Melville and Ancient Mediterranean Sculptural Culture

In March 1857, Melville had visited the Vatican museums on three consecutive Mondays he identified as “Vatican days” in his journal. He would have walked past the sculptural relief of Achille in Sciro more than once, whether or not he consciously registered its imagery when there was so much else to see and to quickly notate in his journal. Among the highlights he did briefly record were “Loggie of Raphael & Sistine Chapel,” the “Hall of Animals,” and “statues in Vatican.” At the end of his first “Vatican day,” he was “fagged out completely, & sat a long time by an obelisk, recovering” (NN J 108, 110, 112, 158, 191). 

Back home in the United States in November 1857, Melville began a four-month Lyceum tour in which he lectured on “Statues in Rome” in sixteen cities. He described the busts of ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, rulers, and authors he had seen in Rome as if they were living persons with discernable character traits. He advised his American audiences that ancient statues from Mediterranean sites cannot fully be understood without “knowing where they came from and under what conditions they were made.” Melville then synthesized his own rich experience among the superfluity of statues in Rome by asking his listeners to imagine the Roman Coliseum as “a great green hollow” to be “repeopled” with “all the statues from the Vatican.” He assured his American audience “the ancients live while these statues endure, and seem to breathe imagination through the world, giving purpose, shape, and impetus” those who create whatever is “high, or grand, or beautiful” (NN PTO 399-402, 406, 409). 

Imagine how the American lecturer who in 1857 had tried with his own words to convey the enduring power and beauty of sculpture created by ancient Mediterranean artists must have felt in 1874 when Colonel Cesnola (the hero of the Battle of Aldie in 1863 and a friend of Herman’s late brother Allan) brought The Amathus Sarcophagus and other ancient Mediterranean sculptures from his excavations in Cyprus to New York’s fledgling Metropolitan Museum. Melville in 1874, in spite of his full-time work as an inspector at the New York Custom House, was already deep into the research and writing of Clarel, the epic poem and pilgrimage to the Holy Land he published in 1876. Clarel was as rich in images of ancient sculpture at the east end of the Mediterranean as his print collection was to be (compare, for example, Melville’s description of the “sculpted frieze” over the entrance of the Sepulcher of the Kings of Judah in the “Tomb and Fountain” canto of Clarel (NN C 1.28.36-40) with the visual depiction of the same sculpted frieze in his French-language print of the  Monument Sépulcral des Rois de Juda (our CAT 18). 

One of the characters briefly encountered in Clarel is the Cypriote (a young pilgrim “from Cyprus” on a personal mission to the Dead Sea). The Cypriot’s carefree singing of the “hymn of Aristippus” represents “That gay Hellenic lightheartedness / Which in pagan years did twine / The funeral urn with fair caress / Of vintage holiday divine” (NN C 3.4.107-13). Exactly such a “vintage holiday divine” is “twined” in the “Sarcophage antique” at the center of Melville’s French-language print of Ruines du Monastère de Cazzafani, dans L’Isle de Cypre published in Paris in 1798/9 (our CAT 17; fig. 13 below). This monumental bier dwarfs the living figures posed before it. The human figure sculpted in high relief on the side of the sarcophagus is itself dwarfed by the lion heads and harvest wreath carved above and beside it. As  Melville’s Cypriote sings his way into the distance, the last words heard are “a wreath on the bier!” (C 3.4.138) 

