CHAPTER X.HOMERIC METALLURGY.

Manis a tool-shaping animal. He alone infuses matter with purpose, and so makes it effective for widening and strengthening his wonderful dominion over physical nature. What is more, his thoughts themselves grow with the means at his command, and their growth in turn inspires a further restless seeking after instruments of fresh conquests. The first metal-workers, accordingly, crossed a gulf destined to divide the ages. It was not for nothing that legendary honours were paid to them; they were the vague recognition of a really momentous advance. Its importance consisted, not so much in the immediate gain of power, as in the implication of what was to come. For metallurgy is an art which does not easily stand still. Even in its crudest stages it demands some technical skill; and technical skill cannot be attained without division of labour, differentiation of classes, and development of intelligence by its direction into special channels, and towards feasible ends.There are, then, few better tests of civilisation than the degree of command acquired over the metals.

The wide compass of metallic qualities was in itself stimulating to ingenuity. There was always something new to be found out about them, and they lent themselves with facility to every variety of treatment. This versatility contrasted strongly with the rigid and impracticable nature of the stony substances they tended to supersede. Thus, the six primitive metals not only presented, at first sight, a great number of diverse characteristics, but those characteristics proved, on the most elementary trials, highly susceptible of change. They could be surprisingly modified, for instance, by mutual admixtures, and, in a lesser degree, by differences of manipulation. Secrets of the craft hence multiplied, and invited, as they continue to invite, further experiments and research.

Of still greater consequence to civilisation at large was the comparatively recondite occurrence of the metals. They are not to be met with, like flints or pebbles, strewing the bed of every stream; their distribution is defined and restricted. The demand for them could, for this reason, only be supplied by opening long lines of communication; it led to extended intercourse between nations, and created wants stimulating to traffic.

Metals, besides, present themselves only by exception in the native state; they are commonly disguised under some form of ore, subterraneanly bestowed.Nature holds them concealed in her bosom, or at most attracts the eye with niggardly samples of her treasures. The very wordmetal, indeed, records a ‘quest,’ a searching for something hidden; and it is remarkable that these substances have been least effective for promoting culture just where they have come most readily to hand. By the shores of Lake Superior pure copper can be quarried like sandstone; and it was, in fact, cut away and hammered into axes and knives by Indian tribes long before they came into contact with Europeans. A similar use has been made of meteoric iron by the Esquimaux. But no development of ingenuity resulted in either case. And for this reason among others, that the metal was usedcold. It received essentially the treatment of stone, and made very much the same kind of response. Because smelting processes were not needed, forging processes were not thought of. The furnace was absent, and with it the power of rendering metals plastic to human wants and purposes. There was, then, good warrant for the figuring, as the arch-metallurgist of mythology, of the incorporated element of fire.

Hephæstus was the Homeric Wayland Smith. He embodied the antique, universal notion of magic metallurgy, but embodied it after a dignified manner suitable to the grand epical standard. Homer was not given to repeating folk-stories current among the lower strata of—shall we say?—Pelasgian society.His associations were with courts and camps, his sympathies with heroic achievements and maritime adventures in distant, perhaps fabulous, countries. There, indeed, grotesque aboriginal fancies might be permitted to flourish; but they were excluded as much as possible from the sunlit spaces of the Hellenic world. Even here they crept in unbidden, for the Homeric theology is by no means exempt from the influence of rustic persuasions. But these were only admitted after passing through the alembic of fine fancy or ennobling thought. Thus, Hephæstus, although he has not wholly put off the semblance of the ‘drudging goblin’ of caves and cairns, stands for a formidable nature-power, and possesses the capability of being sublime. Panting, perspiring, shaggy, and limping, he is still no dubious divinity, but a genuine Olympian. His dwelling is on the mountain of the gods; he shares their councils; his operations are at the command of none; he is self-directed and self-inspired with his art, having taken to the hammer and anvil as spontaneously as the infant Hermes took to music and thievery. Indeed, the ill-used, yet not ill-natured, son of Heré surpasses his progenitors in one important respect. He is the only one of the Homeric gods in whom some remnant of creative power remains active. He alone commands a glimmer of the Promethean spark, half-hidden though it be in the ashes of material conceptions. Not, indeed, life in any true sense, but faculties of perception andanimation are his to give to the works of his hands. His forge can turn out intelligent automata. Among its products are golden handmaidens,[363]conscious without being self-conscious, endowed with all the useful attributes, while devoid of the inconveniences of personality. Their efficiency was purely altruistic; they acted, but neither sought nor suffered. The bellows, too, of the great Iliadic armourer could be left to blow at discretion; and his wheeled tripods repaired to, and withdrew from, the assembly of the gods, at fit times, unsummoned and undismissed. This lingering of the creative tradition, completely dissociated from the mighty Zeus, about the misshapen nursling of Thetis, illustrates his connexion with Pthah, the creative and at the same time the metallurgical deity of the Nile-valley.

