THE decline of Greek civilization was longest deferred in the sphere of art. Here the Hellenistic age bears comparison, not only in fertility but even in originality, with any period in history. Certainly the minor arts suffered no deterioration. Skilled workers in wood, ivory, silver, and gold were scattered throughout the expanded Greek world. The engraving of gems and coins now reached its highest excellence; as far east as Bactria Hellenized kings lavished art upon their currency, and in the west the dekadrachma of Hieron II might be defended as the finest coin in numismatic record. Alexandria became famous for its goldsmiths and silversmiths, whose artistry rivaled the faultless style of its poets; for its delightful cameosโ€”precious stones or shells carved in colored relief; for its blue or green faience, its skillfully glazed pottery, its delicately designed and many-colored glass. The Portland Vase, very likely a product of Alexandria, shows this art at its best: elegant figures cut into a layer of milk-white glass superimposed upon a body of blue glass; this is, so to speak, the Josiah Wedgwood masterpiece of antiquity.*
Music remained popular in all classes of the population. Scales and modes changed in the direction of refinement and novelty;1 transient discords were admitted into harmony; instruments and compositions increased in complexity.2 Towards 240, at Alexandria, the old โ€pipes of Panโ€ were enlarged into an organ of bronze pipes; and about 175 Ctesibius improved this into an organ operated by a combination of water and air and enabling the player to control vast waves of sound. We know nothing more of its construction; but we shall see how rapidly it developed, in Roman days, into the organ of Christian and modern times.3 Instruments were combined into orchestras, and semisymphonic performances of purely instrumental music, sometimes in five movements, were given in the theaters of Alexandria, Athens, and Syracuse.4 Professional virtuosos rose to great prominence, and to a social standing commensurate with their high fees. About 318 Aristoxenus of Taras, a pupil of Aristotle, wrote a small treatise, Harmonics, which became the classic ancient text in musical theory. Aristoxenus was a very serious man, and like most philosophers he did not enjoy the music of his time. Athenaeus represents him as saying, in words that many generations have heard: โ€We also, since the theaters have become completely barbarized, and since music has become utterly ruined and vulgarโ€”we, being but a few, will recall to our minds, sitting by ourselves, what music used to be.โ€5
The architecture of the Hellenistic age cannot impress us, for time has leveled it away with indiscriminate hostility. And yet we know, from literature and the remains, that the Greek building art spread its sway in this period from Bactria to Spain. The mutual influence of Greece and the Orient brought in a mixture of styles: the colonnade and the architrave invaded inner Asia, while the arch, the vault, and the cupola entered the West; even so ancient an Hellenic center as Delos raised Egyptian and Persian capitals. The Doric order seemed too stern and stiff for an age that loved refinement and ornament; it gave ground city by city, while the ornate Corinthian style advanced to its highest excellence. The secularization of art kept pace with the secularization of government, law, morals, letters, and philosophy; stoas, porticoes, market places, courts, assembly rooms, libraries, theaters, gymnasiums, and baths began to crowd out the temples, and regal or private palaces gave a new outlet to Greek design and decoration. Domestic interiors were adorned with paintings, statues, and wall reliefs. Private gardens surrounded the more palatial homes. Royal parks, gardens, lakes, and pavilions were built in the capitals, and were usually opened to public use. Town planning developed as a sister art to architecture; streets were laid out on Hippodamusโ€ rectangular scheme, with main avenues as wide as thirty feetโ€”an ample width for horse-and-chariot days. Smyrna boasted of paved thoroughfares,6 but presumably most Hellenistic streets were trampled dirt, and knew all the vicissitudes of mud.
Fine buildings developed beyond any precedent. At Athens, in the second century, the lofty Corinthian columns of the Olympieum were set up, and the general design of the extended edifice, the most magnificent in Athens, was kid down by the Roman architect Cossutiusโ€”a strange inversion of Romeโ€s usual dependence upon the artists of Greece. Livy described this temple of the Olympian Zeus as the only structure he had seen that could be a fit dwelling for the god of gods.7 Sixteen columns of it standโ€”the most beautiful existing specimens of the Corinthian style. At Eleusis the dying piety of Athens and the genius of Philon completed the majestic temple of the Mysteries which Pericles had begun on a site already sacred in Mycenaean times; only fragments are left, but some of them show Greek design and carving still at their best. At Delos the French have excavated the ground plan of Apolloโ€s sanctuary, and have revealed a city once crowded with edifices devoted to commerce or the protection of a hundred Greek or foreign gods. At Syracuse Hieron II raised many impressive buildings, and restored and enlarged the extant municipal theater; to this day we may read his name on its stones. In Egypt the Ptolemies adorned Alexandria with edifices that gave the city a reputation for beauty, but no sign of them survives. Ptolemy III erected at Edfu a temple which is the noblest architectural relic of the Grecian occupation, and his successors built or rebuilt the temple of Isis at Philae. In Ionia new homes were given to the gods at Miletus, Priene, Magnesia, and elsewhere; the third temple of Artemis at Ephesus was finished about 300 B.C. A still vaster fane was raised by the architects Paeonius and Daphnis at Didyma, near Miletus, in honor of Apollo (332 B.C.โ€”A.D. 41); some drums of the superb Ionic columns still remain. At Pergamum Eumenes II made his capital the talk of Greece by building, among many noble structures, that famous Altar to Zeus which the Germans exhumed in 1878, and have skillfully reconstructed in the Pergamum Museum in Berlin. A majestic flight of steps mounted between two porticoes to a spacious colonnaded court; and around one hundred and thirty feet of the base ran a frieze as supreme in its period as that of the Mausoleum in the fourth century, or the Parthenon in the fifth. Never had Greece been so handsomely adorned; and never had the enthusiasm of its citizens and the skill of its artists transformed with such splendor so many habitations of men.