Page:Palestine Exploration Fund - Quarterly Statement for 1894.djvu/153

Rh last appealing words of faithful Clitus echoed on within his conscious spirit, "This hand of mine saved thee, O Alexander." His bitter remorse would have driven him to suicide, but those about him now saved him from himself. For three whole days he remained fasting, mourning, and accusing himself as the murderer of his friends. At last, through the sculptor's art, those inner chidings of his conscience would sting him less acutely, and the anguish of his soul be somewhat relieved, when his love and gratitude should find utterance, not in fleeting words and momentary cries of self-reproach, but in a monument at once fair and lasting. May we not conjecture that this masterpiece of Greek art was conceived and completed in memory and in honour of him whom he lamented with so deep a compunction? a monument whereon is figured in the centre of that group the arm uplifted once to stay the hand of the enemy, and to save the life of the Chief.

I have ventured to infer on these grounds that the scene represented in this composition is that of the Battle of Granicus. The position and attitude of Alexander remind us of a like portraiture of him in the well known mosaic brought from Pompeii and preserved now in the Museum at Naples, which probably represents the Battle of Issus fought between Alexander and Darius. The mode of treatment was apparently typical. I have myself recognised it on a monument of the Volumni—an Etruscan family—preserved in the sepulchral vaults near Perugia, a city of Tuscany, Etruria of old. The respective attitudes of two engaged in a hand-to-hand fight—a Greek and a Mede—are the same as in the composition before us. The Etruscans, we may believe, received their model from their neighbours, Greek colonists in Italy, settled in the Southern Province, which was known accordingly as "Magna Græcia."

It is not known either when or by whom the sarcophagus, called Alexander's, was prepared. After the death of their Chief, the disputes among his surviving Generals delayed the official funeral for two years, and it is not probable that any one during that period of confusion t.>ok thought for the monument.

The sarcophagus was, as I am inclined to think, made ready during the lifetime of Alexander—not long before his death—and as he permitted no one but Lysippus to execute his likeness in sculpture and only Apelles to paint it, then, if it can be proved that Alexander's portrait is upon it, none other than Lysippus was the artist who designed it. Some inequality, however, has been remarked in the execution of the design, as if some part of the work had been entrusted to an apprentice. This wonderful masterpiece is, to a certain degree, imperfect; the requisite harmony of the whole composition is somewhat wanting. We see before us, as we may suppose, the production either of Lysippus or of a pupil or pupils of his School; or it may be a copy in marble of a work of the Master in bronze. But, whoever executed or designed the battle-scene, these characteristics of the art of Lysippus are to be noticed, such as Pliny describes : elegance, precision in details and portraiture, as well as