363.Ilmarine, the Finnish Hephæstus, made himself a wife of gold.

The Teutonic Wieland sprang from the same mythological stock. He could, however, lay claim to no trait of divinity, but was merely an artist of supreme skill, taught by subterranean pygmies. He was lamed by King Nidung, an early art-patron, eager for a monopoly of his services; but eventually escaped by means of a flying-apparatus of his own construction, his maladroit brother Ægil barely escaping the fate of Icarus. Here, then, Wieland merges into Dædalus, who is only once mentioned by Homer, and that as a builder. In a passage full of the ‘local colour’ of Crete, he is said to have constructedthe ‘chorus,’ or dancing-place of Ariadne.[364]The dream of a levitative art lurked nowhere within the Homeric field of view. Least of all had it been mastered by the ‘eternal smith’ of Olympus, who owed his life-long infirmity to the want of a parachute. His ‘summer’s day’ fall from the ‘crystal battlements’ of Olympus ‘on Lemnos, th’ Ægean isle,’ crippled him incurably; and his return thither was effected by other than aeronautic means. But the story of his alliance with Dionysus is not Homeric, so we have nothing to do with it.

364.Iliad, xviii. 592.

Still less Homeric is the comparatively late account of his localisation in the Lipari Islands:

Vulcani domus, et Vulcania nomine tellus.

And yet it is worth recalling, as evidence that the prime metallurgists of Northern and Southern Europe were offshoots from the same stem. Every one knows that, in the days of old, travellers’ horses were wont to be privily shod, ‘for a consideration,’ at a cromlech at Ashbury in Berkshire,[365]by a certain ‘Wayland Smith,’ who had no doubt his own reasons for eschewing public observation. It seems, however, from the testimony of Pytheas, a Massilian Greek of Alexander’s epoch, that the Liparine Hephæstus conducted himself in just the same kind of way.[366]He worked invisibly, but could be hired to do any given job. This showsa marked decline from his palmy Iliadic days, when his services might by exception be had for love, but never for money. From the position of a god, he had sunk to that of a mere mercenary troll or kobold.

365.Wright,Archæologia, vol. xxxii. p. 315.

366.Scholium to Apoll. Rhod.Argonautica, iv. 761.

Among the Achæans at the time of the siege of Troy, works in metal[367]of traditional repute were ascribed to Hephæstus no less freely than swords and cuirasses in the Middle Ages to Wieland or his French equivalent, Galand, or than fiddles in later days to Straduarius. A Wieland’s sword, first brandished by Alexander the Great, was said to have been transmitted successively to Ptolemy, Judas Maccabæus, and Vespasian; Charlemagne’s ‘Durandal’ and Taillefer’s ‘Durissima’ were from his master-hand, which armed as well the prowess of Julius Cæsar, and Godfrey of Bouillon. Part at least of the armour of Beowulf was also from the cavernous northern workshop which reproduced the forge on Mount Olympus, where the behest of Thetis was carried into execution; and to this day in Kurdistan King David is believed to labour, in a desolate sepulchre among the hills, at hauberks, greaves, and cuirasses.[368]

Never on earthly anvilDid such rare armour gleam,

Never on earthly anvil

Did such rare armour gleam,

as that supplied by Hephæstus to Achilles, after his original outfit had been stript by Hector from thedead body of Patroclus. Only the shield, however, is described in detail. It was a world-picture—a succession of typical scenes of human life:

