young girls holding dolls. The specimen engraved (Fig. 63) is from the tomb of one Aristomache[186]. Aristomache is about thirteen or fourteen years old; the undeveloped breast shows her not to have attained full womanhood. Her head, gently bent, is turned towards a little figure, no doubt intended for a terra-cotta statuette, which she holds in her right hand. This statuette might perhaps represent a deity; but the comparison of other reliefs[187], where a doll is certainly represented, makes us disposed to see one here also. Greek girls were allowed dolls until they married, when they often dedicated them, with balls and other girlish toys, to some female deity[188]. The presence of the doll, then, shows that Aristomache has not yet taken a husband and laid aside infants of terra-cotta for those of flesh. Finally, we engrave (Fig. 64) a characteristic figure of a priestess of Isis[189], from a tomb on which she appears, probably in company of her parents, but they have been broken away. In the stiff and formal dress of her calling she advances, bearing in her hands the sistrum and vase of the goddess who, of all the deities, was most closely associated with the future life. To her patronage and protection her priestess trusts for a prosperous voyage past the dangers of the last voyage, and a happy resting-place in Hades. The letters of the name, Alexandra, show that the monument belongs to the Roman age, though it is by no means wanting in charm. This figure is characteristic of the late age of Attic reliefs, but parallels to it at an earlier period are not wanting. For example, an Athenian tomb of the fourth century[190] shows us a lady seated, to whom a young girl brings a tympanum or drum, the special instrument of the Phrygian Goddess Cybele. And a metrical inscription, which accompanies the design, tells us that the deceased lady was a priestess of Cybele. Cybele, at an earlier time, filled in some respects nearly the same place in the religion of the Athenians which Isis took in Hellenistic days. The paths of the dead were under her guardianship, and she might be trusted to ensure to her votaries a place in the world below. CHAPTER X FAMILY GROUPS We next reach the ordinary family groups, a class of representations usual in the most beautiful and distinctive of the Athenian stelae. It is these which have captivated a long series of travellers and artists from Goethe onwards; and it is these which naturally rise before the imagination when the cemeteries of Athens are spoken of. Goethe has observed that the wind which blows from the tombs of the ancients comes with gentle breath as over a hill of roses. And there is no other series of monuments which seems to take us so readily into the daily life of the Greeks and to make us feel that they were men and women of like nature with ourselves, no longer cold and classic, but full of the warm blood and the gentle affections of ordinary humanity.