Part 3

“The stretcher had been injured. All were excited. Hurry, the Turks may return in force! That stretcher is no good. Put rollers under the flat of the block. Pull on the ropes! _Attention!_ The bust is slipping! _Malheur_, she’s on her back? _Tant pis!_! Now, my children, yet another effort! Good old long-boat! Embark! It was hot work, but she’s ours. Best say as little as possible about it. Monsieur le Vice-Consul, you will please to arrange the settlement of this annoying episode diplomatically!

“Negotiations lasted two days. Finally the Turkish brig ceded to the French the lower part of the statue; but when the ‘Estafette’ sailed for Piraeus. Venus bore irreparable wounds.

“So they say. Such is said to be the secret--or part of it. Among fragments of marble gathered up after the battle of the beach were debris of her arms--in particular of the beautiful left arm which MM. d’Urville and Matterer had seen entire on her shoulder, lifting the triumphal apple!”

The report of M. Ferry makes the trip from Paris to Melos worth while and may have pleased the learned president of the republic, M. Thiers. The American reporter’s account throws light on the theory suggested by the results of M. Ferry’s trip:

“Venus Victrix was received in Paris by the Count de Clarac, curator of the Louvre, then Royal Museum. Did he know of the fight? Perhaps. Was it to forestall a possible hint that a French war-ship could attack and plunder the war-ship of a friendly power in profound peace, or to prevent a dream of the impossible possibility that the marvelous statue could have been mutilated in any French hands, by accident or otherwise, that he assumes Venus to have been dug up [in its present condition]?”

The official report of Count de Clarac when the statue was received at the Louvre runs as follows:

“Bust and front have scarcely suffered from the ravages of time. They keep the velvety skin of a master of the great Greek period, who, after polishing, once more skimmed the chisel over the perfect work. But here and there are slight lesions, due, probably, to careless pickstrokes in digging her up. The shoulders have been much damaged, traces of cords indicate that she was dragged along the shore toward the Turkish brig, and in that fatal passage the shoulders and haunches were scraped and worn, several finger breadths being taken off the former.”

The fertile imagination of the account changes the Greek brig “Galaxidion” into a Turkish man-of-war so as to impress the reader that there is a diplomatic secret to be hidden which might involve the French authorities into a war with Turkey. The cause, being about the goddess of love, would be quite romantic but a war is serious enough to make the authorities wish to avoid it and prefer to cast a shadow of mystery over the whole affair.

We shall see later that the mutilations of the statue need not have originated from careless handling on the part of the French marines when they took possession of the statue.

Here is another passage which describes the nature of the injuries of the Venus statue without, however, being proof of the battle of the beach:

“The shoulder has been broken, not merely scraped and worn, by dragging. And the author of another report, M. Lange, chief restorer of the Royal Museum in 1820, specialist of vast experience and a workman to boot, notes certain exfoliations or scrapings of the left arm fragments ‘running straight up on to the shoulder of the statue, and found also on the back of the hand fragment, which show that these different parts formed one with the shoulder; and these straight scratches could only have been made, all following the same direction, when the left arm was entire!’”

This quotation is made to prove that the arm was still connected with the statue before it was scraped along the ground, but may not this scraping have taken place before it was hidden in the cave?

The Louvre’s acquisition of the Venus of Milo proved in some respects a misfortune to the Count de Clarac. Charles Lenormant, the archeologist, in a contribution to the _Correspondant_ in 1854 mercilessly attacked the director of the Louvre and his staff, saying (as reported in the _Record-Herald_):

“I have always believed that from the beginning to better accredit a production which is its own best proofs, they designedly caused to disappear accessories which might derange the idea that they had just conquered a _chef-d’oeuvre_ of the grand epoch of Greek art. Thus, besides the arms, they suppressed the debris of an inscription.”