Melville, the New York poet whose carefree pilgrim from Cyprus sings of the “wreath upon the bier” in Clarel in 1876, would have been interested in The Amathus Sarcophagus that Luigi di Cesnola had unearthed in Cyprus and brought to the Metropolitan Museum in 1874. As a print collector, Melville would also have been interested in comparing The Amathus Sarcophagus from Cyprus with the Sarcophage antique in his print of Ruines du Monastère de Cazzafani in Cyprus.  Because the Museum had acquired thousands of objects for its Cesnola Collection of Cypriote Antiquities, it is hard to know exactly which ones were on display between 1874 and the expansion of the Museum that doubled its size in 1888. After that expansion, objects from Cesnola’s Cypriote excavations would have been seen throughout the Ancient Antiquities on the expanded First Floor, where the The Amathus Sarcophagus was a prominent and permanent attraction. In addition to selling, donating, and exhibiting thousands of antiquities he had unearthed from Cypriote soil, Cesnola found time to document and illustrate his discoveries in two comprehensive publications. In 1877, Cesnola’s Cyprus: Its Ancient Cities, Tombs, and Temples: A Narrative of Research and Excavation During Ten Year’s Residence was published by John Murray in London. In 1885, the first volume of A Descriptive Atlas of the Cesnola Collection of Cypriote Antiquities in the Metropolitan Museum of Art was published by James R. Osgood and Company in New York (“Limestone sarcophagus,” Provenance). 

Melville the poet remained actively interested in ancient antiquities from the Mediterranean long after publishing Clarel in 1876. In 1888, when Edward Clarence Stedman asked him to provide “one of your best known shorter poems, in your own handwriting” for the 1889 edition of Stedman’s Library of American Literature, Melville sent an autograph copy of his “hymn of Aristippus” from the Cypriote in Clarel, here entitled “Ditty of Aristippus.” This manuscript, now at the American Antiquarian Society in Worchester, Massachusetts, is “the only segment of the text of Clarel known to exist in Melville’s hand” (NN C 867-870). Many of the poems Melville published in the “Fruit of Travel Long Ago” section of Timoleon in 1891 can be traced directly to journal entries from his Mediterranean voyage of 1856-57. But the one poem that most explicitly related to the excavation of an ancient sculptural artifact, “Disinterment of the Hermes,” cannot have been written before May 1877, the month in which German archaeologists, at Olympia in Greece, had discovered the statue of Hermes that had been “described by Pausanius in the second century as by Praxiteles” (NN PP 852). 

In one draft of the poem Melville had indicated its subject as “Suggested by the Disinterment / of the Hermes / By the German Commission.” The opening stanza of the published poem asks, as Luigi di Cesnola had so often done, 

   What forms divine in adamant fair— 

Carven demigod and god, 

And hero-marbles rivalling these, 

Bide under Latium’s sod, 

Or lost in sediment and drift 

Alluvial which the Grecian rivers sift. 

The second stanza answers, as Melville had himself observed from the time of the American Gold Rush into the height of the Gilded Age, that  

  To dig for these, O better far 

Than raking arid sands 

For gold more barren, meetly theirs 

Sterile, with brimming hands. (NN PP 312) 

Melville in his Lyceum lecture on “Statues in Rome” in 1857-58 had asked whether “all our modern triumphs equal those of the heroes and divinities that stand there silent, the incarnation of grandeur and beauty” (NN PTO 408). Now, as he revisited that question when writing and revising “Disinterment of the Hermes” sometime between 1877 and 1891, his distant memories of the ancient statuary he had seen during his voyage to the Mediterranean in the mid-1850s would have been enriched and refreshed by the extraordinary array of ancient Cypriote sculpture Cesnola had brought to the Metropolitan Museum in the mid-1870s. 

By the time Melville retired from his job at the Custom House on New Year’s Day 1886, Cesnola had already published the first volume of his Descriptive Atlas of the Cesnola Collection of Cypriote Antiquities in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1885-1903). When the Museum doubled its exhibition space in its Central Park building in 1888, New Yorkers would be able to explore the full range of the Cesnola Collection of Cypriote Antiquities in the context of the Museum’s ancient sculpture from other Mediterranean cultures. The map of the First Floor in the “General Guide to the Exhibition of 1888-89” shows the spatial layout of the spacious galleries in which the Museum’s many categories of ancient sculpture were then displayed (fig. 14). Six subsequent pages of the Guide summarized the content of each gallery that was depicted and identified on the map. 

