To illustrate the meaning of Greek sculpture and show its close affinity with ritual, we shall take two instances, perhaps the best-known of those that survive, one of them in relief, the other in the round, the Panathenaic frieze of the Parthenon at Athens and the Apollo Belvedere, and we shall take them in chronological order.  As the actual frieze and the statue cannot be before us, we shall discuss no technical questions of style or treatment, but simply ask how they came to be, what human need do they express.  The Parthenon frieze is in the British Museum, the Apollo Belvedere is in the Vatican at Rome, but is readily accessible in casts or photographs.  The outlines given in Figs. 5 and 6 can of course only serve to recall subject-matter and design.

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The Panathenaic frieze once decorated the cella or innermost shrine of the Parthenon, the temple of the Maiden Goddess Athena.  It twined like a ribbon round the brow of the building and thence it was torn by Lord Elgin and brought home to the British Museum as a national trophy, for the price of a few hundred pounds of coffee and yards of scarlet cloth.  To realize its meaning we must always think it back into its place.  Inside the cella, or shrine, dwelt the goddess herself, her great image in gold and ivory; outside the shrine was sculptured her worship by the whole of her people.  For the frieze is nothing but a great ritual procession translated into stone, the Panathenaic procession, or procession of all the Athenians, of all Athens, in honour of the goddess who was but the city incarnate, Athena.

    “A wonder enthroned on the hills and the sea,
    A maiden crowned with a fourfold glory,
    That none from the pride of her head may rend;
    Violet and olive leaf, purple and hoary,
    Song-wreath and story the fairest of fame,
    Flowers that the winter can blast not nor bend,
    A light upon earth as the sun’s own flame,
    A name as his name—­
    Athens, a praise without end.”

SWINBURNE:  Erechtheus, 141.

Sculptural Art, at least in this instance, comes out of ritual, has ritual as its subject, is embodied ritual.  The reader perhaps at this point may suspect that he is being juggled with, that, out of the thousands of Greek reliefs that remain to us, just this one instance has been selected to bolster up the writer’s art and ritual theory.  He has only to walk through any museum to be convinced at once that the author is playing quite fair.  Practically the whole of the reliefs that remain to us from the archaic period, and a very large proportion of those at later date, when they do not represent heroic mythology, are ritual reliefs, “votive” reliefs as we call them; that is, prayers or praises translated into stone.

[Illustration:  Fig. 3.  Panathenaic Procession.]