The Agias, on the other hand, is in style contemporary with the works of 4th-century sculptors.
Of the elaborate groups of combatants with which Lysippus enriched such centres as Olympia and Delphi, or of the huge bronze statues which he erected in temples and shrines, we can form no adequate notion. Perhaps among the extant heads of Alexander the one which is most likely to preserve the style of Lysippus is the head from Alexandria in the British Museum (Plate II. fig. 56), though this was executed at a later time.
Many noted extant statues may be attributed with probability to the latter part of the 4th or the earlier part of the 3rd century. We will mention a few only. The celebrated group at Florence representing Niobe and her children falling before the arrows of Apollo and Artemis is certainly a work of the pathetic school, and may be by a pupil of Praxiteles. Niobe, in an agony of grief, which is in the marble tempered and idealized, tries to protect her youngest daughter from destruction (Plate VI. fig. 78). Whether the group can have originally been fitted into the gable of a temple is a matter of dispute.
Two great works preserved in the Louvre are so noted that it is but necessary to mention them, the Aphrodite of Melos (Plate VI. fig. 77), in which archaeologists are now disposed to see the influence of Scopas, and the Victory of Samothrace (Plate III. figs. 61 and 62), an original set up by Demetrius Poliorcetes after a naval victory won at Salamis in Cyprus in 306 B.C. over the fleet of Ptolemy, king of Egypt.
Nor can we pass over without notice two works so celebrated as the Apollo of the Belvidere in the Vatican (Plate II. fig. 55), and the Artemis of Versailles. The Apollo is now by most archaeologists regarded as probably a copy of a work of Leochares, to whose Ganymede it bears a superficial resemblance. The Artemis is regarded as possibly due to some artist of the same age. But it is by no means clear that we have the right to remove either of these figures from among the statues of the Hellenistic age. The old theory of Preller, which saw in them copies from a trophy set up to commemorate the repulse of the Gauls at Delphi in 278 B.C., has not lost its plausibility.
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| Hamdy et Reinach, Nécropole à Sidon, Pl. 7. |
| Fig. 45.—Tomb of Mourning Women: Sidon. |
This may be the most appropriate place for mentioning the remarkable find made at Sidon in 1886 of a number of sarcophagi, which once doubtless contained the remains of kings of Sidon. They are now in the museum of Constantinople, and are admirably published by Hamdy Bey and T. Reinach (Une Nécropole royale à Sidon, 1892–1896). Sarcophagi of Sidon. The sarcophagi in date cover a considerable period. The earlier are made on Egyptian models, the covers shaped roughly in the form of a human body or mummy. The later, however, are Greek in form, and are clearly the work of skilled Greek sculptors, who seem to have been employed by the grandees of Phoenicia in the adornment of their last resting-places. Four of these sarcophagi in particular claim attention, and in fact present us with examples of Greek art of the 5th and 4th centuries in several of its aspects. To the 5th century belong the tomb of the Satrap, the reliefs of which bring before us the activities and glories of some unknown king, and the Lycian sarcophagus, so called from its form, which resembles that of tombs found in Lycia, and which is also adorned with reliefs which have reference to the past deeds of the hero buried in the tomb, though these deeds are represented, not in the Oriental manner directly, but in the Greek manner, clad in mythological forms. To the 4th century belong two other sarcophagi. One of these is called the Tomb of Mourning Women. On all sides of it alike are ranged a series of beautiful female figures, separated by Ionic pillars, each in a somewhat different attitude, though all attitudes denoting grief (fig. 45). The pediments at the ends of the cover are also closely connected with the mourning for the loss of a friend and protector, which is the theme of the whole decoration of the sarcophagus. We see depicted in them the telling of the news of the death, with the results in the mournful attitude of the two seated figures. The mourning women must be taken, not as the representation of any persons in particular, but generally as the expression of the feeling of a city. Such figures are familiar to us in the art of the second Attic school; we could easily find parallels to the sarcophagus among the 4th-century sepulchral reliefs of Athens. We can scarcely be mistaken in attributing the workmanship of this beautiful sarcophagus to some sculptor trained in the school of Praxiteles. And it is a conjecture full of probability that it once contained the body of Strato, king of Sidon, who ruled about 380 B.C., and who was proxenos or public friend of the Athenians.
More celebrated is the astonishing tomb called that of Alexander, though there can be no doubt that, although it commemorates the victories and exploits of Alexander, it was made not to hold his remains, but those of some ruler of Sidon who was high in his favour. Among all the monuments of antiquity which have come down to us, none is more admirable than this, and none more characteristic of the Greek genius. We give, in two lines, the composition which adorned one of the sides of this sarcophagus. It represents a victory of Alexander, probably that of the Granicus (fig. 46). On the left we see the Macedonian king charging the Persian horse, on the right his general Parmenio, and in the midst a younger officer, perhaps Cleitus. Mingled with the chiefs are foot-soldiers, Greek and Macedonian, with whom the Persians are mingled in unequal fray. What most strikes the modern eye is the remarkable freshness and force of the action and the attitudes. Those, however, who have seen the originals have been specially impressed with the colouring, whereof, of course, our engraving gives no hint, but which is applied to the whole surface of the relief with equal skill and delicacy. There are other features in the relief on which a Greek eye would have dwelt with special pleasure—the exceedingly careful symmetry of the whole, the balancing of figure against figure, the skill with which the result of the battle is hinted rather than depicted. The composition is one in which the most careful planning and the most precise calculation are mingled with freedom of hand and expressiveness in detail. The faces in particular show more expression than would be tolerated in art of the previous century. We are unable as yet to assign an author or even a school to the sculptor of this sarcophagus; he comes to us as a new and striking phenomenon in the history of ancient art. The reliefs which adorn the other sides of the sarcophagus are almost equally interesting. On one side we see Alexander again, in the company of a Persian noble, hunting a lion. The short sides also show us scenes of fighting and hunting. In fact it can scarcely be doubted that if we had but a clue to the interpretation of the reliefs, they would be found to embody historic events of the end of the 4th century. There are but a few other works of art, such as the Bayeux tapestry and the Column of Trajan, which bring contemporary history so vividly before our eyes. The battles with the Persians represented in some of the sculpture of the Parthenon and the temple of Nike at Athens are treated conventionally and with no attempt at realism; but here the ideal and the actual are blended into a work of consummate art, which is at the same time, to those who can read the language of Greek art, a historic record. The portraits of Alexander the Great which appear on this sarcophagus are almost contemporary, and the most authentic likenesses of him which we possess. The great Macedonian exercised so strong an influence on contemporary art that a multitude of heads of the age, both of gods and men, and even the portraits of his successors, show traces of his type.
We have yet to mention what are among the most charming and the most characteristic products of the Greek chisel, the