After passing through the Principal Entrance to the Museum on the South Front of its new addition (letter A on the map), the visitor enters the Hall of Casts of Ancient Sculpture (letter B). This spacious gallery contains “the most noted remains of Greek, Roman, Assyrian and Egyptian sculpture.” Upon entering the elongated Hall of Ancient Sculpture and Egyptian Antiquities (letter C to the right), the viewer sees on the west side “two lines of cases with sarcophagi, mummies, and other Egyptian Antiquities, many of them from the sealed tomb discovered at Gourmet-Mourrai” in 1886. The “eastern line of cases in this gallery,” and the walls surrounding them, are filled with “sculptured objects from the Cesnola Cyprus collection; all arranged according to the style of art, from the Egyptian and Phoenician down to the Greco-Roman." Two of the other rooms in the new addition, featuring Ancient Pottery (D) and Ancient Terra Cotta (F), are also filled primarily with objects from the Cesnola collection, again arranged according to the style of art. So is the Hall of Ancient Statuary, Inscriptions and Bronzes, by far the largest room in the Museum’s original building (H). The “sculptures and statues from the Cesnola collection” on the west side of this room are matched by “funeral sculpture” from the Cesnola collection on the east side, with wall cases on the south side featuring “Cypriote, Phoenician, Greek and other inscriptions of various kinds upon various objects” (“General Guide,” pp. 3-8). 

 As we noted above, The Amathus Sarcophagus that arrived as part of the Cesnola collection in 1874 has especially been valued for the degree to which its iconography “documents the thorough integration of Greek, Cypriot, and Oriental features in works of high quality at the middle fifth century B. C” (“Limestone sarcophagus”). This aesthetic integration reflects the geographical position of the Cyprus north of Egypt; west of Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria; south of Turkey; and east of Greece and Italy. The artistic integration of multiple styles and eras of eastern Mediterranean cultural traditions was perhaps the most prominent feature of not only The Amathus Sarcophagus but of the entire array of Cypriote sculpture in the Cesnola Collection in the context of the sculpture from other Mediterranean cultures surrounding it in the expanded space. The doubling of the exhibition space for Ancient Sculpture on the First Floor of the Museum, like the doubling of the exhibition space for Old Master and Contemporary French art on the Second Floor, brought New York’s Metropolitan Museum much closer to the standard of excellence that Melville had only dreamt of when publishing the last chapter of Pierre in 1852 (NN P 349-50). 

When traveling among the inhabitants of the eastern Mediterranean in 1856-57, Melville had only begun to intuit the possibility of what he would later call an “intersympathy of creeds” among the peoples and religions of that region. By the time he published Clarel twenty years later, he had begun to actively explore the possibility an “intersympathy of creeds” among those peoples and religions, “alien or hostile tho’ they seem” (NN C 1.5.207-08). When the First Addition to the original building of Metropolitan Museum opened to the public in the Exhibition of 1888-89, Melville would have been able to wander through time and space in the doubled expanse of ancient Mediterranean sculpture from the Cesnola Collection. This, and the other ancient sculpture by which it was surrounded, gave tactile, artistic, and spiritual expression to intersympathy of creeds that had been expanding in his own imagination. The integration of multiple creeds and cultures from the eastern Mediterranean can be seen in the loving tribute to Astarte on short end of the Amathus Sarcophagus around the corner of one of the long panels depicting the stately procession of chariots (fig. 15):  

Astarte was a goddess of fertility in the Phoenician region whose worship migrated across the sea to Cyprus, where a temple in her honor was created on the Acropolis of Amathus, a royal city of Cyprus until the Hellenic conquest in 330 B. C. Astarte, who in Phoenician culture had derived from the Sumerian fertility goddess Ishtar, was herself transformed into the Greek goddess Aphrodite under the influence of Hellenic culture in Cyprus. The four figures of Astarte standing side by side on one end of the Amathus Sarcohagus relate closely to the art of Cyprus in the sixth century B. C., whereas the sphinxes who face each other on the lid above them were inspired by the Greek influence that “became fashionable in Cypriot sculpture of the Late Archaic period” (Karageorhis, 203). The figures carved on the opposite end of the Sarcophagus, only partially preserved, are a row of Bes figures, ancient Egyptian protector gods. The incorporation of these and other elements helped to make the Amathus Sarcophagus, now thought to date from 475 B. C., highly valued for its “integration of Greek, Cypriot, and Oriental features” (“Limestone Sarcophagus”). 

