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Apollo as the inspired musician or if we accept the derivation of the Apollo Belvedere from a fourth-century original as the disdainful archer, Hermes, the protector and playmate of his little brother Dionysus, and many other such representations of the gods in their personal moods and characteristic actions, seem in many ways less divine, less full of religious feeling than such an Asclepius; if the great gods are brought too near to human passions and weaknesses, they cannot but lose much of their divinity.
The noble Aphrodites of the fourth century have fixed the type of female beauty in school after school of artists down to our own time. This ideal is perhaps for us best incorporated in the Aphrodite of Melos in the Louvre, a work of the Hellenistic age, combining with the great fourth-century tradition a perfection of detail and an informing life which belong to a later time.
But they are natural forerunners of an interest in town-planning. As in modern England, so in fourth-century Greece, their appearance suggests the growth of a care for well-ordered town life and for municipal well-being which leads directly to a more elaborate and methodical oversight of the town as an organized combination of houses and groups of houses.
There is another element in the individuality of fourth-century statues which may appeal to modern artists, and which certainly did appeal in an inverted manner to early Christian writers of invectives against pagan idolatry. It was said that Phryne had posed as a model for the Cnidian Aphrodite of Praxiteles; and the character of the goddess was inferred from that of her votary.
Now if you see a wave rising in fourth-century Gaul, and a wave breaking into glorious foam in sixth- and seventh-century Ireland, what would you suspect? Why, naturally, that it was the same wave, and had flowed through the country that lies between: common sense would tell you to expect something of a Great Age in fifth- and early sixth-century Britain.
And it is to be feared that none of these fourth-century leaders, neither the fierce bishops with their homilies on Charity, nor Julian and Sallustius with their worship of Hellenism, came very near to that classic ideal. To bring back that note of Sophrosynê I will venture, before proceeding to the fourth-century Pagan creed, to give some sentences from an earlier Pagan prayer.
Here are also two caps from the fourth-century church, fragments of mosaic pavement found in mediæval tombs, and a good many pieces of eighth and ninth-century carving. The survival of the Constantinian plan is explained by the slight alterations made by Euphrasius. The walled-up doors in the baptistery show that it was not an isolated building.
The reigning models of taste in ancient sculpture were copies of fourth-century originals, Hellenistic or later productions. Hence Smollett's ecstasies over the Laocoon, the Niobe, and the Dying Gladiator. Greek art of the best period was hardly known in authentic examples; antiques so fine as the Torso of Hercules were rare.
In the eighteenth century sarcophagi were disinterred bearing fourth-century crosses, of an earlier date than Attila, at all events. There appears to have been a restoration in the sixth century, probably under Narses; the use of super-abaci and the caps in the transept suggest this. Perhaps the council of 557 may have had something to do with it.
The first appears to have been taken by Roswitha from a Latin translation of a fourth-century Greek legend.
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