For thirty years after Ægospotami, Sparta, with the help of Persia,
ruled Greece. After the peace of Callias in 371 B.C. came the
domination of Pheræ and Thebes, and the military supremacy of
Epaminondas. During all this time Athens looked on. Her commerce
had suffered little. The wealth of her capitalists had rather been
increased than decreased by the abandonment of the luxury of empire.
But if the material difference was small, the psychological difference
was immense. Whereas Demosthenes could cry of the Athenian who had
fought at Salamis, that he believed himself “not born to his father and
mother alone, but also to his country,” the State in the fourth century
came to be regarded as a joint stock corporation, to be bled for the
benefit of its most noisy members. Mercenaries took the place of
citizen soldiers in the army of the State. Regardless of the necessity
for providing against emergencies, the citizens voted themselves
largesses from the public funds. A popular statesman was the man who
lessened the cost of public administration, and so could distribute
ever increasing dividends of festival money to the proletariat.
This new regard for the individual was entirely foreign to the ideals
which had dominated Hellas fifty years earlier. Each man began to
realise that apart from citizenship there was an entity which also
claimed attention, an “I” with passions and emotions which required
satisfaction and called for artistic expression. The sculptor no
longer rejected those subjects which derived their interest from the
successful expression of individual emotion.
THE AGE OF SCOPAS (400 B.C.-350 B.C.)
Scopas was the first artist to realise the new necessity laid upon
the plastic arts. He was the chief architect of his day, and in his
work we can trace the effect of the new ideas before sculpture was
divorced in great measure from architecture. We have already mentioned
his association with the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus—one of the “Seven
Wonders.” The Carian ruler Mausolus died in 353 B.C., leaving his
widow Artemisia to rule. She determined to erect a great monument to
his memory, and impressed the best known artists of Magna Græcia into
her service for the purpose. The restoration by C. R. Cockerell in
the Mausoleum Room at the British Museum, or, still better, that by
Oldfield (_The Antiquary_, vol. liv., pp. 273-362), give some idea of
the great pyramidical building, glowing with colour, which stood on a
lofty basement by the harbour side. The whole was surmounted by a great
chariot group by Pythis, containing the heroic figure of Mausolus,
possibly accompanied by Artemisia, after the fashion of Zeus and Hera
in the chariot of the gods.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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