The site of the temple to Astarte on the ancient Acropolis of Amathus was twenty-four miles west of the present port of Larnaca. On February 1, 1857, after spending one week in Beirut after three weeks in Palestinc, Melville sailed from Beirut to Cyprus. His ship “sighted Cyprus” on the morning of the next day and sailed along its “long reach of whitish & yellowish coast with lofty mountains inland” until “coming to anchor off Larnaca, the port of Cypruss” at about five in the afternoon. Passengers “could not well go ashore,” but Melville “saw pretty much all worth seeing from deck. A level country about the town. Turkish look. Palms & Minarets—houses along the shore. Export wine here. Quite a scene among the boatmen alongside. Rivalry among five boatman for one passenger. Sunset” (NN J 95-96). 

During his one afternoon along the coast of Cyprus near the ruins of Amathus and the port of Larnaca, Melville was reminded of the Mediterranean tradition that “from these waters rose Venus from the foam” (Venus being the Roman goddess derived from the Greek goddess Aphrodite from the Cypriot goddess Astarte). He “found it as hard to realize such a thing as to realize on Mt Olivet that from there Christ rose” (J 95). Although Melville had not landed on Cyprus or visited the ruins of the temple to Astarte in February 1857, he did include a complex tribute to the island’s ancient fertility goddess in the “Traditions” canto of Clarel in 1876. Upon the ruins of her temple,  

Astarte, worshipped on the Plain 

Ere Terah’s day, her vigil keeps 

Devoted where her temple sleeps  

Like moss within the agate’s vein—  

A ruin in the lucid sea” (NN C 2.37.8-12). 

Spiritually, Melville’s goddess Astarte keeps her vigil even while her temple sleeps. Her spirit lives “like moss within the agate’s vein.” What once was living temple is now “a ruin in the lucid sea,” a phrase whose sound is as striking as its visual compression.  

Did Melville actually see such a vision of “a ruin in the lucid sea” when sailing to or from the anchorage at Larnaca in 1857? Or did his lucid imagination invent it while writing the five lines he published in 1876? Either way, did he yet know in 1876 that the Amathus Sarcophagus that had entered the collection of the Metropolitan Museum in 1874 had its own striking tribute to the fertility goddess Astarte in the shapes of the four female figures sculpted side-by-side on one of its end panels? If Melville did not know this by 1876, he is likely to have known it by 1888, when the First Addition to the Central Park building doubled its space, and brought new attention to the Cesnola Collection of Cypriote Antiquities housed throughout the length and breadth of entire First Floor. In addition to whatever information accompanied each individual object or each successive exhibition, any interested visitor curious about the history or iconography of the Amathus Sarcophagus could have easily found it Cesnola’s 1877 book Cyprus: Its Ancient Cities, Tombs, and Temples and his 1885 Descriptive Atlas of the Cesnola Collection of Cypriote Antiquities in the Metropolitan Museum of Arts.  

The 1877 London edition of Cesnola's book on Cyprus was an engaging account of Researches and Excavations during Ten Years’s Residence in that Island. The second edition, published one year later by Harper and Brothers in New York, included new maps and illustrations. Chapter 10, devoted to Amathus, locates the ruins of that ancient city in relation to modern Larnaca and traces the stages by which this ancient city founded by Phoenicians assimilated Greek and Ottomon, Egyptian, and Syrian influences, resulting eventually in the transformation of the goddess Astarte into Aphrodite. Cesnola describes the process of discovering and excavating sarcophagi in tombs sometimes 50 feet under the ground, with special attention to the Amathos Sarcophagos that he had brought to New York. This second edition contains two color plates, one showing the stately procession that has been carved into each of the side panels, the other plate showing the figures of the Phoenician goddess Astarte and Egyptian god Bes that had been sculpted out of the stone at each end (Cesnola, 1878, pp. 253-60, plates XIV and XV).  

