This latter way of restoration,--the
aesthetic way,--followed by the famous connoisseurs of the
Renaissance, has been followed here; and the visitor to Munich
actually sees the marbles of Aegina, as restored after a model by the
tasteful hand of Thorwaldsen.
Different views have, however, been maintained as to the right
grouping of the figures; but the composition of the two groups was
apparently similar, not only in general character but in a certain
degree of correspondence of all the figures, each to each. And in
both the subject is a combat,--a combat between Greeks and Asiatics
concerning the body of a Greek hero, fallen among the foemen,--an
incident so characteristic [259] of the poetry of the heroic wars.
In both cases, Athene, whose temple this sculpture was designed to
decorate, intervenes, her image being complete in the western gable,
the head and some other fragments remaining of that in the eastern.
The incidents represented were probably chosen with reference to the
traditions of Aegina in connexion with the Trojan war. Greek legend
is ever deeply coloured by local interest and sentiment, and this
monument probably celebrates Telamon, and Ajax his son, the heroes
who established the fame of Aegina, and whom the united Greeks, on
the morning of the battle of Salamis, in which the Aeginetans were
distinguished above all other Greeks in bravery, invited as their
peculiar, spiritual allies from that island.
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