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 Co
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Reactive

of
Microsystems
The Evolution of Microservices at Scale

Jonas Bonér
 Reactive Microsystems
The Evolution of Microservices at Scale

Jonas Bonér

Beijing Boston Farnham Sebastopol Tokyo

Reactive Microsystems
by Jonas Bonér
Copyright © 2017 Lightbend, Inc. All rights reserved.
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While the publisher and the author have used good faith efforts to ensure that the
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bility to ensure that your use thereof complies with such licenses and/or rights.

978-1-491-99433-7
[LSI]
 Table of Contents

Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v

1. Essential Traits of an Individual Microservice. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Isolate All the Things 1
Single Responsibility 2
Own Your State, Exclusively 3
Stay Mobile, but Addressable 6

2. Slaying the Monolith. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

Don’t Build Microliths 9

3. Microservices Come in Systems. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Embrace Uncertainty 11
We Are Always Looking into the Past 12
The Cost of Maintaining the Illusion of a Single Now 13
Learn to Enjoy the Silence 13
Avoid Needless Consistency 14

4. Events-First Domain-Driven Design. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

Focus on What Happens: The Events 17
Think in Terms of Consistency Boundaries 21
Manage Protocol Evolution 25

5. Toward Reactive Microsystems. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Embrace Reactive Programming 28
Embrace Reactive Systems 35
Microservices Come as Systems 44

iii
6. Toward Scalable Persistence. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
Moving Beyond CRUD 49
Event Logging—The Scalable Seamstress 50
Transactions—The Anti-Availability Protocol 59

7. The World Is Going Streaming. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67

Three Waves Toward Fast Data 68
Leverage Fast Data in Microservices 68

8. Next Steps. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Further Reading 71
Start Hacking 72

iv | Table of Contents
 Introduction

The Evolution of Scalable Microservices

In this report, I will discuss strategies and techniques for building
scalable and resilient microservices, working our way through the
evolution of a microservices-based system.
Beginning with a monolithic application, we will refactor it, briefly
land at the antipattern of single instance—not scalable or resilient—
microliths (micro monoliths), before quickly moving on, and step
by step work our way toward scalable and resilient microservices
(microsystems).
Along the way, we will look at techniques from reactive systems,
reactive programming, event-driven programming, events-first
domain-driven design, event sourcing, command query responsibil‐
ity segregation, and more.

v
We Can’t Make the Horse Faster
If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster
horses.
—Henry Ford1

Today’s applications are deployed to everything from mobile devices

to cloud-based clusters running thousands of multicore processors.
Users have come to expect millisecond response times (latency) and
close to 100 percent uptime. And, by “user,” I mean both humans
and machines. Traditional architectures, tools, and products as such
simply won’t cut it anymore. We need new solutions that are as dif‐
ferent from monolithic systems as cars are from horses.
Figure P-1 sums up some of the changes that we have been through
over the past 10 to 15 years.

Figure P-1. Some fundamental changes over the past 10 to 15 years

To paraphrase Henry Ford’s classic quote: we can’t make the horse

faster anymore; we need cars for where we are going.
So, it’s time to wake up, time to retire the monolith, and to decom‐
pose the system into manageable, discrete services that can be scaled
individually, that can fail, be rolled out, and upgraded in isolation.

1 It’s been debated whether Henry Ford actually said this. He probably didn’t. Regardless,
it’s a great quote.

vi | Introduction
They have had many names over the years (DCOM, CORBA, EJBs,
WebServices, etc.). Today, we call them microservices. We, as an
industry, have gone full circle again. Fortunately, it is more of an
upward spiral as we are getting a little bit better at it every time
around.

We Need to Learn to Exploit Reality

Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.
—Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

We have been spoiled by the once-believed-almighty monolith—

with its single SQL database, in-process address space, and thread-
per-request model—for far too long. It’s a fairytale world in which
we could assume strong consistency, one single globally consistent
“now” where we could comfortably forget our university classes on
distributed systems.
Knock. Knock. Who’s There? Reality! We have been living in this
illusion, far from reality.
We will look at microservices, not as tools to scale the organization
and the development and release process (even though it’s one of the
main reasons for adopting microservices), but from an architecture
and design perspective, and put it in its true architectural context:
distributed systems.
One of the major benefits of microservices-based architecture is that
it gives us a set of tools to exploit reality, to create systems that
closely mimic how the world works.

Don’t Just Drink the Kool-Aid

Everyone is talking about microservices in hype-cycle speak; they
are reaching the peak of inflated expectations. It is very important to
not just drink the Kool-Aid blindly. In computer science, it’s all
about trade-offs, and microservices come with a cost. Microservices
can do wonders for the development speed, time-to-market, and
Continuous Delivery for a large organization, and it can provide a
great foundation for building elastic and resilient systems that can

Introduction | vii
take full advantage of the cloud.2 That said, it also can introduce
unnecessary complexity and simply slow you down. In other words,
do not apply microservices blindly. Think for yourself.

2 If approached from the perspective of distributed systems, which is the topic of this
report.

viii | Introduction
 CHAPTER 1
Essential Traits of an Individual
Microservice

In my previous book, Reactive Microservices Architecture, I discussed

the essential traits of a microservice: isolation, autonomicity, single
responsibility, exclusive state, and mobility. Let’s take a few minutes
to recap the essence of these traits.

