Our museums also contain a great number of the marble slabs, decorated in high relief, which formed the ordinary tombstone of the Athenians buried in the cemetery of Cerameikos, outside the Dipylon Gate at Athens. A few of them are still _in situ_, and present a remarkable picture as they stand. One of the most famous is the tomb of Hegeso, in the Athenian Museum. But there are a great many more, less known but equally beautiful, both there and elsewhere. None of them are, so far as we know, the work of named artists. The great works constructed under Pericles and Pheidias on the Acropolis must have collected dozens of competent minor craftsmen to Athens, and given them a noble training in their craft. Some show the round contours and delicate drapery of the Pheidian style, some the heavy muscularity of Polycleitus, and some show the small, finely poised heads of the school of Lysippus.
The subjects represented on the lecythi generally depict some part of the funeral rites, and the sepulchral slabs generally exhibit a scene of departure, which is always treated with extraordinary dignity and reserve. Not a lamentation is uttered, not a tear falls. Perhaps the gaze of our athlete’s father is more searching and intense than if it were a mere earthly separation from his stalwart son. There is, I think, no portraiture even here. If it is a woman who has gone to her long home, she is sometimes shown putting away her jewels for the journey. On one archaic relief now at Rome, a mother, with a smile upon her face, is placing her child on the knees of Persephone. A very beautiful one, also at Rome, bears the mythological scene of the parting between those types of married love and constancy, Orpheus and Eurydice. The head of Orpheus is bent a little, but Eurydice is smiling farewell, and the hand of Hermes, the Escort of Souls, is very light upon her wrist.[75] Most typical of all, perhaps, is the Mourning Athena,[76] which was probably a public memorial of soldiers fallen in the wars, since it was found built into a wall on the
PLATE LX. TWO TOMBSTONE RELIEFS, FROM THE CERAMEIKOS, ATHENS]
Acropolis. It is strangely simple and restrained. The goddess, clad in her helmet, leans upon her spear, with head bent down, to read the names once painted on a short pillar which is part of the relief. The severe lines of her drapery indicate the austerity of the unknown artist’s treatment of his patriotic theme. This is the speech of Pericles in stone. I have chosen also two less-known monuments from the Athenian Museum to show the Athenian view of death more clearly. The dead hero does not mourn, but his humbler friends, like the Giants and Barbarians of the friezes, may express their emotion visibly and indecently. Young men nearly always have their hounds to accompany them upon their tombstones. They are big animals, perhaps of the famed Molossian breed, akin to our pointers. Their descendants may be seen (and felt, unless the traveller knows the local artifice of sitting down and pretending not to be afraid) on any upland farm in Greece to-day. Girls are often accompanied by small pet dogs, curly and excitable. The big hounds clearly show dejection in every line.[77] Commentators tell us that the cat (_Felis domesticus_) was not kept as a pet in Greece, but that when the ancient writers talk of the “wavy-tail” who catches mice they mean the weasel. Would any one but a commentator keep a weasel for a pet? And what is that headless animal upon the shelf, if not the primeval cat imported from Egypt? The young man in this relief[78] is letting his doves go free. And, as you see, the little slave-boys may look sorry when their masters go. They are not Greeks; they may express human emotions.