Volume one of the Descriptive Atlas of the Cesnola Collection in 1885 also depicts the four sides of the Amathus Sarcophagus in two color plates, but each of these plates is accompanied by a printed page with a descriptive text for each of its two numbered images. Plate CXLIX depicts the Astarte end of the sarcophagus above the side panel whose stately procession includes soldiers at the end. The text for the Astarte section describes its subject as “The nude figure of Aphrodite, or Astarte, repeated four times each, each figure resembling the other, as if all had been made from one mold, each holding her hands to her breasts, and a double necklace and bracelets” (no. 1184). The text for the side panel with “two chariots followed by three foot-soldiers”  indicates that “The armor and costume of the foot-soldiers follow following the last chariot are Greek in appearance; and the whole style of the sculpture on the  two sides may be described as Phoenician, largely influenced by the Greek sculpture of about B.C. 500" (no. 1185).  

The side panel depicted in Plate CL of the Descriptive Atlas shows “two chariots . . . preceded by two horsemen, at the head of a procession whose rear appears on the other side of the sarcophagus. . . . All the horses drawing the chariots have above their head a fan-shaped ornament, which seems to have been an Oriental custom adopted by the Phoenicians. The ornaments at the ends, and on both sides of the sarcophagus, are Phoenician” (no. 1187). The end of the sarcophagus depicted in this plate features “four figures” of the Egyptian deity Bes (also known as the Phoenician Pataiki), but all but one these is “broken or defective.” Above them, the lid of the sarcophagus “is surmounted by four figures of sphinxes, sculpted in an archaic style, recalling the sphinxes from Lycia, in the British Museum” (no. 1186).  

The text and images of the chapter on Amathus in Cesnola’s 1878 edition of Cyprus, as well as the text and images for the Amathus Sarcophagus in the 1885 volume of Cesnola’s Descriptive Atlas, might have expanded Melville’s sense, if he read or saw them, of the ancient sources of the “intersympathy of creeds” that he had himself addressed throughout in Clarel in 1876. If he visited the expanded display of ancient sculpture on the First Floor of the Metropolitan Museum any time after its space was doubled for the 1888-89 exhibition, he would have been able to make many such comparisons of his own through his own eyes, mind, and memory, all of which would have enriched the poetry he published in Timoleon in 1891 as well as the manuscripts of “At the Hostelry” and “Billy Budd, Sailor” that remained uncompleted at his death.  

Just as Herman Melville was still writing and revising poetry and fiction when he died in 1891, so was Luigi di Cesnola still Director of the Metropolitan Museum when he died in 1904. After his death, Herman’s collection of more than 400 prints was preserved by his wife Elizabeth, their daughter Bessie, and their granddaughter Eleanor. In 1955 Eleanor Melville (Thomas) Metcalf donated those prints to the Berkshire Athenaeum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, from which they finally surfaced in 1986 (see our introductory essay on “Herman Melville the Print Collector”). One of those prints, Ancient Persian and Greek Medals (our CAT 1), depicted a wide array of medals and coins from those two ancient cultures. The medal numbered 12 and 13 (fig. 16 below) dates from a much later period in the relations between Phoenicia and Cyprus than the one in which the Amathus Sarcophagus was created. Sidon was an ancient maritime metropolis of Phœnicia on the coast of present-day Lebanon. The image at the center of this three-part engraving is the turreted Head of the City. The images on either side depict the goddess Astarte on a “galley” and on a “prow,” motifs that entered the coinage of the city after “the autonomous era of Sidon” began in 111 B. C. (Head, pp. 796-98, fig. 351).