Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 14, 1903.djvu/300

 274 Greek Votive Offerings.

assertion that no such portrait exists, without asking, Why? " I take it," says Dr. Rouse, '' that to dedicate a portrait as sucli would have seemed the height of arrogance to a Greek, as the story of Pheidias and the shield of Athena implies, and as Demosthenes implies (Dem. Aristocr. 686)

in an age when the thing was common It

was no Greek, but the Egyptian Amasis, who sent two portraits of himself to the Argive Heraeum, and one to Gyrene (Hdt. 2. 182) ; it was the Asiatic Chares of Teichiusa who placed his own statue at Miletus {I.G.A. 488). These were the kind of men who would think their own image an ornament to any shrine : a peck of pride to a speck of piety" (p. 372). But why should it have been deemed the height of arrogance for a o^randee to avow himself the servitor of a god? Surely the greater the grandee, the greater the honour done to the god. Had the Greeks thought otherwise, the temple officials would simply have refused to admit the portraits of Amasis and Chares. The story of Pheidias and the shield of Athena is not in point : the charge brought against the artist was not that he had dedicated a portrait of himself to the goddess, but that he had presumed to introduce his likeness into the Amazonomachia on her shield — a very different matter. The passage of Demos- thenes also misses the mark : it merely proves that the custom of honouring particular generals with a bronze statue was increasing with the individualism of the a^e. Dr. Rouse himself cites portrait-statues of Alcibiades, Lysander and his captains, etc., dedicated in the Heraeum (Paus. 6. 18. 2, 6. 3. 15). These he explains away as due to "colossal vanity" or as " the earliest examples of honorific statues." But he admits that "under the Solonian con- stitution the nine archons swore [in case of perjury or negligence] to dedicate a golden statue, which from the words used (Aristot. Const. Ath. 7) appears to have been meant for a portrait" fp. 315), that in the fourth century