Isolate All the Things

Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.
—Pablo Picasso

Isolation is the most important trait and the foundation for many of
the high-level benefits in microservices.
Isolation also has the biggest impact on your design and architec‐
ture. It will, and should, slice up the entire architecture, and there‐
fore it needs to be considered from day one.
It will even affect the way you break up and organize the teams and
their responsibilities, as Melvyn Conway discovered in 1967 (later
named Conway’s Law):
Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will pro‐
duce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s com‐
munication structure.
Isolation between services makes it natural to adopt Continuous
Delivery (CD). This makes it possible for you to safely deploy appli‐

1
cations and roll out and revert changes incrementally, service by ser‐
vice.
Isolation makes it easier to scale each service, as well as allowing
them to be monitored, debugged, and tested independently—some‐
thing that is very difficult if the services are all tangled up in the big
bulky mess of a monolith.

Act Autonomously
In a network of autonomous systems, an agent is only concerned with
assertions about its own policy; no external agent can tell it what to do,
without its consent. This is the crucial difference between autonomy and
centralized management.
—Mark Burgess, Promise Theory

Isolation is a prerequisite for autonomy. Only when services are iso‐

lated can they be fully autonomous and make decisions independ‐
ently, act independently, and cooperate and coordinate with others
to solve problems.
Working with autonomous services opens up flexibility around ser‐
vice orchestration, workflow management, and collaborative behav‐
ior, as well as scalability, availability, and runtime management, at
the cost of putting more thought into well-defined and composable
APIs.
But autonomy cuts deeper, affecting more than the architecture and
design of the system. A design with autonomous services allows the
teams that build the services to stay autonomous relative to one
another—rolling out new services and new features in existing serv‐
ices independently, and so on.
Autonomy is the foundation on which we can scale both the system
and the development organization.

Single Responsibility
This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it
well. Write programs to work together.
—Doug McIlroy

2 | Chapter 1: Essential Traits of an Individual Microservice

The Unix philosophy1 and design has been highly successful and still
stands strong decades after its inception. One of its core principles is
that developers should write programs that have a single purpose—a
small, well-defined responsibility, and compose it well so it works
well with other small programs.
This idea was later brought into the Object-Oriented Programming
community by Robert C. Martin and named the Single Responsibil‐
ity Principle2 (SRP), which states that a class or component should
“have only one reason to change.”
There has been a lot of discussion around the true size of a micro‐
service. What can be considered “micro”? How many lines of code
can it be and still be a microservice? These are the wrong questions.
Instead, “micro” should refer to scope of responsibility, and the
guiding principle here is the Unix philosophy of SRP: let it do one
thing, and do it well.
If a service has only one single reason to exist, providing a single
composable piece of functionality, business domains and responsi‐
bilities are not tangled. Each service can be made more generally
useful, and the system as a whole is easier to scale, make resilient,
understand, extend, and maintain.

Own Your State, Exclusively

Without privacy, there was no point in being an individual.
—Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

Up to this point, we have characterized microservices as a set of iso‐

lated services, each one with a single area of responsibility. This
scheme forms the basis for being able to treat each service as a single
unit that lives and dies in isolation—a prerequisite for resilience—
and can be moved around in isolation—a prerequisite for elasticity
(in which a system can react to changes in the input rate by increas‐
ing or decreasing the resources allocated to service these inputs).

1 The Unix philosophy is described really well in the classic book The Art of Unix Pro‐
gramming by Eric Steven Raymond (Pearson Education).
2 For an in-depth discussion on the Single Responsibility Principle, see Robert C. Mar‐
tin’s website The Principles of Object Oriented Design.

Own Your State, Exclusively | 3

Although this all sounds good, we are forgetting the elephant in the
room: state.
Microservices are most often stateful components: they encapsulate
state and behavior. Additionally, isolation most certainly applies to
state and requires that you treat state and behavior as a single unit.
They need to own their state, exclusively.
This simple fact has huge implications. It means that data can be
strongly consistent only within each service but never between serv‐
ices, for which we need to rely on eventual consistency and abandon
transactional semantics. You must give up on the idea of a single
database for all your data, normalized data, and joins across services
(see Figure 1-1). This is a different world, one that requires a differ‐
ent way of thinking and the use of different designs and tools—
something that we will discuss in depth later on in this report.

4 | Chapter 1: Essential Traits of an Individual Microservice

Figure 1-1. A monolith disguised as a set of microservices is still a
monolith

Own Your State, Exclusively | 5

Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
 Agricultural Implements.

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IPSWICH,
ENGINEERS, IRONFOUNDERS, AND MANUFACTURERS OF
AGRICULTURAL IMPLEMENTS.

M ANUFACTURERS of Patent and other Iron Prize Ploughs, for Pony,

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Patent Stable Fittings; Copying Presses, &c., &c.
ILLUSTRATED CATALOGUES
MAY BE HAD ON APPLICATION TO THE WORKS, IPSWICH,

SHEPPARD RANSOME,
LONDON AGENT,
3 1, E S S E X S T R E E T, S T R A N D, L O N D O N, W. C.
OR OF

C. GARROOD,
AGRICULTURAL SUPERINTENDENT, CRYSTAL PALACE, SYDENHAM.
Stand 43.—Corn and Seed Crushing Mills, Chaff Cutters, &c.

