PART II HELLENISTIC AND ROMAN SCULPTURE CHAPTER V THE POST-ALEXANDRIAN ART OF THE EMPIRE OF SELEUCUS, THE KINGDOM OF PERGAMUS, RHODES, AND ALEXANDRIA The life story of an idea—the flower of the spiritual world—presents many analogies to the vital phenomena of the natural world. It is born, it lives and, maybe, it suffers the “sea-change” we call death. There are the weeks, months, or years which correspond to the time when the flowers are in their tiring rooms, “Fast busy, weaving, in those still retreats, The robes of rainbow dyes, which they must wear.” Then, with the idea as with the flower, comes the day when Spring, “Fast running o’er the drowsy earth, Taps at the closed portals of their homes, And calls them forth, fresh perfumed and new clad, To the festival of Nature.” And after the flower comes the seed and the scattering of the seed. The blossoming time of the idea which we saw in bud three centuries earlier—Hellenism—was the age during which Hellas consisted of a cluster of self-dependent cities in Greece, with their free colonies in Sicily, Italy, Asia Minor and elsewhere around the Mediterranean basin. Phidias, Praxiteles, and Lysippus were the sculptors of the age when Athens was still the centre of Greek intellectual thought and artistic action. The seedtime of Hellenism—its second phase—is that in which the Hellenic ideal is given to mankind. Magna Græcia is no longer self-centred and self-contained. The Greek takes upon himself the task of showing the barbarian world the value of that clarity of thought and expression which is at once peculiarly Hellenic and peculiarly sculpturesque. This second phase is the Hellenistic period. It roughly dates from 323 B.C., when Alexander died, until the Roman occupation of Syria in the first century before our era. During this period independent schools of sculpture arose beyond the Ægean Peninsula. These were animated in the main by the Hellenic spirit, but the resulting works show abundant traces of the alien influences among which the seed was planted and grew up. Previously, countries within reach of Greek influence turned to such a centre as Athens when they required artists of the first rank to design or decorate a temple or to adorn a public building. Moreover, Greek ideals had never penetrated into the vast countries ruled by Persia. But the union of the country between the Adriatic and the Indus into one Hellenic-Oriental empire, and the foundation of Greek cities throughout the length and breadth of the vast territory, changed all this. Workers in marble and bronze of the first rank arose at centres as remote from Greece as Pergamus and Alexandria. In Greece itself, the peculiar conditions which had produced Hellenism passed away. But a measure of the old artistic force remained, and though the Hellenistic sculptures possess definite characteristics of their own, evidence of connection with the original stock can still be traced.