Chapter VIII: Athens: Periods and Forms of Monuments

In regard to the laws which regulated the erection of monuments of the dead, and the forms which those monuments assumed in successive ages, under the influence of custom and belief, our information does not reach far beyond Athens. At Athens alone have we been so fortunate as to find, beneath the soil, a considerable part of an ancient burying-ground, where not the graves only, but also the monuments erected over them, are untouched by the spoiler, and almost as fresh as they were when Athens was a powerful city. It will therefore be well worth our while to consider the history of the Athenian monumental customs, which have been carefully studied on the spot by several able archaeologists.

Graves of the Mycenaean age have been discovered in Attica, at Sparta, and at Menidi. Of such graves we have already spoken. At an uncertain period, probably about the eighth century, there succeeded, in place of these, the graves found in such numbers just outside the Dipylon gate of Athens, and so called Dipylon graves. The pottery found in these burying-places is very interesting, although the devices are rude, because there are painted upon it representations from the contemporary life of Greece, the prehistoric Greece of the age of Homer and of Hesiod. The most ordinary pictures are sea-fights, or else the burial of the dead. Of the representations of Greek obsequies which these vases bear we have had occasion to speak above[107]. The reason for the selection of the subject belongs to the present connexion.

The time appears to have been one of poverty and of depression in art. The rich treasures and the admirable talent for decoration which belonged to the Mycenaean age lay buried in the past. The Greece which we know, the historic Greece of art and poetry, of philosophy and history, had not yet come into being. The moon had set and the sun had not risen, and men moved in the dimmest twilight. Thus it can scarcely surprise us that the graves of the Dipylon class, with their poor and scanty contents, were surmounted by no sculptured monuments. In place of a column or a slab, there stood on the graves one of the large amphorae of the period, enriched with adornment of geometric patterns and lines of stiff animals. Into these vessels were poured, almost beyond doubt, the offerings of food and drink brought by survivors and descendants. The choice of a sepulchral subject for the vases is thus readily accounted for. The vessel rested probably on a mound of earth, such as the χῶμα, of which we shall presently speak, or on a simple pedestal of stone.

As we approach the historic age of Athens, the stone monument with its painting and reliefs makes its appearance. It is not difficult to divide into periods the history of the production at Athens of monuments of the dead. It falls quite naturally into three sections:--

(1) The time before the Persian wars, 550-480.
(2) The time of perfected art, 480-300.
(3) The Hellenistic and Roman age.

The epic custom of Greece was to erect over the dead a τύμβος or mound, with a στήλη or gravestone[108] placed upon or beside it. Such a custom was continued in later Greece in the case of great graves made after a battle to contain the bodies of the slain. The tumulus at Marathon is well known to visitors to Greece, and the lion set up to crown the mound at Chaeroneia, where the Theban sacred band was cut to pieces by the phalanx of Philip, still exists in fragmentary condition. But for the graves of private persons the lavish customs of the heroic age in Greece gave place to more modest ways.

A passage in Cicero’s _De Legibus_[109] gives us some interesting information in regard to Athenian customs. Solon, Cicero tells us, legislated only against the violation of tombs, not against their sumptuousness. But some time after, in consequence of the growth of splendid tombs in the Cerameicus, a law was passed, forbidding tombs more elaborate than could be made by ten men in three days. Nor were they to be decorated with plaster[110], nor were Hermae to be set on them. Notwithstanding, after a time, the luxury of tombs again increased; until Demetrius Phalereus (B.C. 317-307) carried a law that no monument should be erected save a column not more than three cubits in height, or a flat slab, or a water-vessel[111]. A magistrate was appointed to see that the decree was complied with.

The legislation of Demetrius does appear, as we shall presently see, to have been successful. If the earlier legislation mentioned by Cicero was effectual, it must be placed in the days of the democracy which succeeded the expulsion of the Tyrants or in the stirring times of the Persian wars. For there is a decided dearth of sepulchral monuments at Athens in the first half of the fifth century. In the latter half of the sixth, and again in the latter half of the fifth century, they are numerous and elaborate. Whether Cicero’s words, ‘aliquanto post Solonem,’ can be stretched to cover a period of nearly a century may, however, be doubted.

