Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 1.djvu/78

58 A HISTORY OF ART IN CIIALD.KA AND ASSYRIA. fall of its native royalty, and that it will help us little in our endeavour to grasp the nature and extent of its religious beliefs. The last of the Athenian philosophers, Damascius, has certainly left us some information as to the Babylonish deities which seems to have been taken from authentic sources. 1 This, together with o a few fragments from the work of Berosus, is all that Hellenic tradition has handed down to us. There is nothing here which can be even remotely compared to the treatises upon I sis and Osiris and the Goddess of Syria preserved under the names of PLUTARCH and LUCIAN. But we cannot enter upon the discussion of Chalclaean art without making an effort to describe the oast of the national religion an d o o o its principal personages. In every country the highest function of art is to translate the religious conceptions of its people into visible forms. The architect, the sculptor, the painter, each in his own fashion, carries out this idea ; the first by the dimensions he gives to his temples, by their plan, and by the decoration of their walls ; the second and third by their choice of feature, expression and attribute for the images in which the gods become visible to the people. The clearness and precision with which this embodiment of an idea is carried out will depend upon the natural aptitudes of the race and the assistance it receives from the capabilities of the materials at hand. Plastic creations, from their very nature, must always be inferior to the thought they are meant to express ; by no means can they go beyond it. This truth is nowhere more striking than in the art of Greece. Fortunately we are there able to see how a single theme is treated, in the first place, in poetry, the interpreter of the popular beliefs, and afterwards in art ; we can discover how Phidias and Praxiteles, to speak only of sculptors, treated the types created by Homer and Hesiod. In the case of Chaldsea we have no such opportunity. She has left us neither monuments of sacerdotal theology like those we have inherited in such countless numbers from Egypt, nor the brilliant imagery in which the odes and epics of the Greeks sketched the personalities of ou StaSo^ou diropuu Kal A.v'cra? Trepl TWV 7rpo)TU>v ap^aiv (edition published by Kopp, Frankfort-on-the-Main, 1826, 8vo), ch. 125. Ch. Emile RUELLE, Le Philosophe Damascius ; Etude sur sa Vie et ses Oiirrages, snirie de nenf Morceaux inedits, Extraits du Traite des premiers Principes et traduits en Latin (in the Rerue archcologique, 1861), fragments i. and ix.