DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.9187#0303
GREEK SARCOPHAGI
247
ordinary subject on the stelae of Athens and elsewhere. It
may be that the son is setting out on a military expedition
which brought his father fame and increase of territory.
On the fourth side of the tomb, father and son are asrain
prominent. It is a hunting scene. In the midst is a panther
turning to bay, which father and son charge at the same
moment on horseback from one side and the other. On the
left a young horseman has struck down a stag, and to balance
him on the right is represented a horse galloping away in
a panic, having thrown his rider, whom he drags with him.
There can be little doubt that all these scenes are out of
the life of the person to whom the tomb is devoted, and in
all his son appears with him, very probably the successor who
had the sarcophagus made. The subsidiary figures may be
either younger sons or merely attendants. Unfortunately we
have no historical data for the assignment of the tomb to any
particular ruler of Sidon.
M. Reinach insists with justice on the importance of
this tomb as a monument of the great art of Ionia of the
fifth century, an art of which little has come down to us, but of
the splendour of which we can judge from the statements
of ancient writers. Our sarcophagus lies half-way between
the reliefs of Assyria, recording the great deeds of the kings,
in an exaggerated and ideal historical record, and the
sculpture of purely Greek monuments such as the Mausoleum,
where the battles of Greeks and Amazons, of Lapiths and
Centaurs, take the place of the contests of ordinary men. The
Lycian Tomb and that of the Mourning Women belong almost
entirely to the idealizing tendency of Greek sculpture already
spoken of, which translated the present into the past and the
human into the heroic. With the age of Alexander the his-
toric tendency once more prevails, since the deeds of Alexander
and his contemporaries might well seem pitched at a level quite
as high as the mythic exploits of Herakles and Theseus.
247
ordinary subject on the stelae of Athens and elsewhere. It
may be that the son is setting out on a military expedition
which brought his father fame and increase of territory.
On the fourth side of the tomb, father and son are asrain
prominent. It is a hunting scene. In the midst is a panther
turning to bay, which father and son charge at the same
moment on horseback from one side and the other. On the
left a young horseman has struck down a stag, and to balance
him on the right is represented a horse galloping away in
a panic, having thrown his rider, whom he drags with him.
There can be little doubt that all these scenes are out of
the life of the person to whom the tomb is devoted, and in
all his son appears with him, very probably the successor who
had the sarcophagus made. The subsidiary figures may be
either younger sons or merely attendants. Unfortunately we
have no historical data for the assignment of the tomb to any
particular ruler of Sidon.
M. Reinach insists with justice on the importance of
this tomb as a monument of the great art of Ionia of the
fifth century, an art of which little has come down to us, but of
the splendour of which we can judge from the statements
of ancient writers. Our sarcophagus lies half-way between
the reliefs of Assyria, recording the great deeds of the kings,
in an exaggerated and ideal historical record, and the
sculpture of purely Greek monuments such as the Mausoleum,
where the battles of Greeks and Amazons, of Lapiths and
Centaurs, take the place of the contests of ordinary men. The
Lycian Tomb and that of the Mourning Women belong almost
entirely to the idealizing tendency of Greek sculpture already
spoken of, which translated the present into the past and the
human into the heroic. With the age of Alexander the his-
toric tendency once more prevails, since the deeds of Alexander
and his contemporaries might well seem pitched at a level quite
as high as the mythic exploits of Herakles and Theseus.