced the golden diadem, the ivory throne, the sceptre adorned with an eagle, and the purple toga, as distinctive marks of the supreme authority.
6. Servius Tullius was also of supernatural origin. He was the son of a female slave, and the protecting divinity of the royal castle. He divided the people into five classes or castes; instituted tribunes, and founded the orders of senators, knights, and commons.
7. Tarquinius Superbus, like the Chinese tyrant Ly-wang, who succeeded the five good emperors, defiled the imperial dignity, outraged all laws, divine and human, and was rebelled against by the patricians, who abolished the regal authority. The innocent Lucretia is said to have been the direct cause of the expulsion of the tyrant, and the establishment of the republic.
In the myths concerning these seven kings we have abundant elements for the most beautiful songs, epic poems, and artistic subjects full of dramatic power and vitality. The remarkable fact with the Romans was, that they preserved these myths as historical truths, recorded them in dull prose, affixing to them dates, each of which was a flagrant falsehood, and used them in good earnest as the basis of their national existence.
The royal period ended with the seven kings. Rome had prepared in perfect silence her murderous weapons, and, suddenly dashing forward a well-trained prize-fighter, inaugurated the military theocracy. The history of this second period, with its appalling monotony, may be condensed into one terrible word—WAR.
From 342–340 B.C. war with the Samnites. From 340–337 B.C. war with the Latins. From 325–290 B.C. the second and third Latin war. From 288–264 B.C. war with Carthage and Syrakuse. From 264–241 B.C. the first Punic war. Peace was made, and to fill up the leisure hours, there was a Gallic war. From 218–201 B.C. the second Punic war. Peace was again concluded, and during the interval (183 B.C.) Greece and the Makedonian empire were subjugated. From 149–146 B.C. the third Punic war. The world was conquered, and the boundaries of the vast empire extended in all directions; but the warlike spirit of the Romans had not learnt to rest and to enjoy these conquests in peace; industry, arts, and sciences, had no charm for these wild and indomitable conquerors, and wanting a foreign enemy, they quarrelled amongst themselves. The internal dissensions began. There were the Numantian troubles, the tumults of the Gracchi, and the feud between Marius and Sulla. A foreign war happily put an end to these internal struggles. From 112–106 B.C. war with Jugurtha. From 88–80 B.C. war with Mithridates. From 72–71 B.C. the slaves rebelled and called for bread and for revenge. This was the first civil war—individual egotism conspired against the supreme power, faction fought against faction; a dissolution of all law and order threatened the State. From 54–51 B.C. the Gallic war amused the Roman spectators and war-comedians. From 49–48 B.C. there was a second civil war; from 43–30 B.C. a third; and the republic was at last absorbed by a Cæsarian theocracy.
That arts and sciences did not flourish in a state of continual warfare is quite natural. The houses were mean and low, here and there adorned with clumsy Etruskan pillars; the temples had some Greek forms; sculpture was not cultivated, and Greeks had to chisel or to carve the scanty embellishments. On the other hand, high roads of great excellence, and bold bridges with magnificent arches, were constructed, for everywhere the spirit of practical realism was served; in every stone, every column, every pillar, every statue, the spirit of theocratic despotism predominated. The charming gods of the Greeks were turned into haughty military commanders, not inviting love through beauty, but demanding blind obedience with a thundering ‘sic volo, sic jubeo’ (‘as I will it, so I command it’).
The period of imperial theocracy showed Rome in her pomp and splendour, covering inner hollowness and gradual decay with marble slabs. Palaces and temples, basilicæ and arcades, triumphal arches and amphitheatres, arenas and baths (of the latter Rome alone had about 768), naumachiæ and circuses, theatres and arenas, hippodromes and magnificent tombs abounded; but in all these architectural marvels, the monumental spirit of pride, self-glorification, vain ostentation, and theatrical display, is to be traced; the love of beauty, of artistic moderation, and simplicity being everywhere conspicuous by its absence. Roman art and decoration are to be carefully studied, that we may learn ‘how not to do it,’ if we earnestly intend to produce works of art, and not works of ornamentation, forming a very Paradise for ‘parvenus’ with bad taste.
