Chapter VI: Sparta

The group of grave reliefs which constitutes our record of the customs and beliefs of the Lacedaemonians in regard to the tomb, a group which is inferior to few sets of ancient monuments in historical interest, has not very long been known to the world. Attention was first called to it in 1877 by Drs. Dressel and Milchhoefer, and it has since then found a place in all the histories of sculpture.

Of these reliefs the most important and the best preserved is now in the Museum of Berlin. It was found at Chrysapha near Sparta. It is represented in one of our plates (II), from which representation it is possible to gain some notion of the fashion of its carving, which is remarkable, and has been generally considered to indicate a hand or a school more versed in the carving of wood than in the sculpturing of marble. As in the carving of an onyx, we find several distinct planes one behind the other, on which are respectively projected the different parts of the relief, the outlines of each part being slightly rounded, and the inner markings graven in shallow lines with a tool. The face and arm of the nearest figure project most from the background; next, his body; and so on, layer beyond layer, to the ground of the relief. The style is rude, hard, and vigorous; though the capacity of the artist is narrowly limited, he moves within his limits with

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firm steps. The date of the work is probably the latter part of the sixth century.

Perhaps even more striking than the style of the relief is its subject. Seated side by side, no doubt on two chairs, though one only can be made out, are a pair, a bearded man who faces outwards and who holds in his right hand a winecup, and a woman, who bears a pomegranate in her right hand, while with the left she draws forward her veil. Both figures are fully clad. Behind the pair is erect a bearded snake; before their knees we see advancing two smaller figures, male and female, bringing as offerings a cock and an egg, a flower, and a fruit.

In the same volume of the Athenian _Mittheilungen_ (ii), in which this relief was originally published, may be found photographs of other reliefs which closely resemble it in character, but show small differences in period and detail. On Plate 24 is a relief wherein the snake is wholly wanting: on Plate 23 the snake is transposed, being erect in front of the wine-cup, and the style of the work is decidedly more advanced: on Plate 22 a dog appears beside the seated pair.

These four reliefs then make up a strongly defined group; and before we turn to other reliefs of the Spartan class, it may be well to determine what meaning may be assigned to the representations which they exhibit.

We may begin by rejecting without hesitation some of the theories on the subject which might naturally be suggested by a first impression. The wine-cup in the hands of the male figure might dispose one to think of Dionysus and his consort Ariadne; but this explanation would leave the serpent and other features unexplained, nor have we reason to think that the cultus of Dionysus had struck deep roots at Sparta in early times. Again, the serpent might suggest Asklepius with his daughter Hygieia, since the healing deity commonly carries a staff round which a serpent twines. But to this explanation the winecup offers difficulties; and, again, the evidence for a local cult at Sparta is insufficient.

Far nearer to the mark is the view which Dr. Milchhoefer accepted, that in the dignified seated pair we have embodied the deities of the world of shades. The wine-cup would in that case refer to the frequent offerings of wine made to the shades below; and the serpent is the well-known companion and friend of the dead. We are not well informed as to the names borne at Sparta by the king and queen of the world of the dead. At Argos they were not so well known by the Homeric names of Hades and Persephone, which they commonly bore in Greece, as by the names of Klymenos and Chthonia. But in fact the pair were known by many names in various places.

An interesting terra-cotta (Fig. 29) from Locri in Italy[75] presents a group at first sight nearly resembling the seated pair of Sparta. We find on it Hades and his Queen seated side by side: he is wreathed and holds flowers; she carries a cock and ears of corn. This is valuable evidence, and shows that in southern Italy monuments of the class we are considering might well belong to the worship of the recognized deities of the nether world. But a closer consideration shows that at Sparta the worship took another and a less generalized form, natural to a race among whom ancestors were held in special and unusual honour.

