Ancient cemetery of Cerameicus

There is one aspect of Attic art, and one of its most impressive types, which can be properly seen only in Athens itself. This is the monuments of the dead: of which many stand in the ancient cemetery of Cerameicus, and many are collected in the National Museum. In their pensive and exquisite pathos, in their reserve, in their dignity and human affection, in their manly simplicity— in frank, pure, social, and humane acceptance of death in all its pathos and all its solemnity, these Athenian monuments may be taken as the highest type of funeral emblems that the world possesses. They present an aspect of Death pensive, affectionate, social, peaceful, and beautiful. There is nothing of the ghastly and cruel symbolism of the Middle Ages, nothing of the stately and pompous mausoleums dear to Roman pride, nothing of the impersonal fatuity of our modern gravestones.

The family group is gathered to take its last farewell of the departing. He or she is not stretched on a bed or bier, not sleeping, not wasted by sickness, not ecstatically transfigured. They sit or recline in all their health and beauty, sweetly smiling, as a loved one who is about to take a distant voyage. The family grouped around are thoughtful, serious, not sad, loving and tender, but not overcome with grief; they too take a long farewell of the traveller about to depart. At his feet lies a favourite dog, some bird or cherished pet, and sometimes in an obscure corner a little slave may be seen howling for his master. But only slaves are allowed to weep. Sometimes the young warrior is mounted on his steed, sometimes is seen charging in the midst of battle. But, for the most part, all is ideal beauty, peace, and love.

Heraldic emblems

There is here no vain pomp, no arrogance of wealth and power, heraldic emblems, swords, coronets, and robes of state walking tours ephesus. Neither is there the horror or the ecstasy, the impossible angels, the grotesque demons, the skulls or the palm branches with which we moderns have been wont to bedizen our funeral monuments. It recalls to us our poet’s In Memoriam — a work too of calm and ideal art — towards the latest phase of the poet’s bereavement. It seems as if the sculptor spoke to us in the words of the late Laureate: —

‘ No longer caring to embalm

In dying songs a dead regret,

But like a statue solid set,

And moulded in colossal calm.’

Impressions — first impressions of Athens throng on the mind so closely and so vividly, that they are not easily reduced to order. A visit to Athens is worth the study of a hundred books, whether classical or recent. Any man who has sailed round Greece from the Ionian Sea to the Aigean, and up the Gulf of Corinth, and thence to that of Aigina and Eleusis, at once perceives that Greece was destined by nature to be, not so much the country of a settled nation, as the mere pied-a-terre of a wonderful race whose mission was to penetrate over the whole Mediterranean and its shores.