We have asserted that the Romans never produced anything original in art and science. Their religion, their literature, and their products of art, bear this assertion out to the very letter.
The word ‘religion’ is of Roman origin. The Teutons have faith or trust in God. The Roman word meant the tying down of everyone to certain formulas or dogmas. They borrowed their dogmas and superstitions, their gods and ceremonies, from all parts of the world; especially from the Greeks and Etruskans, and later from the Egyptians. Everything served their purpose so soon as it helped to overawe the masses. They had augurs, auspices, and sibylline oracles. From the entrails of beasts and human beings they predicted the future. Flashes of lightning, the rolling thunder, the flight of birds, meetings with hares, goats, dogs, or cats, announced the will of the gods. The conceptions of the Eastern gods were disfigured, and they were made more jealous, threatening, merciless, revengeful, and inexorable. Jupiter the thunderer (Jupiter tonans) did not govern by any moral law, but by mere force; he spoke in flashes of lightning and in thunder, in terrifying earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Amongst the 30,000 deities with which the Roman triple theocracy peopled the visible and invisible world, there was not ONE divinity of kindness, mercy, and comfort.
They had a divinity of peace, to urge them on to war; they had divinities of plague, hunger, fever, mildew, and death. In their practical spirit they went even so far as to have a ‘Dea Cloacina.’
What subjects to paint or sculpture!
A pale-yellow woman with dishevelled hair, protruding ghastly eyes, wasted lips, fleshless and emaciated limbs, may represent the goddess of hunger; another woman deliberately and slowly tearing the limbs of helpless creatures from their bodies with diabolical delight, may be a goddess of plague; another, placidly playing with human skulls in a field surrounded by dying men, women, and children, may be the goddess of death.
In the illustration of a Dante or a Milton, a knowledge of the Roman mythology may prove full of suggestive power.
The Greeks had a principle in their anthropomorphic worship; the Romans had no aim. Roman high-priests were spiritual butchers, who tried to appease the angry gods with the smoke of burning bullocks, to nourish them with fat, with which they literally besmeared the statues, and to quench their thirst with blood which they poured over the altars. When already educated enough to consider all these divinities with a cold and sceptic indifference; when the augurs could no longer meet without laughing and sneering at each other and their sacred office, then the Roman mind became eager for a more concrete god than these stone figures, and they found a corresponding living divinity in the person of their Emperors. Earth certainly could offer nothing more divine in the form of visible majesty, recognised and obeyed, as soon as clothed in the imperial purple and crowned with the imperial diadem, than the irresponsible ‘god-man,’ who sat on the throne of the Cæsars. The creative force of the Universe, and the phenomena of nature, were moulded in visible forms; and now for the first time a political abstraction had become incarnate in the Emperor pro tem. The hordes of courtiers, courtezans, flatterers, poets, philosophers, historians, juris consults, orators, prætors, and consuls, supported by the thoughtless mass of the people, rendered divine honours to a mortal, in whom, however, the immortal principle of theocratic authority was concentrated. Not even the Egyptians, crouching in grateful admiration before the crocodiles of the Nile, outraged humanity to such a degree as these polite Romans, rendering divine honour to an Emperor, like Aurelius Commodus, who fought 735 times as a common gladiator in the arena before his enervated people. The Roman religion was, in fact, a cosmopolitan mixture of all the atrocious superstitions of the world.
