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 Halicarnassus. These tombs I select not as typical of their age and country, but rather as exceptional. They represent the almost complete victory in Asia not only of Greek art, but even of Greek ideas. Side by side with these monuments there were erected in Asia Minor, and especially in Lycia, tombs in which native tendencies, such as we have seen in an earlier chapter were still dominant. Sir Charles Fellows brought from Lycia some tombs of this character, and casts of the reliefs of others which remain in their site. The most interesting representation is from a tomb at Cadyanda[291], on which we see banqueting scenes, dancing figures, a group of four girls playing with knucklebones, and so forth, with bilingual inscriptions in Greek and Lycian. But to comment on these scenes as if they were of Hellenic origin would lead us far astray. Like the paintings and reliefs of Etruria, they represent a peculiar and lost phase of civilization, thinly veneered by the art and thought of Hellas.