Can we entertain the suspicion that the authorities of the Louvre purposely destroyed the inscription assumed to have been found with the debris of the Venus of Milo and that they suppressed facts or the knowledge of facts which might bear testimony against their cherished theories as to the provenience of their favorite piece of art? Scarcely! The inscription, as we have seen, was doubtless lost because nobody cared for it, for there was no evidence that it belonged to the statue.

WHAT THE FACTS REVEAL.

Of all the statues of classical antiquity the Venus of Milo is the greatest favorite, not only with the public at large but with art critics as well, and it is strange that the statue has acquired this popularity, for it is by no means perfect in conception nor has it been made by any one of the famous artists. The sculptor is either not known at all or, if the pedestal bearing the name of Agesandros or Alexandros actually belonged to the statue, he was a man unknown to fame, and it seems difficult to point out the reasons which give to this most badly wrecked piece of marble its peculiar charm.

We cannot help thinking that the artist worked after a living model and followed details pretty faithfully. It has been noticed for instance that the feet of the Venus are larger than those of the average woman of to-day and the head is unusually small. In fact this close adherence to actual life may be the main secret of the charm of the statue, for on account of this reality there is a personal element in it, and we can almost read the character of the woman who stood as a model. We see at once an absence of any and every lascivious trait quite common to Venus figures of a later period, and in the face there is a remarkable unconsciousness of self.

We may assume that the artist belonged to the famous school of Rhodes or to the group of those artists who made Pergamum famous with their work, but no statement can be made with certainty. Upon archeological grounds we cannot place the date of the statue earlier than about 400 B. C., nor later than the first part of the second century B. C., and this opinion is mainly based upon the excellent workmanship, the peculiar warmth of the skin as well as the classical simplicity of the statue as a whole. It appears that this valuable piece of art is worthy of a Phidias, a Praxiteles, a Lysippos, or a Scopas.

Having searched art books in vain for an explanation of the history of the Venus of Milo and its tragic fate, we will here briefly recapitulate what the simple facts of the statue, its workmanship, its sad and mutilated condition and also its place of discovery, can teach us.

The statue shows a few scratches which indicate that it may have been dragged along the ground, but the marble bears innumerable indentations which can scarcely be explained otherwise than as due to blows with heavy sticks or clubs. The story of M. Ferry recapitulated in the foregoing chapter does not suffice. Some mutilations may be due to a rough handling in transportation, but the scratches are few and the cudgel marks are many. Apparently the statue has stood an attack of a mob of infuriated enemies who hated the goddess and regarded her as a devil--as the patron deity of the worst of sins. She must have endured a terrible persecution at the hands of implacable enemies, and these enemies can only have been Christians.

It is obvious that the statue has been hidden, and we need not doubt that it was concealed by pagan worshipers who wanted to preserve the effigy of the goddess. The marks of brutal treatment visible all over the body of the statue indicate that the fair goddess had been most furiously belabored as if in corporeal chastisement with rods and any weapons that happened to be at hand. The arms are broken and we must assume that the statue was upset and thrown from its pedestal. Probably the goddess fell on her right shoulder which is crushed, while the left arm exhibits a smooth fracture as if it had been broken by the concussion of the fall. If the arms are not the fragments enumerated by Count Marcellus and now preserved in the Louvre, they must have been lost; possibly they were smashed to small fragments.

Can we assume that the provincial population of a small island could have produced the greatest piece of art of antiquity? Could a few farmers have engaged a sculptor who must have been the equal of Phidias and Scopas? If the statue had represented the tutelary goddess of the island, would not some Greek author have alluded to its existence; would not Pausanias have mentioned the fact? The idea that the statue was of indigenous workmanship is a mere assumption and by no means probable. But whence can the statue have come, and how did it find its way to this little island in the Ægean Sea?

This question is not unanswerable; we need only consider the history of the island and its political connections.

The island of Milo was too small a place to have a temple that could afford a statue of such extraordinary value, and we must assume that it was carried thither on a ship. Athens is the only place that we can think of which might have been its original home.