The Romans also instituted public games in imitation of the Greeks, on the degrading ‘panis et circenses’ principle. In Greece, Apollo with his nine muses presided over the public games. The Romans had specially-trained gladiators, wrestlers, dancers, and prize-fighters. The competitors at the Greek games were free and independent citizens; with the Romans they were either criminals, runaway slaves, or men condemned to death. Bears, lions, tigers, and elephants were starved, and set against one another, to delight the spectators with their savage brutality. Soon an improvement was effected, and men were arrayed against men with deadly weapons, to amuse men and women, boys and girls, with their skill in murdering; and at last, as a further progressive development in taste, men were pitted against wild beasts. In the Greek tragedy, the ideal sufferings of humanity, struggling in an unequal combat with omnipotent and inexorable fate, were prominently set forth to purify men from their passions by showing the consequences of even unconscious guilt. The Greek tragedy was the national moral conscience brought into the most perfect poetical form. The Romans instituted a cruel reality of bodily suffering; real blood streaming from real limbs; the real rattle in the throat, which signals death; and the real last gasp of an expiring man, afforded them amusement.
Like their religion and public games, their literature, with the exception of their satires and law-codes, was matter of fact and imitative. The generation of the Roman products of poetry and prose was the following: Homer engendered Virgil, Hesiod—Lucretius; Pindar—Horace; Æsop—Phædrus; Euripides—Terence; Aristophanes—Plautus; Xenophon—Sallust; Thukydides—Titus Livy; Demosthenes—Cicero. Ovid and Tacitus were the only really original writers; the first faithfully depicted the hollowness of Roman ethics; and the other, in unsurpassed language, drew a historical sketch of the Teutons, mercilessly exposing the contrast between noble simplicity, grandeur and honesty, and the demoralised state of his own country.
If art is the outgrowth of the intellectual and moral condition of a people, what kind of art could the Romans have produced? None. And this was the case. Roman art is altogether a misnomer; it is in fact Etruskan, Greek, Assyrian, and Egyptian art, dressed in an eclectic Roman garb by foreign artists. Art with the Romans was never the glorious emanation of the poet’s sacred ideal of the gods, or the irresistible civilising power of beauty; it was merely the handmaid of power, wealth, pomp, and vanity. Art was with them a slave, well fed, well clad, well housed, well paid, to make power more powerful, to dazzle the people, to proclaim the universal dominion of Rome over the world. The Roman character was dry and geometrical, and therefore in its artistic taste architectural and monumental. Anything that could serve, by means of technical perfection, to promote art, was encouraged, adopted, and supported by the Romans.
We have given a drastic picture of the evils of the Roman spirit; we must be just to the great mission which it fulfilled unconsciously and against its will. The centralisation in language, customs, and manners produced a cosmopolitan spirit. Greek artists and philosophers spread taste and learning. Distant nations were brought into closer connection. The roads constructed to facilitate the march of legions, bent on devastating a province, served as means of communication; so did their aqueducts and bridges. The wants of an increasing population forced the Romans to improve agriculture, and commerce was found necessary. Corn had to be brought from one quarter, textile fabrics from another; Greece and Egypt were pillaged of their innumerable works of art, and Rome may be said to have been at that period the greatest museum of the universe. The superstition and credulity which existed among the people, by degrees disappeared. Africa had been considered a land of monsters, with serpents large enough to entangle a whole army and to crush it; other regions of the accessible world had been thought inhabited by men without heads. Giants, kyklops, and enchantresses had been said to perform incredible feats, but were found to be without supernatural power; the golden apples of Spain turned out to be mere oranges, and graced the tables of the wealthier, and in time even of the poorer classes. The mouth of hell had been placed on the shores of the Euxine (Black Sea), but when those regions were occupied by Roman soldiers, the mouth of hell had to be removed elsewhere. East and west, south and north, were united under one great Roman vault, the four quarters of the globe were over-arched, and the broad cupola of universalism set over them. Man was made a common slave to one grand and common abstraction, typically foreshadowing the time when men would be brought as free agents under one great dome of universal brotherhood.
For this grand and really majestic soldering of humanity into one total, the Romans found the spiritual as well as the material form in