All various, each a perfect wholeFrom living Nature—

All various, each a perfect whole

From living Nature—

wrought in gold, silver, tin, and enamel on a bronze surface. The implements at hand were hammer, anvil, tongs, and bellows. A self-supporting furnace—we hear of no fuel—contained crucibles, in which the metals were rendered plastic by heat, but not, it would appear, melted. The bronze used was presumably ready-made.[369]Processes of alloying, like processes of mining and smelting, are ignored in the Homeric poems. They seem to have lain outside the range of ordinary Achæan experience, and can have been carried on only to a very limited extent on Greek soil, and there, perhaps, by foreigners. No part of the ‘clypei non enarrabile textum’ was cast. Forged throughout, inlaid and embossed, it was a piece of work of which the great Mulciber had no reason to be ashamed.

367.Besides some of mixed materials, such as the Ægis of Zeus and the Sceptre of Agamemnon.

368.Mrs. Bishop’sTravels in Persia, vol. i. p. 85.

369.Beck,Geschichte des Eisens, p. 383.

The technique employed by him has, within the last few years, received a curiously apposite illustration. The Homeric description is of a series of vignettes depicted by means of polymetallic combinations, in a manner wholly alien to the practice of historic antiquity. But now prehistoric antiquityhas come to the rescue of the commentators’ perplexity. From the graves at Mycenæ were dug out some rusty dagger-blades, which proved, on being cleaned and polished at Athens, to be skilfully ornamented in coloured metallic intarsiatura. The ground is of bronze, prepared with a kind of black enamel for the reception of figures cut out of gold-leaf tinted of various shades, from silvery-white to copper-red, the details being brought out with a graver.[370]Groups of men and animals, mostly in rapid motion, are thus depicted with considerable vigour, and forcibly recall the naturalistic effects suggested by the plastic power of the poet. ‘On these blades,’ Mr. Gardner remarks,[371]‘we find fishes of dark gold swimming in a stream of pale gold; drops of blood are represented by inserted spots of red gold; in some cases silver is used. What could be nearer to Homer’s golden vines with silver props, or his oxen of gold and tin?’

370.Koehler,Mitth. Deutsch. Archäol. Institut, Bd. vii. p. 241; Schuchhardt and Sellers,Schliemann’s Excavations, p. 229.

371.Macmillan’s Magazine, vol. liv. p. 377.

This peculiar kind of damascening work was completely forgotten before the classical age. It seems to have originated in Egypt at least as early as 1600B.C.[372]and Egyptian influences are palpable both in the decorative designs on the Mycenæan bladesand in the mode of their execution. The papyrus, for instance, is conspicuous in a riverside scene. Nevertheless, these remarkable objects were certainly not imported. They were wrought by native artists inspired by Egyptian models. The freedom and boldness with which the subjects chosen for portrayal are treated make this practically certain. A specimen of the same style of work, brought from the island of Thera (now Santorin) to the Museum of Copenhagen, suffices to show that acquaintance with it was at one time pretty widely diffused through the Ægean archipelago, and hence cannot serve to localise the origin of the Homeric poems.

372.‘A sword exactly in the style of the Mycenæan blades was taken from the grave of Aa Hotep, the mother of Ah Mose, who freed Egypt, about 1600B.C., from the Hyksos.’—Schuchhardt,op. cit.p. 316.

In its entirety, the Shield of Achilles was beyond doubt an ideal creation. The poet described something imaginatively apprehended as thechef-d’œuvreof a superhuman artist, but claiming no existence out of the shining realm of fancy. Only the elements of the creation were taken from reality. The idea dominating its construction, of moulding a work of art into a comprehensive world-picture, is eminently Oriental. It recurs in the mantle of Demetrius Poliorcetes, and, more or less abortively, in various Indian and Moorish embroideries. And the arrangement of the sequence of scenes in concentric circles on the ‘vast circumference’ of the ‘orbed shield’ was certainly copied from Assyrio-Phœnician models.