The early centuries of the Christian era were troublesome times. Lawlessness prevailed and a general decadence had set in, which was due to the many civil wars in both Greece and Italy. The establishment of the Roman empire checked the progress of degeneration but only in external appearance. In reality a moral and social deterioration continued to take an ever stronger hold upon the people. The old religion broke down and the new faith was by no means so ideal in the beginning as it is frequently represented by writers of ecclesiastical history.

Our notions concerning the vicious character of

ancient paganism are entirely wrong. Even the worship of Aphrodite and of the Phenician Astarte was by no means degraded by that gross sensualism of which the fathers of the church frequently accuse it. Wherever we meet with original expressions of the pagan faith we find deep reverence and childlike piety. In many respects the worship of Istar in Babylonia and Astarte in Phenicia, of Isis in Egypt, of Athene, Aphrodite and Hera in Greece, of the Roman Juno, and Venus, the special protectress of the imperial family, was noble in all main features, and did not differ greatly from the cult of the Virgin Mary during the Middle Ages. We shall discuss this phase in a subsequent chapter and here reproduce an ancient platter which is ascribed by archeologists to the fourth century B. C., and shows a noble and serene Venus who is fully draped and flying on a swan.

When Christianity spread over the Roman empire, the city of Athens was the last stronghold of paganism, but even there the mass of the population had become Christian. There was a time in the development of Christianity when it was hostile not only to ancient pagan mythology but also to pagan science and to pagan art. This was the age in which almost all the statues of the Greek gods were either destroyed, or maltreated and shattered so that not one has come down to us unmutilated.

Prof. F. C. Conybeare of University College, Oxford, describes conditions of that age in his translation of the _Apology and Acts of Apollonius and Other Monuments of Christianity_, as follows:

“The obvious way of scotching a foul demon was to smash his idols; and we find that an enormous number of martyrs earned their crown in this manner, especially in the third century, when their rapidly increasing numbers rendered them bolder and more ready to make a display of their intolerance.

Sometimes the good sense or the worldly prudence of the Church intervened to set limits to so favorite a way of courting martyrdom; and at the Synod of Elvira, c. A. D. 305, a canon was passed, declaring the practice to be one not met with in the Gospel nor recorded of any of the Apostles, and denying to those who in future resorted to it the honors of martyrdom. But in spite of this, the most popular of the saints were those who had resorted to such violence and earned their death by it; and as soon as Christianity fairly got the upper hand in the fourth century, the wrecking of temples and the smashing of the idols of the demons became a most popular amusement with which to grace a Christian festival. As we turn over the pages of the martyrologies, we wonder that any ancient statues at all escaped those senseless outbursts of zealotry.”

It must have been in one of these “outbursts of zealotry” that one of the temples of Aphrodite was attacked and the statue of the goddess brutally assaulted. The mutilated statue presumably lay prone upon the ground at the foot of its pedestal at the overturned altar, and had to suffer under the clubs of fanatical zealots. When night broke in and the rioters sought their homes, the few friends of paganism, perhaps the priests, perhaps some well-to-do philosophers and admirers of the ancient Greek civilization, came to the rescue. They met stealthily at the place of the tumult and with the assistance of

their servants had the statue carried away down to a ship at anchor in the harbor. Before the riot could be renewed on the next morning the ship set sail for the island of Milo where the devotees of the goddess may have had friends, or where possibly one of their own number possessed a farm. There they hid the statue, and it is certain that the act of concealment was done in the greatest haste, for it was only lightly covered over, and a mark, discovered later on by careful investigation of the place of hiding, was scratched into the curbstone on the wayside to indicate the spot.

