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

CHAPTER XIII

later monuments of asia minor

The sepulchral monuments of Greece Proper are all on
a modest scale, and noteworthy on account of their beauty
of design and charm of sentiment rather than for their
magnificence or costliness. In order to find sumptuous tombs
erected by Greek architects and decorated by the great Greek
sculptors, we must cross over into Asia. We have in a previous
chapter spoken of some of the monuments of Asia Minor which
are contemporary with the earliest tombs of Greece.. We have
now to observe how Greece in the later fifth and the fourth
centuries paid back the artistic debt which she owed to Asia.
The custom of erecting magnificent memorials of departed
rulers long prevailed in all parts of Asia. And when Greece
stood without a rival in the arts of architecture and sculpture,
it was natural that the wealthy princes who planned the
monuments of their predecessors, or sometimes their own
destined tombs, should import Greek artists, and allow them
a free hand to produce great mausoleums, in which the art
of Greece registered in beautiful forms the affection of kinsfolk
and the veneration of subject populations.

Without at all intending to exhaust the subject, I propose
to give some account of a few of the most noteworthy of these
monuments, especially of the Nereid monument and the
Gyeulbashi heroon in Lycia, and the Mausoleum a Halicar-
nassus. These tombs I select not as typical of their age and