We have evidence that during the latter part of the sixth century, the τύμβος the στήλη, the mound and the slab, persisted side by side. Often a grave would be marked by both; sometimes one or the other would be wanting. In the course of time the mound has usually disappeared, while the slab often remains. But it is easy to prove that the mound was common to early periods. Not only do we find mention of it in a variety of authors[112], Herodotus, Plato, Lucian, Pausanias, but its form is depicted upon black-figured vases. We give an instance (Fig. 40) in which Achilles is represented as dragging the body of Hector tied to his chariot beside the mound which represents the grave of Patroclus[113]: a serpent and the shade of Patroclus appear. Here the tomb is a white mound of oval form, whence it may be judged that in place of a mere mound of earth sometimes an artificial structure was built, and a recent discovery at Athens fully confirms this view. In the Piraeus street were found in 1891[114] remains of an erection about two yards in diameter, which consisted of a framework of tiles overlaid with fine stucco, and which seemed originally to have been in the shape of the upper half of an egg. This was clearly just such a tomb as is figured in the vase-painting: and doubtless in antiquity such mounds were common, but they perished easily, or might very commonly be destroyed by careless workers in the course of excavation. At Myrina Messrs. Pottier and Reinach found the contents of tombs in many cases lying on the surface of the ancient soil; a fact for which they account by saying that these objects must originally have been covered by a mound.

On the mound would in some cases be set the commemorative stone. In other cases in this period also, as we learn from vase-paintings[115], an earthenware vessel was set on it to receive offerings. Sometimes we find in the representations mound and stele set side by side. And sometimes there is a third feature of the tomb, a τράπεζα, or table, that is, a horizontal stone. In one remarkable vase-painting[116] we see clearly mound, stele, and table. More commonly we find the stele and the table only; the latter being used as a seat by the dead person, or sometimes serving as a place of deposit for baskets of wreaths and other offerings. See, for example, Fig. 11, p. 22.

The ordinary stele was in shape a tall and tapering slab, surmounted by an acanthus pattern. On the face of it were commonly the names of those buried, and, as a rule, two rosettes. In our frontispiece, which represents a part of the cemetery of the Cerameicus in its present form, may be seen several stelae; and one is figured in the text (below, Fig. 43) as an example. The rosettes seem to represent the two breasts, and we may here see a hint that the stele takes the place of a portrait-figure, just as does the turban which commonly surmounts modern Turkish tombs.

In the sixth century the stele is commonly adorned with a portrait of the deceased in low relief; but sometimes a painted portrait takes the place of one in relief.

Not all stelae, however, were of tall and narrow form, nor was the device on them always limited to a single figure: groups sometimes make their appearance, and to accommodate them the stele has to be made broader. This development we will trace in the next period. Meantime we must say a few words as to the pillar (κίων) which is frequently mentioned as well as the stele in ancient epigrams. The small round pillar, carved with a simple inscription, which is so abundant at Athens, belongs to the later age of the city. But in early times pillars were frequently set up on graves, and surmounted with a portrait or figure of some kind. As examples we may cite the supposed grave of Orpheus in Pieria, which was marked, according to Pausanias[117], by a pillar surmounted by a hydria; and the grave attributed to the sons of Oedipus, Eteocles and Polynices, on which stood a pillar supporting a shield[118]. On the grave of Aristomenes at Messene also was a pillar to which the ox, annually destined to be sacrificed to the hero, was tied[119]. At a later time the grave of Epaminondas was marked, like that of the sons of Oedipus, by a pillar supporting a shield, and that of Isocrates by the figure of a siren, standing on a pillar 30 cubits high. The oldest existing specimen of a sepulchral pillar is from the tomb of Xenares in Corfu.

The terms σῆμα and μνῆμα, which are frequently applied to the tomb both in existing epitaphs and in the epigrams of the _Anthology_, do not seem to refer to any special form of monument, but rather to the purpose of the tomb as a significant monument (σῆμα) or as a memorial (μνῆμα).

