Gods and Men

No one admires the relics of ancient Greece more deeply, or more acquisitively, than the British. For a look at a Greek art exhibition in the Royal Academy of Arts, 2,500 Londoners a day plunked down a shilling each. They got their shilling's worth. Mostly lent by private collectors--including 17 19th-Century paintings from King George's collection--the exhibition covered Greek art from an onion-smooth, onion-shaped head, carved about 3000 B.C., to a painting of Greek resistance fighters of World War II. The Royal Academy show did not compare with the Elgin marbles in the British Museum, but it seemed a wonderful enough world of happy, half-naked, carefree athletes to give most visitors "a feeling of serenity."

Sun's Mother. It was not surprising that The Goddess of Crete (known variously as the Triple Goddess, the Earth Mother, the Snake Goddess--see cut) was the hit of the show: she had a long, ancient history of success.

She was only six inches high, and at first glance her flounced skirt, wasp waist, bare breasts and triple crown looked comically ahead of the fashion. She had roamed the Mediterranean with Cretan pirates. She was reportedly worshiped from Asia Minor to Spain as the eternally virgin mother of all things, the new moon, full moon and old moon, whose baby boy (the sun) went down to death each year. All life was supposed to flow from her inexhaustible breasts.*

The liveliest sculpture in the show, a bronze athlete somersaulting onto a bull's broad back (1600 B.C., see cut), reminded some visitors of the Minotaur legend. In the labyrinthine palace at Knossos was a bull ring where Minoan youths and maidens displayed their superiority to the sacred beasts. Captives from abroad probably proved with their lives that it was not really so simple to go up against an angry bull barehanded.

By Homer's time, the bloody, bull-roaring rites of Knossos were a memory, and the hell-for-leather chariot cavalry and iron-pointed spears of the savage Dorians (the last great wave of northern barbarians to inundate Greece) had driven the Goddess into hiding. Their god, and Homer's, was her rebellious son, Zeus--who later got an ancestry of his own.

Zeus's Olympian family, crudely hacked out of oak and olive trunks, took possession of every sacred grove during the next four dark centuries (1100 B.C.-700 B.C.). But not until the Dorians began cutting down their oaks to build ships did marble and bronze bring immortality to their gods.

Greek ships brought back good ideas from every Mediterranean port. The idea of the Griffon (600 B.C., see cut) came from Asia Minor. Egypt contributed to the cold, finely modeled formalism of Youth from Andros. But the linear energy of The Cottenham Relief, a horse and horseman, was closer to real life than anything the Egyptians produced (see cuts). To the Greeks, gods were fairly human, and human strength and grace were godly characteristics. At the roots their religion remained anthropocentric--man was the center of the universe and the measure of all things.

Moonlight's People. By the time Pericles became chairman of Athens' general assembly in 460 B.C., the pallid, inanimate population of the Acropolis might almost have been mistaken, by moonlight, for real people. Sculptures like Aphrodite (see cut) made the Pygmalion myth credible.

Visitors would search in vain the smiling, empty-eyed statues of the gods for some trace of the crushing power displayed by the gods of that day's literature, in the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Greece's playwrights had learned to limn the impersonal Fates; Greece's sculptors went on modeling the gods in the image of man. Later statues, like Epicurus and Head of Aphrodite (see cuts), displayed a chill perfection which was more than human and less than divine. They might just as well have been Hollywood stars. Little about them was awe-inspiring--except their beauty.

* For a recent mythological novel in which she figures largely, see Robert Graves's Hercules, My Shipmate (TIME, Oct. 15).

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