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

CHAPTER X

family groups

We next reach the ordinary family groups, a class of
representations usual in the most beautiful and distinctive
of the Athenian stelae. It is these which have captivated
a long series of travellers and artists from Goethe onwards;
and it is these which naturally rise before the imagination
when the cemeteries of Athens are spoken of. Goethe has
observed that the wind which blows from the tombs of the
ancients comes with gentle breath as over a hill of roses.
And there is no other series of monuments which seems to
take us so readily into the daily life of the Greeks and to make
us feel that they were men and women of like nature with our-
selves, no longer cold and classic, but full of the warm blood
and the gentle affections of ordinary humanity.

It is the natural pathos and the artistic charm of the
family groups which adorn the majority of the tombs of ancient
Athens, which strongly impress all visitors to that beautiful
city, even visitors to whom most of the works of Greek
sculpture do not convey any strong emotion. There is
scarcely any one, however hardened by Puritanic training or
the ubiquitous ugliness of modern surroundings against what is
simple and true and lovely in art, who does not feel, through
the hard shell of Philistinism, some touchiugs of sympathy and
delight, if he spends a morning in the Cerameicus, or an after-
noon in the sepulchral rooms of the National Museum. The