Though Hades and his Queen are frequently mentioned in sepulchral inscriptions, they are but rarely figured together in sculpture. A comparison of two or three other stelae of Sparta will suggest at all events a modification of the view that the seated pair of the reliefs already mentioned are merely the rulers of the world below. In the fourth volume of the Athenian _Mittheilungen_ are published two reliefs which beat

important inscriptions. On one is represented a man wrapped in a cloak seated: in his left hand is a pomegranate; in his right a wine-cup, out of which a coiled serpent drinks. The stone bears the name ΤΙΜΟΚΛΗϹ. If this inscription were of the same date as the relief it would of course at once prove that the stone is a memorial of an individual, and not a dedication to Hades. But in the opinion at least of Prof. Furtwängler the inscription is decidedly the later; it cannot therefore be regarded as conclusive evidence. But such evidence is afforded us by the next monument. Here we have a bearded man seated, in a decidedly later and more finished style of art, holding in his right hand a wine-cup, from which a serpent feeds. The inscription here is ΑΡΙΣΤΟΚΛΗϹ Ο ΚΑΙ ΖΗΘΟϹ; and it seems not merely to show that the memorial belongs to a man, Aristocles, but also that this Aristocles received a second name after his death in the quality of hero or demi-god. We learn from other sources of several such heroic names bestowed on distinguished men after their death. The rarity of names on the Spartan tombs may be readily accounted for by the existence of a stern law of Lycurgus[76], that names were not to be recorded on the tombs except in the case of priestesses, or of warriors who had fallen in battle. Another regulation of the great lawgiver ordained that bodies might be buried within the city, and memorials of the dead set up in the neighbourhood of the temples. Such monuments were not always gravestones, but sometimes memorials of those who were buried in a different place, or had fallen on foreign service.

In view of such facts as these we cannot hesitate to see in the sepulchral reliefs of Sparta reference to individuals, the ancestor, or the ancestor and his wife. They are the shrines of the family worship of the Laconians. But yet in a sense the dead man is identical with Hades. In Egypt each of the virtuous dead became part of Osiris. According to Herodotus the Getae thought that their dead returned to their deity Zalmoxis. In Greece, by dying, men put away the individual accidents of the flesh and became in a sense united with Hades. This no doubt is one reason why down to the second century B.C. we scarcely ever find individual portraits on tombs, a fact to which we shall hereafter return.

The cultus of ancestors was closely parallel to that of the gods. To both, sacrifices of food and of drink were constantly brought. To the temple of the gods corresponded the family heroum or shrine. To the statues of the gods corresponded the representation of the human dead in an ideal or heroized form. And gods and ancestors alike partook with their votaries of food at stated times, becoming the guest-friends of the worshipper.

Regarding the relation of the Spartan stelae to the cultus of ancestors as certain, we may proceed to consider in the light of that connexion the meaning of various details of the reliefs. The thing that is perhaps of the highest interest in them is the high honour paid to women. Ancestor and ancestress sit in state side by side, and are approached by their descendants, the smallness of whose figures is intended to portray the humility of their approach to their heroic progenitors. That ancestor-worship should find a special home at Sparta need not surprise us. We know that respect for elders and for parents was almost as strongly rooted among the conservative Laconians as it is in our days among the Chinese and Japanese. An exhortation to be worthy of their predecessors was the appeal which most readily stirred the hearts of the Spartan spearmen. They lived under the shadow of the past to an extent which we can hardly realize. But it is scarcely so familiar a fact that Sparta was the city in all Greece where women were held in highest honour. The Athenians inherited something of the Ionian desire for the seclusion of women, and to the contemporaries and countrymen of Thucydides it seemed high praise of a woman to say that she was never talked of. At Sparta, on the other hand, in some of the great crises of history, women are prominent in the foreground, from the days when little Gorgo saved her father Cleomenes from being bribed, to the days when Agiatis stirred up a later Cleomenes to his projects of political reform. The Spartan education, which seemed to regard women as only of use for bearing children to uphold the State, can scarcely have aimed at a high intellectual ideal. Modern German writers are fully convinced that sharing the exercises and games of the men must have rendered Laconian women coarse and masculine. Yet the Spartan ladies had a great share in the ownership of land; Spartan nurses were sought for in all Greece for the rearing of boys; and we learn from Plutarch that in all matters the Spartans were ready to take the advice of their women, and looked on their approval as the highest of rewards. On this regard for women among the Laconians, the treatment of women in their sepulchral reliefs is an excellent commentary.