This explanation seems to me simple enough to be acceptable. The facts seem to tell it. Consider the age when paganism broke down; consider the fanaticism of the early Christians, the uncultured mobs led by fanatical monks, mobs capable of tearing to pieces a noble woman--I refer to Hypatia--in the conviction that they were doing a good deed pleasing in God’s sight. Other statues of pagan gods have received exactly this treatment. Is it possible to explain the cudgel marks on the statue of the Venus of Milo differently?

It seems strange that this explanation has not been offered before. The data of the conditions in which the statue was found, the place of hiding, the political relation of Melos to Athens, and the character both of the few pagans and of the multitudes of Christians who lived in the beginning of the Christian era, tell us the story of the statue, its sad fate and why it found here a safe place of concealment.

The pagan remnant was small and kept quiet for fear of persecution, but we may very well imagine how they lived in the hope that paganism would celebrate a revival, that the storms of these barbarous outbursts would pass by and the temples of the gods would be restored in all their ancient glory. Then would come the time to bring the goddess back to her ancient dwelling place, to raise her altar again and light the sacrifice anew. But though the riots ceased and the authorities restored order, though for a short time a pagan emperor sat again on the throne of Cæsar, the ancient gods never returned and Christianity permanently replaced paganism. The devotees of the lost cause died without seeing their hope fulfilled. The desecrated statue remained hidden and their secret was buried with them in the grave.

THE MEANING OF “APHRODITE.”

The etymology of the name Aphrodite is doubtful. The Greeks derived it from the word ἀφρός = foam, because the goddess was said to have risen from the foam of the sea. This wild guess of ancient Greek philology may have been responsible for the fable that Uranus (Heaven) nightly embraced Gaia (Earth) until he was attacked and mutilated by his rebellious son Kronos. Uranus, deprived of his creative ability, retired to the outskirts of the world. Mythologists assume that herewith the creation of the raw material of the universe ceased, but that the generative principle being now mingled with the sea changed into foam, whence rose the goddess that represents all fertility and creativeness in both vegetable and animal domains.

If this legend of the origin of Aphrodite is not simply the product of the wrong etymology of her name[7] it is assumed to have been imported from Phenicia. The only other similar myth known is found among the South Sea islanders where Rangi (Heaven) and Papa (Earth) embraced one another so closely that no life could originate, Rangi being regarded as a great blue canopy of stone. Then Tane Mahuta, their youngest son, corresponding to Kronos, the youngest child of Uranus and Gaia, cruelly separated the couple and forced his father upward and pressed his mother down, thus becoming the creator of life on earth.[8]

The ancient Greeks were poor philologists and similar failures of etymological speculation are quite common among them. Thus they explained the origin of names like Heracles as “the fame of Hera,” or Amazon as “the woman without breasts,” or Prometheus as “the forethinker,” etc. All these derivations are wild and obviously wrong guesses, nor may our modern philologists, though more scientific, be always exactly correct. We are taught now by comparative philology that Prometheus, the firebringer, is the Sanskrit word _pramathyus_, “the driller,” denoting the hard stick[9] which by a swift rotation in a soft piece of wood produces the spark that calls forth the beneficent flame.

This explanation seems probable but we cannot say that our etymologies of other names have been equally successful.

One recent interpretation of “Aphrodite” would make us regard the name as an Egyptian importation, explaining the word to mean _Apharadat_, “the gift of Ra,” the sun-god, derived from _Pha Raa Da-t_ with the prosthetic A; but this, like the suggested derivation of Psyche from _Pha Sakhu_, “the mummy,” seems to be a mere accident of homophony. Other Greek names such as Elysion from _Aalu_, the Elysian Fields of the Egyptians, Charon from _Kere_, driver or skipper (ferryman), are better attested, but if the name Aphrodite came from Egypt the cult of a goddess by that name and character has been lost or obliterated.

* * * * *

Originally Aphrodite was the same figure as Hera or Juno, Artemis or Diana and Pallas Athene or Minerva. These female deities are differentiations of the idealized and personified activities of womanhood: Hera as the queen of heaven, the protectress of wifehood; Diana of girlhood and virginity; Athene as the goddess of battles, as protectress of arts and sciences, as wisdom personified; Aphrodite, the personification of beauty and love.