Every one who examines the early graves of Attica must be struck with the fact that whereas it would seem natural that tombs should be set up by children for their parents, at Athens the opposite rule seems to prevail. Commonly tombs profess to be erected for those who died young by their sorrowing relatives. Not only were young men who fell in battle honoured with fine monuments, but young men who died of disease, and unmarried girls. A large proportion of the women whose tombs we find seem either to have died unmarried or else to have perished in childbirth. It would seem that ordinary citizens, who died in the course of nature, were buried in great family vaults; but that separate tombs with fine sculptural decoration were erected in special cases, when a father lost a promising and beloved boy or girl, or a young husband lost at one blow his wife and his hope of a progeny to carry on his name and tend his old age. The erection of a tomb to relative or friend was no matter of course, but an exceptional proceeding, adopted when feeling ran strongly, and required some satisfaction in outward act. The stern law of Sparta allowed only the names of men who fell in battle or women who were priestesses to be publicly set up. At Athens feeling took the place of law; and while those who died for their country were sure of honourable burial, ornate tombs were the gifts of special affection. We are told that the effeminate people of Agrigentum erected special tombs to their horses and pet birds. Here, as in so many cases, the Athenians maintained the human mean, between harsh rigour on the one hand, and luxurious effusiveness on the other.

To the second period, B.C. 480-300, belongs the great mass of the fine sepulchral monuments of Athens. In the age of Pheidias, the custom comes in of flanking the sculptural group of stelae with a pair of pilasters supporting a small gable, as seen in several of our plates, and by degrees the ground between the pilasters recedes, and a deep interior is seen, as in Plates XI, XXVI, &c. By this recessing is produced the monument in the form of a small and shallow temple, within which we see in very high relief some scene from the daily and domestic life of Athens. These are the most splendid of the Athenian tombs, in date almost confined to the fourth century. They are the monuments of which Cicero writes; ‘amplitudines sepulcrorum quas nunc in Ceramico videmus’: even in Cicero’s time they were evidently one of the great sights of Greece; how much more notable are they now, when we have but a wreck of the artistic wealth and splendour of Greece with which to compare them!

It has been sometimes supposed that the temple-like form of these tombs, whence they are called ναἰσκοι, indicates special veneration for those to whom they are erected. If houses in form like those of the gods are given to mortals, surely, it may be said, the mortals are raised almost to the rank of the gods. This view, however, is mistaken. The architectural forms which we associate with Greek temples are not originally peculiar to them. It is only because the temples of Greece have survived the secular buildings that we are disposed to look on pillars and gables as belonging specially to the gods. We have, however, still a few secular Greek buildings, such as the Propylaea of Athens; and we see them to be constructed on similar architectural principles to the temples. The Ionic and Doric styles of architecture were no more exclusively religious in use or origin than was Gothic architecture in England. The ναἰσκοι were not temples, but merely a framing for a domestic interior, such as is often represented on vases. They are rooms of the women’s apartments in Greek houses. A dead lady in the _Anthology_ calls her tomb οἰκία λάϊνα[120].

About contemporary with the introduction of the ναἰσκοι was the custom of shaping the tomb after the fashion of a vase. These stone vases are extremely common in the Museum of Athens. Perhaps the earliest of them is one published by Köhler[121]. In the relief of it we see two men hand in hand, and it bears an inscription which Köhler on epigraphic grounds assigns to the period B.C. 450-430. It is painted like a real Greek vase with palmettes and maeander patterns. It was probably at the time when the custom of placing terra-cotta vases on the tombs was dying out, that it occurred to the sculptors to replace them by making the stele itself in the form of a vase, adorned like the ordinary stelae with inscription and relief. The marble vases were of two kinds. First, we have the lekythos or unguent vase, of the same shape as the red-figured and white ground vases very commonly placed in Athenian graves. These latter are mentioned by Aristophanes[122] as the work of the inferior artist: ὃς τοῖς νεκροῖσι ζωγραφεῖ τὰς ληκύθους, and in another passage he speaks of them as sometimes let into the tomb and fastened there with lead[123]. To imitate them in marble was therefore natural. For an instance of the lekythos tomb see figures 70 to 72, below. In the case of those who died unmarried, a vase of another form was used as the model. Here again we have only an imitation in stone of a terra-cotta vase often placed on the tomb. At Athens it was a custom, when a marriage was about to take place, for a girl to bring to the bride a vessel of water from the spring Callirrhoe for a bridal bath. The water was fetched in a two-handled vessel of peculiar form, the λουτροφόρος, such as seems not to have been used on any other occasion. The Athenian Museum contains several imitations in terra-cotta of the marriage vase; and in every case the scenes painted on these vases are taken either from the ceremonies of marriage or those of mourning. When a girl was married the marriage vase was used in the pomp and jollity of the wedding: when she died unwedded, it was placed on her tomb as a memorial. As Athenian epitaphs put it, in that case she was wedded to Hades. On the tombs also of youths who died before the marriage-day, the λουτροφόρος of terra-cotta was regarded as an appropriate decoration. A well-known passage of Demosthenes[124] gives us explicit authority for this usage. ‘What is the proof,’ he asks, ‘that Archiades died unmarried? A marriage vase is set up on his tomb.’ Sometimes the marriage vase thus set on the tomb was an ordinary vessel of terra-cotta. Sometimes it was represented in relief on the stele. And sometimes the stele itself was fashioned in the form of a marriage vase.