E., First Prizes for the above Mills at the Annual Exhibitions of 1853, 1854, and 1855
R., and F. TURNER have received the Royal Agricultural Society’s
(the last occasion when a prize was offered). Also the 1st Prize and Gold Medal at
the Paris Imperial Universal Exhibition of Agriculture, 1856; Large Silver Medal at the
Grand Austrian Imperial Exhibition, Vienna, 1857. Illustrated Catalogues sent free on
application to
ST. PETER’S IRON WORKS, IPSWICH.

R ICHARD GARRETT & SONS, Leiston Works, Saxmundham, Suffolk;

Patentees and Manufacturers of Agricultural Machinery of all kinds, and of the most
approved construction.
 Route to the Works: Per Eastern Counties Railway from Bishopgate-street, London,
booking direct to Leiston.

M ARRIOTT’S Improved Humane Bee-hives, for taking pure Honey

without destroying the Bees, to be obtained of E. RIGBY and Co., 80, Gracechurch-
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E DWARD HAMMOND BENTALL,

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Ironfounder, Patentee and
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Warehouses: Swan Lane, Upper Thames Street, London, E.C., and 48, Rue
des Marais, St. Martin, Paris.
 THE

PORTRAIT GALLERY
OF THE

CRYSTAL PALACE.

BY

SAMUEL PHILLIPS.

CRYSTAL PALACE LIBRARY;

AND
 BRADBURY AND EVANS, 11, BOUVERIE STREET, LONDON.

1854.

BRADBURY AND EVANS,

PRINTERS TO THE CRYSTAL PALACE COMPANY,
WHITEFRIARS.

PREFACE.

The object of the following pages is to extract from the

valuable collection of Statues and Busts, that will be
found adorning the vast area of the Crystal Palace, some
of the interest and instruction which such works, if
properly addressed, are certain to yield. Man looks at his
own image with a more feeling curiosity than he regards
the architectural remains of a city, however ancient, or of
any structure, however beautiful. The broad brow of the
poet whose works we have read, or the martial air of the
soldier whose deeds we have heard, excite an instant
desire for more intimate acquaintance with the men; and
such acquaintance can never be formed without lasting
advantage to all who are susceptible of instruction.
 The limits of the present small volume have prevented
my doing more than record, as briefly as I might, the
salient points in the characters of the various personages
whose statues and busts constitute the Portrait Gallery of
the Crystal Palace; but I trust sufficient has been done to
throw a little light upon the various features which the
visitor will contemplate on his pleasant journey, and to
indicate, however indistinctly, the universal path which,
in life itself, leads to all true greatness. A portrait gallery
exhibits the men who have worked their way to
eminence. Biography teaches how they travelled the
difficult and thorny road.
The collection of Statues and Busts in the Crystal
Palace is necessarily imperfect; but it begins with a
goodly array. It is the intention of the Directors to extend
and, as far as the nature of the subject allows, complete
it; and there can be no doubt that we have already the
elements of one of the finest portrait galleries in Europe.
I desire in this place to express my thanks to my friend
M. Regnier, the eminent French comedian, to whose
kindness I am indebted for much information in
connexion with the French busts. I am also anxious to
acknowledge the services of my assistant, Mr. Shenton,
who, under severe pressure, has rendered me great help
in the collecting and verifying of our interesting
materials.
SAMUEL PHILLIPS.
Crystal Palace,
June, 1854.
 CONTENTS.

ANTIQUE PORTRAITS.

GREEK COURT.
SOUTH SIDE COURT—
PAGE

GREEK POETS AND DRAMATISTS 13

NORTH SIDE COURT—

GREEK PHILOSOPHERS, STATESMEN, AND GENERALS 19
ROMAN COURT.
ROMAN EMPERORS 29
AVENUE IN FRONT OF ROMAN COURT 41
COURT OF THE ROMAN LADIES 43
COURT OF ROMAN GENERALS AND POETS 46

THE ITALIAN PORTRAITS—

INTRODUCTION 54
ARTISTS AND MUSICIANS 56
POETS AND DRAMATISTS 69
SOLDIERS AND STATESMEN 76
PRELATES AND THEOLOGIANS 78
KINGS AND QUEENS 79
THE FRENCH PORTRAITS—
INTRODUCTION 80
ARTISTS AND MUSICIANS 83
POETS AND DRAMATISTS 91
SCIENTIFIC MEN AND WRITERS 98
SOLDIERS AND STATESMEN 109
PRELATES AND THEOLOGIANS 121
KINGS AND QUEENS 124

THE GERMAN PORTRAITS—

INTRODUCTION 134
ARTISTS AND MUSICIANS 136
POETS AND DRAMATISTS 145
SCIENTIFIC MEN AND WRITERS 149
SOLDIERS AND STATESMEN 157
PRELATES AND THEOLOGIANS 162
KINGS AND QUEENS 163

THE ENGLISH PORTRAITS—

INTRODUCTION 168
ARTISTS AND MUSICIANS 169
POETS AND DRAMATISTS 179
SCIENTIFIC MEN AND WRITERS 188
SOLDIERS AND STATESMEN 202
PRELATES AND THEOLOGIANS 218
KINGS AND QUEENS 220
 INTRODUCTION.

