The Museum of Berlin has acquired, from the Sabouroff Collection, two interesting statues of women, seated in an attitude of grief, which almost certainly belong to tombs, and challenge comparison with the ‘Penelope.’ One is figured in Pl. VIII. Their date is probably the fourth century; but they certainly do not come from the hands of the great sculptors of that century; the work of them is poor, and their style has been well termed that of domestic art. Their dress is not that of the Athenian lady, but that of the maidservants who so often appear on the stelae in attendance on their mistress[166], a dress of coarse material with long sleeves reaching to the wrist. They are clearly mourning slave-girls, who were placed on the grave of their mistress to commemorate her wealth and her kindness to her dependants. We next approach the rich series of sepulchral reliefs, in which, as we have already shown, three periods are to be distinguished: first, that before the Persian War; second, the fifth and fourth centuries; and third, the later age. In this chapter we deal with the representations which are primarily portraits, leaving more complicated scenes for the next chapter. Among the best-known of the works of early Athenian art is the stele of Aristion, which was found in 1838 in the midst of a tumulus at Velanideza in Attica. Simple and in details clumsy, the figure of the warrior (Pl. IX A) on that stele is singularly pleasing as a whole, and the unrivalled eye of Brunn saw in it, at a time when very little was known as to the early art of Athens, the whole promise of the Attic art of the future, more especially in the way in which it occupied the field of the relief, and was wrought into a composition which showed in all its _naïveté_ a fine sense of proportion and of the relation of the part to the whole. As if on a parade, the soldier stands in helmet and cuirass, grasping his spear, and waiting the word of command. The hair and the right hand especially show the limitations imposed on the artist by the undeveloped character of his technique. Yet the relief is justly a favourite with lovers of art. One of its charms our plate imperfectly reproduces, the delicate remains of colouring, which may still be traced on the marble, and which are repeated on the casts in our cast collections. From the same cemetery as this work of the sculptor Aristocles comes another stele adorned, not with relief, but [Illustration: PLATE IX _Page 140_ ]