The usage is well illustrated by a stele from Kalyvia, now at Athens[125], of which we give an engraving (Pl. IV). The whole field of the stele is occupied by a great marriage vase in relief. On the top of it, on a basis, stands a Siren, tearing her hair and beating her breast in sign of sympathy with the mourners. On the body of the vase is depicted a scene from the funeral rites. A marriage vase stands erect in the midst of three mourners, all apparently women, one of whom is tying to the handle of the vase (this vase has but one handle)

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a wreath. Twice over, on this curious stele, we have the symbolism of the vase employed to indicate the unmarried condition of the defunct.

On another stele (Pl. V) three vases are represented in relief, a marriage vase and two sepulchral lekythi[126]. The central vase bears a relief, a young horseman armed, standing beside his horse, and giving his hand to an elderly man who is wrapped in a cloak. The relief on the vase to left shows us a boy, of somewhat manly form, running with a hoop. It is likely that in the grave to which this monument belonged a father had buried three sons, one of military age and almost marriageable, the other two still young.

No sentiment is more often expressed in epitaphs, none more strongly affected the Greek heart, than the sadness of the fate of those young men and women to whom death came in the place of that marriage which was regarded as the consummation of earthly happiness. When the marriage vase was used for funeral libations, then indeed the bitterness of fate was felt by every bystander. The poets have embodied this feeling in many an epigram; one of these by the poet Meleager[127] I must endeavour, though the task is a hard one, to reproduce in English:--

When Clearista doffed her virgin tire,
No bridal but a tomb did she require.
The flutes before her door but yesternight
To merry household clatter answered bright;
The morrow found them wailing, and the lay
Of Hymen in lament died sad away.
And torches bright that in her bower did glow
Illume the passage to the realm below.[128]

It is not, however, most usual to find the tombs of the later fifth and the fourth centuries thus adapted to the circumstances of a special tenant. Some of the stelae of this period, such as those of Tynnias (Pl. X), Aristonautes (Pl. XI), and Amphotto (Pl. XVII) belong especially to individuals; but the great majority of the graves between B.C. 450 and 300 are of eminently domestic character. The reliefs which they bear represent not one person but many, and the inscriptions contain several names. The simple burial customs of the Athenians made great vaults unnecessary; a handful of ashes could be easily disposed of.

In looking at the sculpture of Attic tombs, we must not forget this domestic and family destination. And there is another point, one of technique, which we must also bear in mind. All decorative reliefs in Greece, whether they belonged to the temple, the public building, or the tomb, depended in a great degree for effect on the colour which was freely used to help out the sculpture. Few traces of colouring now remain on the sepulchral reliefs, but there can be no doubt that originally they were coloured, not perhaps all over, but in many parts. The background would be filled in with blue or other strong colour. The hair of the persons sculptured would be, according to the almost universal custom of Greek sculpture, red. Eyes and eyebrows would be indicated with the brush as well as with the chisel. The garments would commonly be at all events tinted, and in some cases they would bear designs painted to represent embroidery, as is the case with the votive archaic female figures recently discovered at Athens[129]. On our plate, which represents the stele of Aristion (Pl. IX), considerable traces of colour may be observed. And besides colour, metal accessories were in many cases added. In the stele of Dexileos (Pl. XII), reins, sword, and lance were added in metal.

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Thus when we see on our reliefs a lady holding out empty hands (cf. Pl. XXVI), we may be sure that originally those hands had borne a necklace or other jewelry, added in colour. The handles of the marriage vase on Pl. IV must have been marked with colour. The ornaments of the helmet of Aristonautes (Pl. XI) were added in metal, and so on in other cases. To the modern eye the pure white of Greek reliefs as they now are, seems classical and appropriate. And we may be right. Greek life has passed away, and looks upon us as if from another world in the ghostly reflection of Greek art. We see it not in a realistic but in a softened and ideal light. But the Greeks themselves loved strong colour, and in any purely artistic question their eyes are far more to be trusted than ours, which are perverted by the ugly surroundings of our daily life.