Portraiture is associated with the earliest attempts at

representing living objects, both in sculpture and in
painting. Even amongst savages we find resemblances,
carved or painted, or both, of the human form, generally
grotesque, but always presenting an idea of Art. With the
advance of civilization, the demand for portraits
increased, as the knowledge of the means available for
painting and sculpture improved. Men in authority, or
possessed of great wealth, or renowned by deeds of
arms and feats of strength, became the first subjects for
the art.
That the Egyptians early practised portrait-painting, is
evident from the discovery of mural sculpture, at a date
anterior to the time of Rameses, representing painters
delineating men and animals, and sculptors carving out
of granite the very figures reproduced in another
material, in the Egyptian Court of the Crystal Palace.
Herodotus records the fact that Amasis sent his portrait
painted on wood to Cyrene as a present; and some
portraits of this kind were found in the tombs at Thebes.
On comparing the heads of Rameses and Amenoph,
several of which are to be seen in the Egyptian court, the
individuality of each is at once perceived. Rameses has
an aquiline nose and thin lips, while Amenoph has the
turned-up nose and thick lips of the African.
In Clarac’s “Musée de Sculpture,” are collected many
accurate engravings of the portraits of the Egyptians
contained in the Louvre, which, according to this
authority, are all verified, as many as eighty-six of them
having their names attached. In the Imperial Library, at
Paris, there is a collection of a hundred Chinese portraits
of great antiquity. They were brought from China by the
well-known Jesuit missionary, Père Ameot. Pauthier,
author of a History of China, refers to these portraits,
and considers them to be those of celebrated men and
women living at a period long anterior to Confucius.
Croesus, King of Lydia, had the image of his baking
woman set up in gold: and Herodotus has preserved the
names of two Argive youths, Biton and Cleobis, who for
their piety in drawing their mother, the priestess of Juno,
to the temple, when the oxen for her car in a great
solemnity did not arrive, had their statues placed by their
countrymen at Delphi.
To the Greeks, indeed, we owe the finest examples of
portraits in Sculpture. Their temples, forums, and other
public places, as well as their private dwellings, were
ornamented with the busts and statues of heroes, kings,
poets, orators, and others distinguished by their
achievements. Many of these examples have fortunately
been rescued from destruction, and preserved to the
present time.
The Romans, although not themselves, either by the
gift of Heaven, or by their own tastes, artists, were great
patrons of art. Many a rich Roman citizen had the court
of his house converted into a kind of forum, which he
adorned with his favourite portrait statues. From the
precious ruins of Ancient Rome—from her temples,
palaces, villas—countless statues and busts have been
dug out. Her tombs also were furnished with portraits,
busts, and statues, recumbent, or in other postures.
In all times, and in all countries, we note a desire to
perpetuate the memory of the dead; and the pious as
well as humane intention was carried out in various
ways. The Egyptians enclosed their mummies in wooden
and stone cases, carved and painted in order to
resemble, more or less, the inhabitant within. The tombs
of Etruria are usually surmounted by a half recumbent
statue, which although but rudely representing the
features and attitude of life, clearly reveal the intention
to produce a portrait of the deceased person, but never
—which became the custom in after ages—as though he
were dead.
From the employment of sculptured portraits upon the
monuments of the dead, and from the use of other
images in the funeral rites, such representations came to
be called “busts,” from the Latin word Bustum, signifying
a tomb, or rather place where the burning of the body
took place. Since the majority of persons could not afford
a statue, the less expensive memorial, consisting of the
head and shoulders, was the more generally adopted;
and hence the name now current amongst us.
Portraits played a still more important part in the
economy of the ancient Romans. Images, or rather
masks, made in wax and representing their ancestors,
were kept by the Romans in the vestibules of their
houses, placed in cases formed like temples, and there
constantly exposed to the notice of the family and of
visitors. When a member of the family died, these masks
were worn by the friends who assisted at the funeral, as
were the dresses and robes of office belonging to the
ancestors whom they personated. After the ceremony,
the images were faithfully restored to their sanctuaries in
the vestibule.
Another use of portraiture was originally peculiar to the
Greeks, but it became subsequently adopted by other
nations. We refer to the practice of painting upon a metal
shield the portraits of a family—often with the father in
the centre—and of hanging it up as sacred to the gods.
There are similar portraits extant, in terracotta, of
Demosthenes in exile at Calauria, and of Thales. The
ancients also painted portraits on wood in encaustic, and
some portraits formed in mosaic still exist.
In proportion to the growth of luxury, and to the
development of the arts, do we find the increased
employment of portraiture. Every kind of work was
decorated with a portrait. This was especially the usage
of the Greeks under the successors of Alexander, at
Alexandria, Antioch, and Pergamus; and with the
Romans, towards the close of the Republic, and under
the Emperors.
Engraved stones of seals and rings are exceedingly
valuable in enabling us to identify antique busts and
statues; their hardness having preserved them from
injury. Very frequently they give the impression of being
most accurate portraits. In the Greek Court is a large
collection of casts of these extremely interesting works,
