In any attempt to picture to ourselves the kind of furniture and objects of daily use apart from chariots, arms, &c., that surrounded the Greeks in early ages, it will be necessary to bear in mind the close connection which that people must have had with the Asiatic races, and the splendour and refinement that surrounded the wealthy civilisation of the oriental monarchies.
They were so continually the allies or the rivals of the various states in Asia Minor, and pushed out into that fertile region so many vigorous colonies, that it cannot be doubted that the splendid stuffs, beds, couches, thrones, chariots, &c., used by Greeks on the Asiatic continent or in Europe, had much of eastern character in form and method of execution; perhaps, at first, in decoration also. This woodcut represents a chair of Assyrian character on a bas-relief from Xanthus, in the British museum.
Much that is oriental figures in poetic accounts of the arms, furniture, and equipments of the Greek heroic ages. The chiefs take the field in chariots. These could have been used but in small numbers on ground so uneven as the rocky territories of the Morea. The beds described by Homer, the coverlids of dyed wool, tapestries, or carpets, and other instances of coloured and showy furniture, were genuine descriptions of objects known and seen, though not common. Generally the furniture of the heroic age was simple. Two beds of bronze of Tartessus, one Dorian and one Ionian, the smallest weighing fifty talents, of uncertain date, were kept in the treasury at Altis, and seen there by Pausanias towards the end of the second century. The chariots differed little except in the ornamental carving, modelling, or chasing, from those of Egypt.
The oldest remaining models of Greek furniture to which we can point are the chairs in which the antique figures in the Syrian room at the British museum are seated. These are dated six, or nearly six, centuries before Christ. They represent chairs with backs, quite perpendicular in front and behind. The frame-pieces of the seats are morticed into the legs, and the mortices and tenons are accurately marked in the marble, the horizontal passing right through the upright bars. These early pieces of furniture were probably executed in wood, not metal, which was at first but rarely used. The woodcuts show the different forms taken from antique bas-reliefs.
The chest or coffer in which Cypselus of Corinth had been concealed was seen by Pausanias in the temple of Olympia. It was made about the middle of the sixth century B.C. The chest was of cedar, carved and decorated with figures and bas-reliefs, some in ivory, some in gold or ivory partly gilt, which were inlaid on the four sides and on the top. The subjects of the sculpture were old Greek myths and local legends, and traditions connected with the country. This coffer is supposed to have been executed by Eumelos of Corinth.
The great period of Greek art began in the fifth century B.C.; but those were not days favourable to the development of personal luxury among the citizens. An extreme simplicity in private manners balanced the continual publicity and political excitement of Greek life. The rich classes, moreover, had little inducement to make any display of their possessions. The state enjoyed an indefinite right to the property of its members; the lawgiver in Plato declared "ye are not your own, still less is your property your own." In Sparta the exclusive training for war admitted of no manner of earning money by business. In Athens the poorer class had so exclusively the upper hand of the rich that the latter had to provide the public with entertainments of sacrificial solemnities, largesses of corn, and banquets. "The demos," says the author of the "Gentile and the Jew," "understood the squeezing of the rich like sponges." Greece was the paradise of the poor.
It is therefore to be expected that the sculpture of the day, though employed sometimes upon the decoration of thrones or state seats, chariots, chests, looking-glasses, tripods, as the painting was on walls, vases, and movable pictures on panels, should have been employed mostly in temples and, with occasional exceptions, on objects of some public use. The chest described above was kept as a relic, and the elaborately carved thrones in the temples were those of the statues of gods and heroes. Ivory and gold laid over a substructure of olive wood were the materials quite as frequently used by great sculptors as marble or bronze for statues which did not form parts of the actual decorations of their architecture. In later times these materials were used in sumptuous furniture.
The Greeks used couches for sleeping and resting upon, but not for reclining on at meals, till the Macedonian period. We give two or three examples, from marbles: one of which resembles the modern sofa. Women sat always, as in Rome, sometimes on the couch at the head or foot, on which the master of the house or a guest reclined, generally on chairs. Besides chairs like the one represented here, the Greeks made arm-chairs; and folding chairs of metal. In the Parthenon frieze Jupiter is seated in a square seat on thick turned legs, with a round bar for a back, resting on short turned posts fitted into the seat. The arms are less high than the back; they are formed by slight bars framed into the uprights at the back, and resting on winged sphinxes.
Mirrors of mixed metal alloys, silver, tin, and copper, have come down to our times in great numbers. They were made occasionally in pure silver, and in gold probably among the Greeks as they were in later times among the Romans. The cases are of bronze, and engraved with figure designs of the highest character. There is, however, no proof that these were used as furniture in houses, as in Rome. They are hand mirrors, and the description of them, as works of art, belongs rather to that of antique bronzes. The woodcut shows the usual type, with the richly ornamented handle.
Designs of the Greek couch, whether for sleeping or for reclining at meals, are abundant on tomb paintings, and sculptures, and on the paintings of vases. In the British museum we may see a large vase in the second vase room, on which a couch for two persons is arranged with a long mattress covered with rich material, lying within what appears to be a border of short turned rails with a cushion on each end, also covered with rich striped material. A long low stool decorated with ivory lies below the couch as a kind of step. The legs, as in many vase representations, are thick turned supports with lighter parts below, and a turned knob at the foot. On another vase Dionysus reclines on a thick round cushion at the head of the couch, while Ariadne sits on it. Figures feasting or stretched in death on similar couches can be seen in two beautiful and perfect funeral chests in the Ægina room. All these pieces of furniture seem made of or decorated with ivory, and furnished with coloured cushions or coverings of an oriental character. Tripods were made of bronze in great number for sacred use, and probably also as the supports of brasiers, tables, &c., in private houses. The tables were of wood, marble, and metal; the supports being either lion or leopard legs and heads, or sphinxes with lifted wings, a favourite form in Greek ornamentation.
With regard to Greek houses generally, their arrangements differed very little from the earlier houses of the Romans. The bas-relief in the British museum-Bacchus received as a guest by Icarus-represents a couch with turned legs, the feet of which are decorated with leaf work; a plain square stool, perhaps the top of a box, on which masks are laid, and a tripod table with lion legs. The houses in the background are tiled. The windows are divided into two lights by an upright mullion or column, and a bas-relief of a charioteer driving two horses ornaments a portion of the wall, and may be intended for a picture hung up or fixed against the wall. The whole shows us an Athenian house, decked for a festive occasion, and garlands and hangings are festooned round its outer walls.
The Greek chariot was of wood, probably similar to that of the Egyptians. It had sometimes wheels with four strong spokes only, as in the woodcut. The chariot wheel of the car of Mausolus, in the British museum, has six. The Ninevite wheels have sometimes as many as twelve, as may be seen in the sculptured bas-reliefs of the narrow Assyrian gallery of the British museum.
The woods used by the Greeks for sculpture were ebony, cypress, cedar, oak, smilax, yew, willow, lotus, and citron. These materials were rarely left without enrichments of ivory, gold, and colour. The faces of statues were painted vermilion, the dresses, crowns, or other ornaments were gilt or made in wrought gold.
CHAPTER III.
Table of Contents THE ROMANS.
The splendour that surrounded the personal usages of the earlier races of antiquity, the Egyptians, Ninevites, Persians, Greeks, and Tuscans, was inherited by the Romans. Not only did they outlive those powers, but they absorbed their territory as far as they could reach it; they affected to take in their religions and deities to add to their own system; they drained the subject populations for slaves, and eagerly adopted from them every art that could administer to the magnificence and luxury of their own private life. They have left both written records in their literature and actual examples of their furniture, made in metal or of...
