Page:Travels & discoveries in the Levant (1865) Vol. 1.djvu/47

Rh dying away into the ground of the relief rather abruptly. It was probably finished with colour, and the rail must have been also coloured, as it is at present hardly distinguishable. So with the shield of the warrior on the left. This is represented in a side-view, the outline not being completed on the side most distant from the eye. The third class of sepulchral reliefs in the Theseium are small slabs, the subject of which is generally the well-known funeral feast, or leave-taking. Of these there are but few in the Theseium, and they seem of a later period than the rest. One of these reliefs probably commemorates some Athenian matron who had died in childbirth. The principal figure is seated in a chair, and holds a pyxis on her knees; her attitude is that of a person fainting from exhaustion. Before her stands a veiled female figure, perhaps the goddess Eileithya, who advances her right hand, as if in token of sympathy. Between these two, and in the back-ground, is a third female figure, holding in her arms a new-born babe, wrapped up in linen, on which the seated figure places her hand.

These sepulchral reliefs have a peculiar interest for us, because in the scenes which they represent, and in the sorrow which they so tenderly commemorate, we have a genuine expression of the feelings of the individual, which in Athenian art and literature are seldom permitted to have free utterance. Though their appreciation of domestic life was probably inferior to our own, it is not to be supposed that the Athenians were incapable of the affections and emotions natural to the human heart, because in