which merit careful examination. Many of the heads are
wonderfully beautiful—far surpassing in execution any
similar work of the present time.
In like manner the portraits upon coins, being
connected with writing, have been most useful in
contributing to the knowledge and naming of antique
busts and statues. Of these illustrations also, the visitor is
enabled to study a very complete series from very early
times.
The universal taste for portraiture exhibited by the
ancients, and the encouragement to art which the vast
wealth of many enabled them to afford, soon led to the
formation of a gallery of portraits in every house of
importance. Such a gallery contained portraits, both
sculptured and painted, of great men in art, science,
letters, and arms, and was called “The Pinacotheca.” The
desire to render such a collection as complete as
possible, led to the production of an infinite number of
copies from those originally taken from the life: just as
with us, houses are adorned with plaster-casts of the
busts of Wellington, Shakspeare, and Milton.
It will now be understood how it has happened that so
large a number of portrait-busts have remained to us
from antiquity. Unless they had been multiplied in the
manner described, the acts of ignorance and the
accidents of time would have effaced all record of the
features and aspect of the good and great in ancient
story. Most of the works, executed in metal, were melted
down and converted into money. One valuable mine,
however, was happily discovered in the ruins of
Herculaneum, completely preserved, and was removed to
the Museum at Naples, where it still exists. Of several, so
recovered, we possess fine copies in the Crystal Palace.
During the reign of Hadrian in Rome (A.D. 120), art
enjoyed a revival—a Medicean period. A multitude of
works of every kind were produced, and portraiture was
carried to its height through the very zealous loyalty to
which sculptors gave way, in their desire to flatter their
imperial and magnificent patron, by representing the
members of his family as so many gods and goddesses.
The like encouragement was afforded under the
dominion of Antoninus Pius (A.D. 140), and his adopted
son, Marcus Aurelius; followed, unfortunately, by the
destructive propensities of the odious Commodus, who
would have limited portraiture to the representation of
his own face.
We see the first efforts of portraiture in Christian art, in
the representations—sculptured and painted—of saints in
the early ages of the faith. Some examples of these will
be found in the Byzantine and Mediæval Courts. A certain
conventional form was adhered to in all these works, in
which we remark especially a general elongation of the
face and features, as if the aim had been to impress
upon them the natural effects of emaciation from
penance and fasting, the body and limbs being also
subjected to the same treatment. The eyes are always
almond-shaped, half closed, and sloping upwards from
the nose. The portraits of Justinian, Theodora,
Nicephorus, and Charles the Bald, on the façade of the
Byzantine Court, bear evidence of their authenticity.
In forming our idea of an individual portrait painted in
the early Christian period, we must never forget to allow
for the formalities by which an artist of that time was
inexorably directed. Statues and pictures were then
produced (as indeed they are to this day by the monks of
Mount Athos,) in accordance with rule and system—a
sort of holy heraldry. At the time of which we now speak,
we trace no general and popular use of portraits, such as
we observed amongst the ancients, although they were
still to be found in the hands of the most wealthy and
cultivated. These were of an expensive kind, in mosaic
and in miniature painting, the latter style being
frequently employed when a valuable manuscript or
missal was copied for presentation, and a portrait of the
author or donor was usually painted upon it.
Mediæval portraiture shows a considerable advance
upon the Byzantine, but is still inferior to the antique and
to the portraiture of our own time. It was confined,
almost exclusively, to monumental effigies, in which the
artist was constrained to present the lifeless form, in the
stiffness of very death—whether sleeping the sleep of
eternal peace, or kneeling in the attitude of prayer. Some
of the finest examples are to be seen in the Mediæval
Court: of these more than one are doubtless portrait-
statues of the time. The same may be said of some of
the effigies of the Knights Templar, which exhibit great
individuality, having been executed in a very hard kind of
marble, that has well retained the features originally
carved out of it. Busts of this period are exceedingly rare;
inasmuch as portraiture of the kind was not in
accordance with the religious feeling of the age. We must
be content to take the effigies of mediæval art as
portraits of the time; treated, of course, after certain
conventionalities, but nevertheless truthful and most
interesting.
The art of portraiture revived under the creative genius
of Giotto and Orcagna, and of the great men of the
Renaissance—Domenico Ghirlandaio and Giovanni Bellini
—until it reached the highest dignity and beauty in the
superb works of the mightiest of the mighty Italians—
Michael Angelo, Raffaelle, and Titian. The most
remarkable portraits of this period are paintings, and are
therefore not to be found in large numbers in the Crystal
Palace. In the beautiful gallery, however, of copies from
the old masters, will be found several fine examples. In
the Renaissance and Mediæval Courts, will be seen some
of the statues from the tombs of Maximilian and Albert of
Saxony—the finest portrait-statues of their kind. In the
Italian Court, too, there are the immortal monumental
statues of the Medici, and a superb bust of Cosmo de’
Medici by the inimitable Cellini.
The antique statues and busts described in the
following pages are from
The Vatican, at Rome,
The Capitoline Museum,
The Naples Museum,
The Florence Gallery,
The Louvre,
The Berlin Museum,
The British Museum.