The date of Greek sepulchral monuments may be determined by a variety of considerations. The inscriptions which they bear may help us in some cases. We know that the old Attic alphabet, which did not distinguish short from long vowels, confusing O with Ω, and E with H, and which used the form [**shape] for Λ and Λ for Γ, was officially superseded by the alphabet of Asia Minor in the archonship of Euclides 403 B.C. But long before this date the Ionian letters had been in frequent use for private documents. Thus any tomb bearing an inscription in the Ionian character can scarcely be later than 400 B.C.; but may be considerably earlier. The evidence of date furnished by inscriptions being thus rather vague, we return to the evidence offered by the forms of the stelae and the style of the reliefs.

A certain roughness and want of elaboration in the acroteria, the architectural adornments of the tops of the stelae, indicates fifth-century work. For example, the stelae of Lysander (Pl. XX) and of Mica (Pl. XXI), with their somewhat clumsy ending above, are typical of the fifth century, while a somewhat more elegant top, as in the stele of Damasistrata (Pl. XXIII), is usually an indication of the more luxurious fourth century. But style of sculpture is a safer criterion. Those who are familiar with the style of the Parthenon frieze, and with that of Praxitelean art, will find little difficulty in determining to which of these two very different styles that of any given relief most closely approximates. To the question of the relation of sepulchral reliefs to the works of the great Athenian artists we will return in a later chapter (XI).

The effects of the sumptuary laws of Demetrius Phalereus are clearly visible in the Athenian cemeteries. After 300 B.C. we find no more lofty stelae, no more temple-like tombs of great size and beauty. As might be expected from the statement of Cicero above cited, henceforward we find only small and mean monuments, the low stele with reliefs, the stone lekythos, the short pillar, inscribed only with a name. Such tombs are found in extraordinary abundance in the neighbourhood of Athens; but their interest, whether from the point of view of the historian or the artist, is but slight, and we shall be but little concerned with them in these pages.

We must imagine most of the roads leading to great cities as flanked on both sides by the sculptured memorials of the dead. Those who have visited Rome and Pompeii will be familiar with this custom, which seems to us rather depressing. But we must remember that the tombs of the Greeks and Romans had not that air of uniform melancholy which tombs bear among us. The frontispiece shows a part of the great Athenian cemetery of the Cerameicus, which lay just outside the Dipylon Gate. It shows us the line of tombs of various ages and of many forms, which flanked the sacred way leading to Eleusis, the line of which is visible in the foreground. On the left is the relief of Dexileos, which belonged to a sort of shrine, of which the foundations still exist. Close to it is a table or τράπεζα; below it, a tall stele with rosettes on the face of it, and surmounted by an acanthus. Then come more tables and a flat stele adorned with reliefs. Further are two shrines, ναΐσκοι, and a lofty basis supporting a bull. One or two short pillars of the later age are visible in the background. In some cases stone lekythi, such as that lying broken at the foot of the pedestal of the bull, were inserted, sometimes one and sometimes two, in the flat upper surface of the tables.

To what events this section of the cemetery owes its remarkable preservation is a matter of conjecture. Francis Lenormant suggested that it was covered by the earthen _agger_ set up against the walls of Athens by Sulla when he attacked the city from this side, and so preserved from the ruin which time brings. Dr. Brückner, however, rejects this view, thinking that the spot was buried with earth by the Athenians themselves on some occasion[130]. Whatever explanation be accepted, it is certainly a great gain to us thus to find preserved, like a fly in amber, a section of a great cemetery of Greece.

The architectural features and decoration of the tombs of Athens may best be spoken of in this place.

First, of the acanthus. The gradual growth of this ornament in complication and variety may be traced in the stelae of successive periods[131]. The general form is always two Ionic volutes, surmounted by a palmette. To this is commonly added, after the fifth century B.C., some kind of pattern derived from the leaf of the acanthus, which Callimachus, the inventor or improver of the Corinthian column, at the same period introduced into temple architecture.

