The Pergamene Frieze: Its Relation to Literature and Tradition

The frieze of the Pergamene altar, on which the battle between the gods and giants is represented, however its artistic work may be judged, will always hold henceforth an important place in the history of Greek art. The main outlines of its subject, the broad marks of its style, have already been made known in England through descriptions and photographs. A slight knowledge of the frieze will show one at once a mass of elaborate detail, which finds its place there because the artists have endeavoured to express in their work the various traditions which have grown up around the myth. We have therefore to deal here with a learned and reflective art; and to search out its full meaning is to ask how it stands in relation to the earlier tradition. When one looks at the forms which these enemies of the gods are here made to assume, one remarks instantly the distinction between those who are rendered with full human shape, and those whose bodies are a combination—often motley enough—of animal forms appearing side by side with the human. Now it is with this distinction that the whole history of the development of the tradition is concerned—and it is my aim to show that the Pergamene work reproduces the elements which an analysis of the myth discloses. The earth-born giants may have been regarded under three different aspects—as autochthones, a primeval race of men, or a race anterior to men, (2) as daemones, or beings that belonged to the worship of a primitive people, (3) as allegorical figures, as personifications of certain physical forces, certain powers in the natural world hostile to man. It is obvious that these ideas need not be distinct, and that by a fusion of the last two the giant may appear as a daemon whose being is rooted in certain elementary operations of nature. But one may ask the question—and the answer intimately touches the Pergamene frieze—whether, whenever the giants appear either in literature or art, there is always one and the same original conception in the background, or whether the one and the other of the above-mentioned ideas is prominent at different times and in different places?