In its manufacture no iron was employed; and this was quite in accordance with Homeric usage.The latest metallic acquisition of the fore-time boasted no traditional consecration; it could impart neither beauty nor splendour; the part its nature assigned to it was one of prosaic usefulness. It is accordingly excluded from the Mycenæan scheme of ornament imitated in the Shield, and may, indeed, have been unknown to the artists by whom that scheme was elaborated. The Olympian Demiurgus, at any rate, was acquainted with no such substance; but then the gods of Greece were never quick to adopt new improvements. So far as Homer tells us, the only Olympian use of iron was in the chariot of Heré, thus described in the Fifth Iliad:

And Hebe quickly put to the car the curved wheels of bronze, eight-spoked, upon their axletree of iron. Golden is their felloe, imperishable, and tires of bronze are fitted thereover, a marvel to look upon; and the naves are of silver, to turn about on either side. And the car is plaited tight with gold and silver thongs, and two rails run round about it. And the silver pole stood out therefrom; upon the end bound she the fair golden yoke, and set thereon the fair breast-straps of gold.[373]

373.Iliad, v. 722-31.

This passage shows, as Dr. Leaf points out,[374]that the chariots of those times, being very light, were, in the intervals of use, taken to pieces and laid by on stands. That they were then covered with linen cloths is told to us elsewhere in the Iliad. Not all were furnished with eight-spoked wheels. The emphasis laid upon the fact as regards the goddess’s carindicates that it was exceptional; and the indication is confirmed by the four-spoked wheels of every vehicle in the Mycenæan reliefs. As to the iron axletree, it was plainly meant, not for show, but for strength; yet its introduction, even in that humble capacity, among the appurtenances of a divine being, can scarcely have been warranted by prescription, and may have appeared a no less daring innovation than the serving-out of gunpowder to the infernal host in ‘Paradise Lost.’

374.Leaf’sIliad, vol. i. p. 186.

Homeric archæology has assumed a new aspect since the opening of the prehistoric graves at Mycenæ. The doubts of centuries have now at last met a criterion of truth; the debates of centuries are in many cases already virtually closed. And this is only a beginning. If the spade be the best commentator, it will hardly be laid aside until further light has been thrown upon still twilight places in Homeric controversy. What has been done is indeed surprising enough. Not very rarely, what might pass—allowing for some slight poetical amplification—for the originals of implements or utensils described in the Epics, have been unearthed in the course of the excavations begun by Dr. Schliemann. Among them is an excellent model, on a reduced scale, of Nestor’s Cup, an acquisition almost as surprising as would have been the recovery of Jason’s Mantle, or Penelope’s Web.

The Pramnian beverage prepared by the skilled Hecamede for the refreshment of Nestor and Machaonwas served in ‘a right goodly cup that the old man brought from home, embossed with studs of gold, and four handles there were to it; and round each two golden doves were feeding; and to the cup were two feet below.’[375]

375.Iliad, xi. 631-39.

The golden beaker now, after three millenniums of sepulture, exhibited in the Polytechnicon at Athens,[376]has two, instead of two pairs of dove-surmounted handles; but the support of each by a separate prop riveted on to the base, corresponds strictly to the construction with ‘two feet below’ (πυθμένες), as described in the Iliad. The real and imagined objects unmistakably belong to the same class and epoch, and their agreement is in itself strong evidence of coherence between Homeric and Mycenæan civilisation. The ‘studs of gold’ embossing the Nestorean drinking-cup were doubtless the ornamental heads of the nails used as rivets. The art of soldering, in the proper sense, was a later discovery;[377]but the Mycenæan goldsmith sometimes had recourse to a cement of borax for fastening pieces of gold together. In general, however, decorative adjuncts were separately cast, and afterwards attached with rivets to the objects they were intended to embellish. In this way,probably, the purely ornamental use of metallic knobs and bosses grew up. The Homeric epithets ‘silver-studded’ and ‘bossy,’ applied to sword-sheaths, chairs, and shields, have been copiously illustrated by the discovery at Mycenæ of innumerable gold, or rather gilt, discs and buttons, which had evidently once formed the adornment of the sheaths and shields lying alongside.[378]At Olympia, too, bronze sheathings have been found set with rows of solid silver nails,[379]by means of which they may have been fastened to chairs of the exact type of those described in the Iliad.

376.Schliemann,Mycenæ, p. 236; Helbig,Das Homerische Epos aus den Denkmälern erläutert, p. 371; Schuchhardt and SellersSchliemann’s Excavations, p. 241.

377.Riedenauer,Handwerk und Handwerker in den Homerischen Zeiten, p. 122.

