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And, at last, about the year 576 B.C., we come to the first true school of sculptors, the first clear example, as we seem to discern, of a communicable style, reflecting and interpreting some real individuality (the double personality, in this case, of two brothers) in the masters who evolved it, conveyed to disciples who came to acquire it from distant places, and taking root through them at various centres, where the names of the masters became attached, of course,. to many fair works really by the hands of the pupils. Dipoenus and Scyllis, these first true masters, were born in Crete; but their work is connected mainly with Sicyon, at that time the chief seat of Greek art. “In consequence of some injury done them,” it is said, “while employed there upon certain sacred images, they departed to another place, leaving their work unfinished; and, not long afterwards, a grievous famine fell upon Sicyon. Thereupon, the people of Sicyon, inquiring of the Pythian Apollo how they might be relieved, it was answered them, ‘if Dipoenus and Scyllis should finish those images of the gods’; which thing the Sicyonians obtained from them, humbly, at a great price.” That story too, as we shall see, illustrates the spirit of the age. For their sculpture they used the white marble of Paros, being workers in marble especially, though they worked also in ebony and in ivory, and made use of gilding. “Figures of cedar-wood, partly incrusted with gold”–kedrou zodia chryso dienthismena [12]–Pausanias says exquisitely, describing a certain work of their pupil, Dontas of Lacedaemon. It is to that that we have definitely come at last, in the school of Dipoenus and Scyllis.

[Footnote 12:
Transliteration: kedrou zodia chryso dienthismena. Pater’s translation: “Figures of cedar-wood, partly incrusted with gold.” The root verb anthizo means “to strew with flowers…and so, to dye with colours.” (Liddell and Scott.) Pausanias, Description of Greece, Book VI, Chapter 19, Section 12. Pausaniae Graeciae Descriptio, 3 vols. F. Spiro. Leipzig, Teubner. 1903. ]

Dry and brief as these details may seem, they are the witness to an active, eager, animated period of inventions and beginnings, in which the Greek workman triumphs over the first rough mechanical difficulties which beset him in the endeavour to record what his soul conceived of the form of priest or athlete then alive upon the earth, or of the ever-living gods, then already more seldom seen upon it. Our own fancy must fill up the story of the unrecorded patience of the workshop, into which we seem to peep through these scanty notices–the fatigue, the disappointments, the steps repeated, ending at last in that moment of success, which is all Pausanias records, somewhat uncertainly.

And as this period begins with the chest of Cypselus, so it ends with a work in some respects similar, also seen and described by Pausanias–the throne, as he calls it, of the Amyclaean Apollo. It was the work of a well-known artist, Bathycles of Magnesia, who, probably about the year 550 B.C., with a company of workmen, came to the little ancient town of Amyclae, near Sparta, a place full of traditions of the heroic age. He had been invited thither to perform a peculiar task–the construction of a throne; not like the throne of the Olympian Zeus, and others numerous in after times, for a seated figure, but for the image of the local Apollo; no other than a rude and very ancient pillar of bronze, thirty cubits high, to which, Hermes-wise, head, arms, and feet were attached. The thing stood upright, as on a base, upon a kind of tomb or reliquary, in which, according to tradition, lay the remains of the young prince Hyacinth, son of the founder of that place, beloved by Apollo for his beauty, and accidentally struck dead by him in play, with a quoit. From the drops of the lad’s blood had sprung up the purple flower of his name, which bears on its petals the letters of the ejaculation of woe; and in his memory the famous games of Amyclae were celebrated, beginning about the time of the longest day, when the flowers are stricken by the sun and begin to fade–a festival marked, amid all its splendour, with some real melancholy, and serious thought of the dead. In the midst of the “throne” of Bathycles, this sacred receptacle, with the strange, half-humanised pillar above it, was to stand, probably in the open air, within a consecrated enclosure. Like the chest of Cypselus, the throne was decorated with reliefs of subjects taken from epic poetry, and it had supporting figures. Unfortunately, what Pausanias tells us of this monument hardly enables one to present it to the imagination with any completeness or certainty; its dimensions he himself was unable exactly to ascertain, and he does not tell us its material. There are reasons, however, for supposing that it was of metal; and amid these ambiguities, the decorations of its base, the grave or altar-tomb of Hyacinth, shine out clearly, and are also, for the most part, clear in their significance.