beneath this superficial aspect we

cannot deny that the reclining figure, M, represents the same idea as does the Cephalos; that is to say, a person in the act of awakening. We have thus in the same place in each angle a figure awakening from sleep, the superficial difference being that one is a man, the other a woman. In spirit the two angles thus respond perfectly. In both we have a scene of awakening, appropriately caused in the first instance by the dawn, but intensified in the second instance by the coincident birth of Athenè.

The third figure, M, lying with the feet still crossed one over the other, is surely still more asleep than awake. The second, L, has pulled back her feet, as a woman must do in rising suddenly from a low seat, and is doing her best to stir up her sleeping sister. The first, K, has swung round towards the centre, her left arm pressing hard on the shoulder of L.' All three have been closely grouped like sisters. They are all three taken by surprise, nearly as much so as the three daughters of Cecrops in the west pediment. It is the surprise of beings who, till that moment, have been asleep under daily conditions, and in their native place. In Olympos nothing of the kind was possible. We must, therefore, regard the so-called Fates as local Attic beings, or, to repeat the phrase we have already used, when speaking of the west pediment, "interested local spectators." Accordingly we recognise in both wings of the east pediment-as in the west-local personages

1 The marble head belonging to Count Laborde, in Paris, has sometimes been thought to belong to K, but more frequently perhaps it is assigned

to one or other of the figures in the west pediment. The nose and mouth are restored. See the cast in the Elgin Room.

COMPARISON WITH WEST PEDIMENT

43

who either had already passed into legend or were still in the state of personifications. We regret that Professor Furtwaengler, having accepted the local Cephalos and two of the local Attic Horae for the left wing, should have fallen back on the Fates for the right wing, instead of following up the principle of local representation, a principle which in the west pediment he has pursued to its extreme.

The east and the west pediments of the Parthenon were respectively the first and the second acts of the drama of Athenè. It was incumbent that certain of the characters should be taken over from the one act to the other; at all events, Athenè herself and Poseidon. Poseidon could not have been absent from among the gods at the scene of her birth in the east pediment. Nor could Hermes have failed there; yet we find him also again in the west pediment accompanying the chariot of Athenè. If the charioteer of Poseidon in the west pediment is Amphitritè, as is mostly supposed, she also may have been present at the birth of Athenè in the east pediment by the same right which entitled her to be present at the birth of Aphroditè alongside of Poseidon on the base of the Zeus at Olympia by Pheidias. For all we know, the goddess also who accompanies the chariot of Poseidon and she who drives the chariot of Athenè may have been taken over from the missing central group of the east pediment. In any case, the two pediments stood in a dramatic relation to each other, with a certain number of the personae carried over from the one act to the other.

The facts are there, and need no illustration from other works of Greek sculpture. But we may mention as more or less analogous and nearly contemporary the narrow frieze of

the Nereid monument in the British Museum, where we see first an assault on a walled city, and next the same walled city being surrendered to the captor. On Roman reliefs, as

on the columns of Trajan and of Marcus Aurelius, such repetitions are constant. But once we are satisfied that the conception of both pediments involves the idea of "interested spectators," the extent to which the same figures may appear in both pediments would depend on what degree of intimacy the sculptor wished to express between the angle groups of both pediments. In both the locality was the same, in our opinion. Of course, the sculptor was free to choose a different set of local representatives for each angle. But our suggestion is that he may equally have carried over an angle group from the first act of the drama to the second. In a word, we suggest that the so-called Fates are the three peculiarly Attic personifications of morning dew, Aglauros, Hersè, and Pandrosos, as many have believed them to be since Welcker's identification of them in 1845. They would thus be a companion group to the three Horae in the left wing, who had the power of rolling away the clouds and revealing the blue sky. These three sisters were known simply as the Parthenoi, and their position on the Parthenon near the waning moon at dawn would be appropriate. They would be there as strictly local semi-divine beings. When they reappear in the west pediment it is as the daughters of Cecrops, about whom legend had woven a local tale connected with a grotto on the side of the Acropolis, and the birth of the boy Erichthonios. Whether the sculptor had meant us to assume an interval of years between the birth of Athene and her rivalry with Poseidon, no one can say. We

prefer to think that the one act followed immediately upon the other, but that would not necessarily exclude the reappearance of the Dew Maidens as the legendary daughters of Cecrops. In any case, we do not press our view beyond insisting on the strictly local character of the persons in all the angles, including the sun and moon, who, as we have said, were the sun and moon as known to the Athenians in their daily life.

Whether Fates or Dew Maidens, the three figures K, L, M have exercised a singular fascination from the moment of their becoming widely known. Perhaps we should rather say the two figures L, M. For undoubtedly it is the grouping of these two that excites the most pleasure, so simple and so obvious is the motive, so grand the bodily forms, and so beautiful the drapery. The motive we have already described-one woman putting her heels back and trying to raise hurriedly another who has been sleeping against her. It is one of those universal actions which need no explanation even to the simplest of mankind. The third figure K is a little detached as we see her now. But an examination of the backs of K and L shows that when the group was put up in position it had been found necessary to dig deep holes in the back of L and in the lowermost part of K, in order that the two figures might be brought nearer together and more closely knit. The left arm of K, now missing, had then been firmly planted on the back of the shoulder of L, whose right arm again crosses over on the thigh of K. Thus originally the whole triad had been closely bound together. The figure whose bodily attractions are most obvious is M. Such movement as we see in her body is

hardly voluntary on her part. She is simply an object of study and admiration. No wonder she has been sometimes called Aphroditè, nor that recently she has been compared with the "Aphroditè in the Gardens" at Athens, by Alcamenes, a work renowned for its elegance.1 She has even been claimed as herself from the hand of that favourite pupil of Pheidias. But whatever her charms, we must not forget that she is only a secondary figure in a great composition.

If we are right in describing the Theseus or Cephalos of the opposite angle as sunlit, we should expect to find the corresponding figure M sculptured as in twilight, and illumined by the waning moon; that is to say, without deep shadows in the folds of the drapery such as the sun casts, but with a predominance of edges of folds as if seen emerging in obscurity. Doubtless the mere attitude of the figure necessarily leads to an effect of this kind. Her body is tilted over to the front in such a manner that the folds of the chiton on her right side hang down and fill up what otherwise would have been a deep mass of shadow. Her dress is drawn tightly round her legs, producing sharpedged folds, and the drapery covering the rock on which she lies falls in flat masses. It would seem as if the sculptor had chosen this attitude and pose with an instinct for the effect of a figure seen in the dull light of the sinking moon. And in any case we must bear in mind that the fact of all three figures being closely draped, reasonable in the Gardens. See also Reisch, in the Jahresheften d. Oesterr. Inst., i. p. 77 fol.

1 Amelung in Roem. Mittheilungen, 1901, pl. 1, 2, p. 21, considers that a statue in the Doria Pamphili palace at Rome may be a copy of the Aphroditè