The acanthus is said by some to be introduced into tomb decoration because it grew on the rocky spurs which the Greeks generally used as burying-places. And in favour of this view may be cited the curious fact that in the vase-paintings we often see on the top of a tomb, in place of a sculptured acanthus,

HEAD OF ASSYRIAN STELE.]

one growing naturally. But there is, on the other side, a piece of evidence the value of which must be acknowledged. At Khorsabad in Assyria[132], M. Place discovered a tall square stele, fluted on all four sides, and surmounted by a device which is really a palmette, but which bears a strong resemblance to the so-called acanthus pattern of Greek art. The meaning and purpose of this pillar are obscure; but whatever they may be, it is scarcely open to doubt that in an artistic sense it lies in the line of descent of the Hellenic stele. And it naturally suggests the question whether the finial ornament of Greek gravestones was originally meant for an acanthus at all, or whether it is only a variety of the Ionic scroll and the Assyrian palmette. We engrave side by side the top of this column (Fig. 41), and for comparison with it, an archaic anthemion from a Greek stele[133] (Fig. 42).

After the archaic period the anthemion on the top of the Attic stele goes on developing in complexity as well as in beauty. We give three characteristic treatments of the fourth century, which may be compared with the example already figured. Of these monuments, one (43)[134] is adorned with rosettes only; the second (43 A)[135] with a group of three persons, father, mother, and daughter; the third (43 B)[136] with a marriage vase.

The acanthus is not the only ornament used as a finial for Greek stelae: other devices sometimes appear in the same place; and their meaning is a matter worthy of consideration.

On some of the early monuments of Attica there stood a sphinx. The instance figured (44) is from an early tomb at Spata, near Athens[137]. The monster is archaic in form: her hair falls in long formal curls, her breast is covered with

feathers: on her head is a round crown. The history of the sphinx has been traced by Milchhoefer[138] and other writers. Its origin is certainly to be sought in Egypt, in which country sphinxes were set up in lines as guardians of the temples. The Egyptian sphinx is unwinged and male, as the beard which it commonly wears clearly shows; but when the people of Asia Minor and Syria imitated the form, they added wings. The significance of the monster was in Egypt quite vague; and it was probably even more vague in Asia. Thus when the Greeks adopted the strange form, it cannot have brought with it much meaning. They had to give it a meaning of their own. In fact, it was quite characteristic in the Greeks that they

borrowed forms and gave to them their own meaning. They took the forms and sounds of the letters of the alphabet from the Phoenicians, but used those letters to express their own thoughts, and the same thing took place when they received from the East an established pattern or form in art. To the Greeks, then, the sphinx is a monster, sometimes fierce and hostile, sometimes more kindly and gentle, who brings men and women to an early death; a spiritual force, like the Siren, which bears away souls. On a terra-cotta (Fig. 45) published by Stackelberg[139], a sphinx, this time with human arms, is represented as standing on the body of a dead youth. Some such group must have been before the mind of Aeschylus when he describes the shield of Parthenopaeus as adorned with a sphinx bearing in her claws a man of Thebes[140]. But in the sphinx of our engraving there is no sign of fierceness or ravening.

A sphinx probably stood on the top of one of the most interesting of early Athenian monuments, the stele of Lamptrae, of which I give a restoration (Fig. 46) by Dr. Winter[141]. It consisted of a thick slab with elegantly adorned cornice. On the top is a deep cutting, made to hold either the sphinx of the engraving, or, possibly, a portrait. Three sides of the slab bear low reliefs which are much injured, but the subjects of which are of interest. On the front is a young horseman, evidently the denizen of the tomb, who rides to the right on a horse, holding spear and shield: a second horse is represented by a mere doubling of the outlines. On one of the narrower sides stands the father of the horseman, in an attitude of grief: on the other side are two mourning women, no doubt his near relatives. To these mourning relatives we may find abundant parallels among the vases which represent the lying in state of the corpse and its removal to the place of burial[142].

It will be observed that the sphinx of the terra-cotta has human arms. This, and her female sex, bring her into close connexion with other female monsters, who also are winged and have the arms of women, the Harpies and the Sirens. Harpy and Siren are, in fact, not clearly distinguished in art; both are human-headed birds. And both are daemons destructive to human life, since, according to the legends, the Harpies were notable for foul and ravenous habits, the Sirens for a passion for the blood of the sailors whom they drew to them by the sweetness of their singing. As sphinx and Siren were thus both alike the ministers of early or untimely death, it will not greatly surprise us to find that on later monuments Sirens appear in the place of sphinxes. An instance from the museum at Athens is figured (Fig. 47)[143]; the woman-bird is human from head to waist, and is occupied with playing on her lyre. The tomb on which she stood perhaps belonged to some young girl or boy who perished by an untimely death.

