feathers: on her head is a round crown. The history of the sphinx has been traced by Milchhoefer[138] and other writers. Its origin is certainly to be sought in Egypt, in which country sphinxes were set up in lines as guardians of the temples. The Egyptian sphinx is unwinged and male, as the beard which it commonly wears clearly shows; but when the people of Asia Minor and Syria imitated the form, they added wings. The significance of the monster was in Egypt quite vague; and it was probably even more vague in Asia. Thus when the Greeks adopted the strange form, it cannot have brought with it much meaning. They had to give it a meaning of their own. In fact, it was quite characteristic in the Greeks that they [Illustration: FIG. 43 B. ANTHEMION.] [Illustration: FIG. 44. SPHINX OF SPATA.] [Illustration: FIG. 45. TERRA-COTTA: SPHINX AND YOUTH.] borrowed forms and gave to them their own meaning. They took the forms and sounds of the letters of the alphabet from the Phoenicians, but used those letters to express their own thoughts, and the same thing took place when they received from the East an established pattern or form in art. To the Greeks, then, the sphinx is a monster, sometimes fierce and hostile, sometimes more kindly and gentle, who brings men and women to an early death; a spiritual force, like the Siren, which bears away souls. On a terra-cotta (Fig. 45) published by Stackelberg[139], a sphinx, this time with human arms, is represented as standing on the body of a dead youth. Some such group must have been before the mind of Aeschylus when he describes the shield of Parthenopaeus as adorned with a sphinx bearing in her claws a man of Thebes[140]. But in the sphinx of our engraving there is no sign of fierceness or ravening. [Illustration: FIG. 46. STELE OF LAMPTRAE, RESTORED.] A sphinx probably stood on the top of one of the most interesting of early Athenian monuments, the stele of Lamptrae, of which I give a restoration (Fig. 46) by Dr. Winter[141]. It consisted of a thick slab with elegantly adorned cornice. On the top is a deep cutting, made to hold either the sphinx of the engraving, or, possibly, a portrait. Three sides of the slab bear low reliefs which are much injured, but the subjects of which are of interest. On the front is a young horseman, evidently the denizen of the tomb, who rides to the right on a horse, holding spear and shield: a second horse is represented by a mere doubling of the outlines. On one of the narrower sides stands the father of the horseman, in an attitude of grief: on the other side are two mourning women, no doubt his near relatives. To these mourning relatives we may find abundant parallels among the vases which represent the lying in state of the corpse and its removal to the place of burial[142].