The ancient pagans were not so very unlike the Christians; e. g., Istar, like the Virgin Mary, represented at the same time eternal virginity and motherhood, and the name of the temple on the Acropolis might truly be translated “Church of the Holy Virgin,” for Parthenon is derived from παρθένος, “virgin.”

In prehistoric times there was more reverence for the female deity than for the male god. So Ares (or Mars) is the god of fight, of combativeness, while Athene is the teacher of the art of warfare, of generalship, of strategy in battle.

The character of Aphrodite as a universal principle was never lost sight of. She was and remained the giver of life, joy, love, loveliness, grace, fertility, increase, exuberance, rejuvenescence, springtime, restoration of life, immortality, prosperity and the charm of existence,--and all this she was in one, all as a universal principle and in its cosmic significance.

The same idea is also expressed in Eros, called in Latin Amor or Cupido, who is regarded as the oldest and at the same time the youngest of the gods, represented as a beautiful youth. This same Eros is said to have existed prior to Aphrodite, for when she rose out of the sea, Eros met her at the shore, while according to another version he was regarded as her son.

The notion that Aphrodite is the cosmic principle of love has found expression in poetry and philosophy, but her mythical nature has never been definitely settled. Homer, who calls Aphrodite Cypris (Κύπις) speaks of her in the Iliad (V, 312) as the daughter of Zeus[10] and Dione, the goddess

who in olden times was worshiped on the Acropolis in Athens, in Dodona, and in other localities, as the wife of the Olympian ruler and as his female counterpart. Dione is probably the same word as Hera’s Latin name Juno. As her daughter, Aphrodite is called Dionæa (Διωναία) and also by her mother’s name Dionē.

Being the goddess of sexual love, Aphrodite was also held responsible for all relations between men and women, and philosophers felt the need of distinguishing between heavenly love and vulgar passion, calling the former “Aphrodite Urania,” the latter “Aphrodite Pandemos.” In Plato’s Symposium (180 D) the heavenly love is described as “the older one, born without mother, the daughter of heaven,” while the younger and less divine Aphrodite is the daughter of Zeus and Dione. The same contrast is brought out in the age of the Renaissance by Titian in his famous picture of heavenly and worldly love.

The distinction between celestial and earthly love however is artificial and has certainly not influenced the cult of the goddess. It is a later thought, invented by philosophers for the purpose of teaching a lesson.

THE CULT OF APHRODITE.

Polytheism is not a stable religion. It changes with the growth of civilization, and we do not know a time in which it was not constantly in a state of transition.

The myths which connect Aphrodite in one place with Adonis, in others with Mars, Hephæstos, Anchises and other gods or mortals, were originally several different developments of the same fundamental idea, the love story of the goddess of love. This is quite natural and ought to be expected, but when in the days of a more international communication these myths were told in different shapes in all localities, they in their combination served greatly to undermine the respect for the goddess and to degrade the conception of her even as early as in the time when the Homeric epics were composed. Nevertheless, since the sarcasm remained limited for a long time to the circle of heretics and scoffers, the noble conception of Aphrodite was preserved down to the latest days of paganism.

In other words Venus was originally the mother of mankind. She was at once the Queen of Heaven or Juno, the Magna Mater or Venus Genetrix, the educator and teacher or Pallas Athene, the eternal virgin or Diana, and the all-nourishing earth-goddess, Demeter or Ceres; and this view had better be stated inversely, that the original mother of mankind became differentiated in the course of history into these several activities of womanhood, as Juno, Venus, Diana, Ceres and Athene, which divinities were again reunited in Christianity in the form of Mary, the Queen of Heaven, the Mother of God, the Lady as an authority and guide in life, and the Eternal Virgin.