The offerings brought to the seated pair in the relief first cited are such as belonged in a special way to the dead. The pomegranate was the food of the Shades, which, when Persephone had tasted in the palace of Hades, she belonged to him beyond recall. The cock and the egg are the simplest meat-offerings which were brought to the dead and enjoyed by the living. Flowers in all countries and in all ages have been laid on the tomb; and the Greeks who loved to deck their banquets with them were not an exception to the general rule. The winecup in the hand of the seated hero may be characterized as a very broad hint to his descendants that at the tomb were due the libations which were grateful alike to the gods and to the spirits of the dead. The serpent who is sometimes represented as drinking from the cup is either the companion of the dead or even his spirit in another form. The way in which a serpent disappears into the ground marks him out as essentially a chthonic being.

A few more characteristic specimens of this class of monuments must be cited. On a stele from Chrysapha (Fig. 30) we see a man, depicted in an archaic style of art, seated, holding winecup and pomegranate; at his feet leaps a dog, while a horse is depicted in relief in the background. In discussing this relief Dr. Furtwängler[77] advocates the view that horse and dog have a symbolical reference, the horse being

nearly connected with Hades and the dog with Hecate, both mythologic beings closely connected with the dead. I have proposed[78] a somewhat bolder view, that these animals sculptured on the stone bear the same relation to the mortal horse and dog which had belonged to the hero that the portrait bears to himself, and that they are really a survival of an ancient custom, whereof we find traces in the graves of Greece and Italy, by which the horse and dog of a deceased warrior were slain and buried in the same place with him. Whether their bones were mingled with their master’s, or whether they are merely figured on his gravestone, the meaning is much the same, that wherever the lord is, there are his faithful attendants: ‘Admitted to that equal sky, his faithful dog shall bear him company,’ as Pope says. In any case, horse and dog on a tomb are certainly a mark of knightly rank.

Among many proofs that the animal companions of the hero had reference rather to his occupations and necessities than to any symbolism, the evidence afforded by a grave at Tanagra[79] seems worth citing. Although that grave is of a period later than Alexander the Great, it seems to preserve early Greek ways of looking at death and what lies beyond. The interior of this grave contained paintings of the head and neck of a horse, a sword and a loom, besides a house and various articles of furniture. Here the paintings seem closely to represent what might at an earlier time have been the contents of the grave. The horse and the sword belong to the husband, the loom to the wife, whether we are to consider these as reflections of the past life of the pair or as an accompaniment of their ghostly existence. The furniture and the house are provision for their spiritual need of a domicile, just as in the graves of Egypt we find paintings of the life of the house and farm, there placed to break the shock of death, and provide for the shadow of a departed landlord a shadow of his past employments[80].

We pass to the representations which serve to bridge the gap between the grave-monuments of Sparta and those of other districts. Among the Spartan reliefs published by Milchhoefer, the following occupy one plate[81]:--

A female figure, seen from the waist upwards, clad in a chiton, holding in her left hand a tall flower.

A youth, standing, clad in a chlamys; he holds a staff in one hand, in the other a cake or fruit; before him a snake erect.

Both of these are of quite early style: with the latter of them we may compare the following in the Museum at Athens[82]:--

Man standing wrapped in a mantle; in his left hand a pomegranate, in the right a winecup, out of which feeds a serpent coiled and erect.

In these instances we approach the ordinary representation of the dead as standing, so common on the tombs alike of Athens and of Northern Greece, numerous instances of which will be found in the ninth chapter. Yet the snake, the flower, the pomegranate, all belong to the special cultus of the dead; and there is not in these cases a reference to the past life, as is probably the case with the great majority of Attic stelae.