Gardner, Percy: Sculptured tombs of Hellas (London, 1896)

CHAPTER IX

athens and greece. portraits

In the Spartan group of sepulchral monuments we found
one of the two fountain-heads of Greek sepulchral reliefs,
springing directly out of the ancestor-worship of the Dorian
race. For the other main source, which is much less religious
and more artistic in origin, we turn to Athens and to Ionia. It
arises out of the custom of setting up portraits of the dead.

The earliest sepulchral monuments which reach us from
Attica, setting aside the merely decorative or symbolical sphinx,
are portraits of the dead. In these portraits there is something
of artistic and something of religious purpose. As we shall
presently see, no hard and fast line can be drawn between the
image used in ancestor-worship and the portrait which is merely
a memorial. In fact we may see two lines of tendency taking
their rise in the mere image of the dead. The one tendency
is to bring it nearer to the images of the gods; to identify the
departed ancestor or friend with Hades, the ruler of the world
of shades. The other tendency is to render the portrait a
characteristic memorial of the life which is past. In almost all
existing sculptural remains we may see something of both tenden-
cies, and it is by no means easy to determine what features
in them properly belong to the past life, and what features to
the life which begins with death. At Sparta, as we have seen,
there is almost no reference to the past. In Lycia, past
and future are closely blended. At Athens, and in several