MISS HARRISON ON PAUSANIAS.* Miss HARRISON has made herself, by
long and loving study, a competent authority upon Attic vase.painting, and her papers on this subject in the Journal of Hellenic Studies are neither few nor unimportant. Her previous books also, and especially that on the Myths of the Odyssey, prove her a zealous student of primitive Hellenic culture and beliefs. We are glad that one so well qualified should have undertaken the present task of setting before English readers the mythology and monuments of ancient Athens.
In so doing, Miss Harrison takes Pausanias as her guide, for in spite of the vigorous attack which has of late been made upon the old traveller's good faith, she believes in him still. Dry he is, and brief ; he fills many chapters with Roman wars and Macedonian Kings, which we would gladly exchange for a word or two more about a frieze or a fresco. At times he may have dressed up his diary and notes by help of previous writers on art, and in his Attica, which unfortunately forms his first book, he has not had time to warm up to his subject. But there he is,—our only authority; and each new excavation tends to confirm his credit. The starting-point, therefore, of this volume is a translation of selected portions of Pausanias by Mrs. Verrall ; these are as nearly perfect in style and accuracy as can be. The rendering of the frequent word xtigrat (of statues, &c.) might perhaps be improved, and one or two passages might be more literally rendered without sacrifice of elegance.
Upon these texts Miss Harrison hangs a delightful com- mentary, dealing with all the main points of Athenian topography, and explaining with admirable clearness the results of the excavations made and still being made by the Greek Government. In these discoveries no scholar has borne so brilliant a part as Dr. Dorpfeld, and he has placed all his information at Miss Harrison's service. Accordingly, there is no book—except perhaps the excellent Guide-Johanne for Athens, re-edited by M. Haussoullier—which can be com- pared with the present as summarising the latest facts and views of Athenian archteology. From her wide and intimate acquaintance with vase-paintings, Miss Harrison is able to place before us, by vivid description and plentiful woodcuts, replicas, or echoes at the least, of the groups and figures noted by Pausanias. But she is by no means content to be a commentator on Pausanias, or the writer of a manual on Athenian art. All else with her is subordinate and subsidiary to the criticism of ancient Attic myths and worships. She is bent on going behind the orthodox Hellenic pantheon, and even the Homeric theology, and recovering for us the old local cults that lingered in the several Attic demes, and the primitive forms of ritual which either gave rise to curious explanatory legends, or were but clumsily adapted to the more developed and centralised worships of later Athens. Her account of the worship of Asklepios, of the " democratic " legend of Theseus, and of the transformations of the story of Cephalus and Procris, are good examples of her method. Sometimes we feel that she is pushing her favourite study too far ; she seems more interested in Erechtheus and Erichthonios than in Athene herself; and in adducing the evidence of vase- paintings for the existence and development of myths, she lays too much weight upon the argumentunt a silentio.
• Mythohigy and Monuments of Ancient Athens r being a Translation of a Portion of the "Attica" of Pausanias By Margaret de G. Verrall With Introductory Essay and Archmo'ogical Commentary by Jane E. Harrison. London: Mac- millan and Co. 1990.
We note some slips. The tripods which gave their name to the Street of Tripods were never dedicated after dramatic, but only after dithyrambic victories. Also, Pausanias meant what he said when he stated that these tripods " enclosed " (zEpiixorrEi) certain famous statues : one such was the Farm, or rather Satyr, of Praxiteles, which stood within the legs and beneath the cauldron of a tripod, as under a canopy. We think, also, the author's interpretation of Pausanias i., 27, §1, as referring to the Old Temple whose foundations have recently been discovered by Dr. Dorpfeld, is too forced to be satisfactory. Other verbal errors should disappear from a second edition, Leukippidz for the daughters of Leukippos, Akysilaos, Nisuros, and Propylma with a singular verb. Miss Harrison's style, which is always delightfully fresh and lively, at times becomes almost too vivacious (pp. xlii., lx.) ; and in a beautiful passage on p. 467, she employs a Scripture phrase in a way that might pain a sensitive reader. Her in- formation is usually brought up to date, but in defending the bona fides of Pausanias she is not aware of the elaborate defence of the traveller published this year by Dr. Gurlitt (Ueber Pausanias), nor does she note that a fragment is still in existence of the inscribed base (p. 524) of the chariot which commemorated the Athenian victory over the Chal- cidians and Bceotians between 510 and 505 B.C. The base was smashed to pieces by the Persians B.C. 480, and was restored by the Athenians soon after. This restoration, of which a fragment still remains (Corpus Laser. Att., i., No. 334), Herodotus saw and described (v., 77) ; but a corner of the broken original base, employed by the builders of Pericles as mere "filling," was actually discovered in 1887, and described by Professor Kirchhoff in the Sitzungsberichte of the Berlin Academy of that year. Omissions, however, like these (and they are very few) in no way detract from the value of a work which will be welcomed equally by the scholar and by the general educated reader.
Here is Miss Harrison's account of the evolution of the art-type of Athene Parthenos :—
" Pheidias, in his earlier days, made a statue of the militant Athena, in which, if we may trust the rather vague copies that appear on coins, he seems to have been feeling his way from the old Polias type to the new Parthenos. Her shield was on her arm, but her spear stood upright; it was not levelled in direct attack as in the old type, nor, in all probability, was the goddess striding forward. The shield, as in the Parthenos figure, was richly carved. Taking, then, the bronze figure by Pheidias (later called Promachos) as a transition stage, what amount of actual invention was there in the Parthenos ? Very little ; she just relaxed her pose, laid down her shield, and held her spear she had already lowered more lightly. The splendid accessories, the adorning of the helmet with gryphons and pegasoi and sphinx, were his ; but the main conception, the standing goddess with spear and shield, was, as it should be, of the old traditional Polias. This nowise detracts from the genius of Pbeidias ; reverently to keep the old yet add the new, to touch so little and yet transfigure so much, this is the proper quality of genius."
The whole chapter devoted to the Parthenon and its sculptures is a delightful and scholarly account of recent discovery and criticism, and will send many a reader to study the Elgin marbles afresh. But the great museum of Greek art is Athens itself, which at this moment teems with the interest of ever new discovery. And the impression conveyed by this book cannot be more eloquently conveyed than in these words. from the preface :—
" The record we have to read is the record of what we have lost. That loss, but for Pausanias, we should never have realised. He, and he only, gives us the real live [sic] picture of what the art of Ancient Athens was. Even the well-furnished classical scholar pictures the Acropolis as a stately hill approached by the Propyltea, crowned by the austere beauty of the Parthenon, and adds to his picture perhaps the remembrance of some manner of Erechtheion, a vision of colourless marble, of awe, restraint, severe selection. Only Pausanias tells him of the colour and life, the realism, the quaintness, the forest of votive statues, the gold, the ivory, the bronze, the paintings on the walls, the golden lamps, the brazen palm-tree, the strange old Hermes hidden in the myrtle leaves, the ancient stone on which Silenus sat, the smoke-grimed images of Athene, Diitrephes all pierced with arrows, Kleoitas with his silver nails, the heroes peeping from the Trojan horse, Anacreon singing in his cups ; all these, if we would picture the truth and not our own imaginations, we must learn of, and learn of from Pausanias. But if the record of our loss is a sad one, it has its meed of sober joy; it is the record also of what—if it be even a little—in these latter days we have refound."
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