ΗΡΟΔΟΤΟΣ.
 THE PORTRAIT GALLERY.

ANTIQUE PORTRAITS.

GREEK COURT.—South Side-Court.

POETS AND DRAMATISTS.

[28] 1. Homer. Great Epic Poet of Greece.
[Born, probably B.C. 850. Place of birth unknown.]
A majestic antique Bust. The kingly and venerated Patriarch of all Poets,
for the western civilization—or, the sound of a Name! The two wonderful
poems which bear down this name—whatever signifying—through the
lapse and revolutions of time, preserve, as it were, the image of an
extinct world: although of a world, perhaps less than half real, and more
than half ideal:—for the manners were: the persons and events may, or
may not have been: and the gods and goddesses of the “Iliad” and the
“Odyssey” were, we know, only a believed-in, waking dream. But, by the
potency of the song, the picture lives! The war, imaginary or no, raging
between the Hellespont and the foot of Mount Ida, remains, to the
educated memory of the nations, like the beginning—if not of the world’s,
yet of its western half’s—history. And those heroes and heroines, with
their high actions and their deep passions—the unrolling, embroidered
web of their fortunes and fates:—the king of men, Agamemnon,—the
swift-footed son of the sea-goddess, Achilles,—-the sage, long-lived
Nestor,—the shrewd, enduring Ulysses,—Ajax, a tower in the fight,—
Diomed, favoured of Minerva present beside him in the storm of spears;—
and that grey-headed, imperial sire of Troy, with all his falling sons, Priam,
—the gallant and good Hector,—the loving and faithful Andromache,—the
aged, too fruitful mother, Hecuba;—even the fatal and criminal, but
divinely beautiful Helen—Is it not a strange magic that dwells in the
creative thought of the poet, and in his modulated words, and that thus,
in a language, and with manners, a faith, an age—all so long since dead
and gone—can, as if reviving all, render those Shadows, to us—now, here
—the earliest objects of a wondering and aspiring enthusiasm:—the first
enkindlers in our bosoms of that glowing, intense, comprehensive, and
intelligent sympathy, which transports us out of the central self, and
beyond the close-drawn horizon of our own particular life, to feel the
conditions and to understand the spirits of all our fellow men? Let the
theory be true, which denies to these incomparable works an individual
author—which supposes them woven together of many songs, first sung
in many places, by many singers; let the benignly august, fillet-bound
head before us, be—that which only at last it can be—a conjecture of the
Grecian chisel;—we see at least here how the consummated art of
sculpture has chosen to express, in corporeal form, the one soul of power
which animates those immortal twins of poesy. We see in what shape of a
human head, crowned with its own irradiations, the fountains of all song
might have sprang. We see what the living and wandering minstrel of
Greece, beloved and honoured wheresoever, in hall or on green, he and
his harp came,—what the individual Homer, for whose birth seven cities
contended, and whom in the after-day the land numbered amongst her
half-divine and worshipped heroes—WOULD HAVE BEEN:—or, WAS!
[Although modern antiquaries agree with Pliny that busts of Homer are apocryphal,
yet there can be no doubt this is the true Greek conventional portrait of that
poet. A headless marble was dug up inscribed with his name and shortly
afterwards the head itself was found in the same hole, and it fitted precisely to
the marble previously discovered. The bust, so found, is now in the Naples
Museum. The same head is constantly found in other representations of the
ancient poet. The head is bound with the “strophium,” an ornament given by
the Greek artists to their gods and heroes. The attitude of the head would seem
to express the blindness with which Homer, according to tradition, was afflicted.
This bust is from the marble in the Stanza dei Filosofi of the Capitoline Museum,
Rome.]
[28] The objects forming the Portrait Gallery in the Crystal Palace, are numbered
in red figures throughout.
2. Archilochus. Greek Poet.
[Born at Paros, about B.C. 700. Killed in battle, about B.C. 635]
A satirical poet of great renown, whose acrid pen spared neither friend
nor foe. A writer also of licentious verse. Fragments only of his
compositions have come down to us. To him is attributed the invention of
the Iambic measure, and he shares with Thaletas and Terpander the
honour of establishing lyric poetry in Greece. The victors in the Olympic
games were accustomed to sing one of his hymns in their triumphal
procession. The countenance of his statue denotes impudent boldness.
[The two early poets united: a mode of portraiture adopted by the Greek artists
when two celebrated men were of the same country, and of kindred pursuits, as
Herodotus and Thucydides, parallel historians; Metrodorus and Epicurus,
philosophers of the same sect (see No. 20). This double terminal or Janus was
found at Rome on the Celian Hill: it is now in the Vatican. The ends of the noses
are modern, as are some other parts in the Homer. That portraits of Archilochus
existed so long after his death is proved by the existence of an inscription in the
Analecta of Thucydides written for his portrait.]

2A. Homer. Great Epic Poet of Greece.

[For life see No. 1.]

3. Æsop. Writer of Fables.

[Born in Phrygia, about B.C. 620. Died about B.C. 560.]
The reputed author of the fables to which his name has been for
centuries attached. According to the general account, he was originally a
slave, and gained much notice for his wit, and especially for his talent of
communicating useful maxims in the form of apologues. His talent
procured him favour at the court of Crœsus. He is said to have been
thrown from the top of a rock and killed, by the priests of Delphi. His
fables, at first preserved by tradition, were at a later period converted into
Greek and Latin verse by Babrias and Phædrus. We have them in Greek
prose, told naturally and in the utmost simplicity. In stature Æsop is
described as small and hump-backed, with a prominent stomach and
pointed head, yet the intellectual expression of his countenance is not
that usually given to dwarfs.
[From the very remarkable half-figure in marble in the Villa Albani, at Rome; the
whole of which is of great antiquity. It has been maintained that Æsop was not
deformed, inasmuch as the circumstance is not mentioned by writers, before
 the time of the Greek monk, Planudes Maximus. There are, however, traditions
affirming his deformity, and Plutarch, in his Feast of the Sages, makes him sit
upon a low stool at the feet of Solon. The countenance has a thoughtful and
elevated expression. Lysippus sculptured the portrait of Æsop to be placed
amongst the sages of Greece at Athens. Phædrus refers to this work, and the
celebrity of the man is fixed by the fact that the court sculptor of Alexander
employed himself upon his statue.]