Yet this is by no means certain. For the Siren of Attic tombs has greatly modified her nature under the kindly influence of Attic poetry and art. She came from the East, almost certainly as a malicious and devouring daemon. But in the ordinary custom of Attic tombs of the fifth and fourth centuries she becomes friendly and sympathetic. Sometimes, as in our example, she plays on a musical instrument. Sometimes she seems to express grief by the movements of her arms, beating her breast, or tearing her hair (see Pl. IV). A passage in the _Helena_[144] of Euripides represents the Sirens quite in the same sympathetic light. Helen, when wailing over the calamities at Troy calls on the Sirens, winged maidens, daughters of the earth, to come and join to her lamentations the music in which they were skilled.

The sphinx and the Siren may have originally found their place on tombs as ἀποτρόπαια, stone images of daemons to drive away the real daemons. But they retain their place on the tombs of a more refined age to express sympathy with the mourners, and to add a gentle touch of sorrow to the delightful domestic scenes which usually occupy the front of the monuments. Sophocles calls the Sirens the daughters of Phorcys, who sing the ways of Hades; it cannot therefore seem inappropriate that the tomb of Sophocles himself was adorned with the figure of one of these spirits.

More obscure devices are sometimes mingled with the acanthus over the tomb. In a few cases (Fig. 48) we find a pair of goats butting one another over a drinking-cup[145]. The cup seems to show that there must be here some Dionysiac reference or meaning, though what it is we cannot say. In one case a female figure (Fig. 49), the import of which is hard to determine[146], stands over a tomb, with the acanthus-leaves for a background.

It is not rare in most periods of Greek art to place on a tomb, instead of a portrait, the image of an animal, or some other device, the meaning of which has to be discovered by the spectator. Sometimes it contains an allusion, usually to his name. We engrave (Fig. 50) a stele on which is represented a lion in relief[147], and as the name of the person whom the tomb commemorates is Leon, the allusion is clear. We may compare an epigram of Simonides[148], written for a tomb, which runs thus:--

Most brave of beasts am I; of men most brave
He whom I guard, reclining on his grave.
Leon his name, yet save he had possessed
The lion nature, here I should not rest.

The traditional character of the lion, which was known to the Greeks rather from the _Iliad_ than from personal experience, made his figure a fitting adornment for the tombs of those who had died in battle for their country. Two gigantic lions still survive which adorned Greek tombs of historical celebrity. One stood over the remains of the Theban band which fell at Chaeroneia. The other, brought by Sir Charles Newton from Cnidus, probably marked the burial-place of the Athenians who fell in the battle of Cnidus, 394 B.C. The lioness on tombs seems to have scarcely had such dignified associations. On the tomb of Lais at Corinth stood a lioness, holding in her paws a ram[149], a symbol of the destructive force of the charms of the courtezan. A lioness without a tongue is said also to have stood on the tomb of Leaena, the Athenian courtezan who was a friend of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, and refused to betray the conspirators against the Tyrants.

A bull or cow sometimes also stood on a grave. In the British Museum is a bull of this class[150]. A heifer is said to have stood on the tomb of Boidion, concubine of Chares, who followed him in his expedition against Philip of Macedon[151]. On the grave of Diogenes of Sinope was a dog, to mark his cynic nature. But the dog which appears on the summit of a tomb in the Athenian cemetery need not have anything to do with cynicism. He may have his place as a trusty watcher and guardian; or he may be connected with the cultus of the dead, as we have already suggested. On the grave of Philager his teacher, Metellus Nepos, set a raven, which Cicero declared to be most appropriate to a master who taught how to fly better than how to speak[152]. Of course the raven, as the bird sacred to Apollo, was very appropriate on the tombs of learned men. In an epitaph in the _Anthology_[153] it is said that the grave of the poet Sophocles was surmounted by a satyr, holding in his hand a female mask. As, however, we are told by other authorities that a Siren stood on his tomb, we must suppose the satyr to have surmounted a cenotaph erected to the poet by his admirers in some other city than Athens. From another epigram[154] we learn that on the grave of Plato an eagle was sculptured: here we are clearly in the realm of poetic symbolism.