4. Homer. Great Epic Poet of Greece.

[From the marble. Once in the Capitoline Museum; now in the Louvre.]

5. Epimenidies. Poet and Prophet of Crete.

[Flourished about B.C. 596]
St. Paul in his Epistle to Titus (i. 12) is supposed to allude to
Epimenides. But little more than his name and existence are known, apart
from tradition. About B.C. 596, he was invited to Athens, in order to stay
the plague brought upon the city by an impious outrage committed by
Cylon, one of the Athenian rulers, on the altars of the Acropolis.
Succeeding in arresting the pestilence, he augmented his already great
fame—but he refused any other reward beyond the goodwill of the
Athenians in favour of the inhabitants of Gnossus, where he dwelt. He
was a native of Crete.
[From the marble in the Vatican. One of the conventional portraits of the ancient
Greek poets. The closed eyes are to represent the sleep which tradition says he
fell into for fifty-seven years.]

6. Æschylus. Tragic Poet.

[Born at Eleusis, in Greece, B.C. 525. Died at Gela, in Sicily, B.C. 456. Aged 69.]
The founder of Greek tragedy as it existed in its greatness. He
introduced a second actor upon the scene, and gave dramatic interest to
his act, by rendering dialogue the most important element in the play. He
improved the masks and dresses of the actors, and raised the character of
the choral dances. The scenes painted under his direction were, it is said,
the first in which the idea of perspective was maintained. Sublimity and
magnificence characterize the style of his tragedies, in which the action
and plot, with an unparalleled simplicity of structure, move on, in
commanding and stern strength, to their catastrophe; supported by grand
imagery, with diction wrested to the height of energy and solemn passion.
The characters drawn by Æschylus are as lofty as the language which
they speak. We almost yearn for the simple voice of Nature as we listen to
the sustained thunder-tone of this great master. His mind seems ever
attuned for discourse with the Gods; yet in the “Prometheus,” though
dealing with a demigod, he describes with awful power, human suffering
and human passion in its saddest and most thrilling aspect. The family of
Æschylus were remarkable for their valour, and he himself fought bravely
at Marathon and Salamis. He was an actor in his own plays.
[From the marble in Stanza dei Filosofi, of the Capitoline Museum, at Rome.]

7. Sophocles. Tragic Poet.

[Born at Colonus, in Attica, about B.C. 495. Died probably at Athens, B.C. 405. Aged 90.]
In Sophocles, Æschylus found a rival and a conqueror. When Cimon (B.C.
468) returned from the Isle of Scyros, with the ashes of Theseus, the first
play of Sophocles (“Triptolemus”) was preferred to the composition of
Æschylus, who in chagrin retired to Sicily. From this time Sophocles stood
alone, until he, in his turn, met a successful rival in Euripides. In 440, he
produced “Antigone,” for its calm beauty, and the pure picture of heroic,
feminine self-devotion, one of the finest antique tragedies extant, and the
occasion of his promotion through the favour of Pericles. In the person of
Sophocles was represented the ideal of Greek perfection. He was very
beautiful; he excelled in gymnastics, music, and dancing; in temperament
he was calm and contented; in disposition kind and cheerful; he had a
ready wit, a serene piety, and intellectual grandeur. His tragedies have an
advantage over those of Æschylus, in being essentially human; they
appeal to the feelings of an auditory, and are written in a less
magniloquent style than that of the sublime father of Greek tragedy,—to
whom, however, Sophocles lay under the obligations of a pupil to his
instructor. Both are profound masters of their art.
[This bust is from the Capitoline Museum, and is identified by another in the Vatican
—found in 1778—on which all the letters of the name remained, except the SO.
It was for a long time called Pindar,* because of the inscription; Bottari has
proved it to be Sophocles, whom it completely resembles. Compare the Lateran
statue, No. 325, standing in the great Transept, near the monument of
Lysicrates.]

*. Pindar. Greek Poet.

 [Born probably at Thebes, about B.C. 522. Died there, about B.C. 442. Aged about 80
years.]
The most famous lyric poet of Greece. Sent at an early age to Athens,
he became the pupil of Lasus. He sung the victors in the Olympic,
Nemæan, Pythian, and Isthmian games,—the great festivals of assembled
Greece. Forty-five of these odes of triumph are all that have descended to
us; they are characterized by great boldness of style, spirit, and trumpet-
toned enthusiasm, but the brilliant diction does not escape obscurity; and
the modern student often follows with difficulty the excursive wing of
“The Theban Eagle,” through the wide regions of Hellenic mythology.
Pindar’s earliest extant work was written in his twentieth year. He is
described as a man of strong religious feelings, and a devout worshipper
of the gods.

8. Æschines. Greek Orator.

[Born in Attica, about B.C. 389. Died in the Isle of Samos, B.C. 314. Aged about 75.]
One of the greatest Greek orators. Was at the battle of Mantineia (B.C.
362), and distinguished himself at the battle of Tamynæ in Eubœa (B.C.
358). Afterwards entered into political life, and became a partizan of Philip
of Macedonia. Accompanied Demosthenes on two embassies to Philip,
and was accused by Demosthenes of betraying the interests of the state
to that monarch. The speech of his accuser and his own admirable
defence are extant. His last great public act was the prosecution of
Gtesiphon for illegally proposing to present Demosthenes with a golden
crown for his services to the state. Demosthenes defended the accused,
and the speeches of the two orators delivered on this occasion are also
preserved. The prosecution failing, Æschines at once went into exile (B.C.
330). As a popular leader and orator worthy to be called the rival of
Demosthenes. He lacked the vehement passion and powerful invective of
that consummate master, but his lucid arrangement, his facility and
perspicuity, have never been surpassed.
[For an account of this statue, so long called Aristides,* see Handbook to Roman
Court and Nave, No. 326.]

*. Aristides. Athenian Patriot.

[Born (uncertain). Died about B.C. 468.]
 His unbending integrity procured him the title of “The Just.” Was at the
battle of Marathon (B.C. 480), where he fought bravely. Opposed to the
extreme democratical party in Athens, headed by Themistocles, by whose
influence he was banished (about B.C. 483). He was still in exile at the
time of the sea-fight of Salamis (B.C. 482), but he raised a band, and
fought for his country in this battle. Recalled by the Athenians from
banishment, and commanded their army at the battle of Platæa (B.C. 479).
His sense of justice spotless: his self-denial unimpeachable. At his death
he was very poor, although he had borne the highest offices of the State.
The Athenians became more virtuous from the contemplation of this
bright example. It is related that in the representation of one of the
tragedies of Æschylus, a sentence was uttered in favour of moral
goodness. The eyes of the audience turned involuntarily and at once from
the actor to Aristides.

9. Euripides. Greek Poet.

[Born at Salamis, B.C. 480. Died in Macedonia, B.C. 406. Aged 74.]
The father of Euripides, putting his own interpretation upon the oracle
which promised that his son should be crowned with “sacred garlands,”
had him carefully trained in gymnastic exercises, and whilst yet a boy
Euripides won the prize at the Eleusinian and Thesean games. But the lad
was soon allured from physical sports, by the fascinations of philosophy
and literature. He became the ardent pupil and friend of the philosopher
Anaxagoras, and the instruction thus derived is visible in many of his
productions. At the age of 18, Euripides wrote his first tragedy. He gained
the first prize B.C. 441, and continued to exhibit his plays until within two
years of his death. He died in Macedonia, and is said to have been torn in
pieces by the dogs of the Macedonian king. Twenty of his plays are
extant. Like Anaxagoras, Euripides was of a serious temper, and averse to
mirth. He was intimate with Socrates, and the contemporary of
Herodotus, Xenophon, Thucydides, Pindar, Aristophanes, Æschylus, and
Sophocles. To assign him his poetical rank we must look back. In the
three great Attic tragedians we trace a natural progress of their theatre.
In Æschylus, the stage appears attracted with predominant force to the
high mythological ideas which it arose to embody: the muse stalks
sublimely above the heads of men. In Sophocles, the art tempers and
adjusts, with admirable equipoise, the superhuman and the human
element; the spirits and hearts of men are more closely approached by
the poet, still overshadowed by the heroic and the divine. In Euripides,
although the story which he represents is still drawn from the same
source of divine and heroic fable, the sympathy with passions, events,
interests, and sufferings, incident to humanity, prevails in excess. With
him, amidst strewings of beautiful poetry, and whilst penetrated with
strokes of singular pathos, we too much feel that we step on our own
daily and common earth. We miss the elevation of an art which should, in
reflecting ourselves, lift us above ourselves: as we have experience in our
own Shakspeare. Sophocles said that “he himself represented men as
they ought to be, but Euripides as they are.”
[This bust is verified by another in the Louvre, and one in the Naples Museum,
which has the name of Euripides engraved on the breast. There is also a cameo
of exceeding beauty in the Louvre, on which we find the same head. Portraits of
Euripides were common at Athens, and even as late as the 5th century his
statues were to be seen at Constantinople. A small seated statue of Euripides
will be found in the Bas-relief Gallery, No. 215. It is inscribed with his name,
and has a list of his plays, upon the slab which supports the statue. See
Handbook to Greek Court, No. 215.]

10. Aratus. Astronomer.

[Flourished about B.C. 270.]
A fellow-countryman of St. Paul, who quotes one of his works in his
address to the Athenians. Called to the Court of Antigonus Gonatas, King
of Macedonia. He there pursued physics, grammar, and philosophy. He
also versified two astronomical treatises by Eudoxus. There are many
errors with much want of precision in the descriptive portions of these
works, proving the poet to have been neither a mathematician nor an
acute observer. As a poet, Aratus was hardly more eminent. He is wanting
in originality and poetic feeling; yet his verses obtained popularity both in
Greece and Rome.
[The well known head, representing, as it is supposed, the Poet of the Stars, in the
attitude of viewing the heavens. The same head is found on medals, of which
the best is preserved in the Hunterian Museum of the College of Surgeons,
London.]