378.Schuchhardt and Sellers,op. cit.p. 237, &c.

379.Furtwängler,Bronzefünde aus Olympia, p. 102.

For his effects of palatial splendour, Homer relied all but exclusively on the metals. Upholstery was for him non-existent. Small carpets for placing under the feet of distinguished persons, and rugs for their beds, were the utmost luxuries known to him in this line, and they were mere individual appurtenances. But for producing general effects, his means were exceedingly limited. He could dispose neither of rich draperies, nor of silken hangings. Polished and rare woods lay outside his acquaintance; the marbles of Paros and Pentelicus had not yet been quarried; porphyry, jasper, alabaster, and all other kinds of ornamental stones seem to have been strange to him. Not so much as a coat of plaster, or a dash of distemper, clothed the bareness of his walls. Floors oftrodden earth, rafters blackened with smoke, chimneyless and windowless apartments, belonged even to the royal residences of his time, at least in Ithaca. But in a few of the more opulent houses of the Peloponnesus, something was done to dispel this sordid aspect by means of metallic incrustations; and the possibility was made the most of by the poet. Nor need the looks of Mammon have been ‘always downward bent’ in the radiant dwellings imagined by him, since their riches lay on every side. They are, in the Iliad, appropriated exclusively to the gods, and are vaguely characterised as ‘golden,’ or ‘of bronze,’ all details of construction being omitted. But the terrene magnificence of the Odyssey is more distinctly realised.

‘Son of Nestor, delight of my heart!’ [exclaimed Telemachus, entering the ‘megaron’ or banqueting-saloon of Menelaus], ‘mark the flashing of bronze through the echoing halls, and the flashing of gold and of amber,[380]and of silver and of ivory. Suchlike, methinks, is the court of Olympian Zeus within, for the world of things that are here; wonder comes over me as I look thereon.’[381]

380.Seesupra, p. 241.

381.Odyssey, iv. 71-75.

His experienced sire was little less astonished at the pomp surrounding the Phæacian king. All the ‘cities of men’ visited by him in the progress of his long wanderings had not prepared him for the dazzling effect of those stately halls.

‘Meanwhile,’ it is said, ‘Odysseus went to the famous palace of Alcinous, and his heart was full of many thoughts as hestood there, or ever he had reached the threshold of bronze. For there was a gleam as it were of sun or moon through the high-roofed hall of great-hearted Alcinous. Brazen were the walls which ran this way and that from the threshold to the inmost chamber, and round them was a frieze of blue, and golden were the doors that closed in the good house. Silver were the doorposts that were set on the brazen threshold, and silver the lintel thereupon, and the hook of the door was of gold. And on either side stood golden hounds and silver, which Hephæstus wrought by his cunning, to guard the palace of great-hearted Alcinous, being free from death and age all their days.... Yea, and there were youths fashioned in gold, standing on firm-set bases, with flaming torches in their hands, giving light through the night to the feasters in the palace.’[382]

382.Odyssey, vii. 81-102.

Both here, and at Sparta, besides perhaps some gilding of smaller surfaces with overlaid gold-leaf, the stone and woodwork of the houses can be understood to have been coated with metal plates—a mode of decoration usual in Mesopotamia from a very early date. Thus, the temple of Bel at Babylon had its walls covered with silver and ivory, while the shimmer of gold came from pavement and roof.[383]The fashion was adopted in Egypt, and spread to Asia Minor, perhaps through the conquests of Ramses II., who built at Abydos a temple to Osiris, plated with ‘silver-gold.’ It was diffused as well among the pre-Dorian Greeks. Both the so-called ‘Treasury of Minyas’ at Orchomenus, and the ‘Treasury of Atreus’ at Mycenæ, bear evident traces of having once been scale-plated with bronze, not, it is thought, uniformly, but in fixedpatterns.[384]So, here again, archæological research supplies the most instructive gloss upon the Homeric text. Metallic incrustations lost their charm when tinted marbles and manifold draperies had become fully available; but a glint of their traditional splendour was introduced by Plato into his Atlantis, where the temple of Poseidon was lined interiorly with the semi-mythical ‘orichalcum’ (later identified with brass), dug up appropriately in great profusion from the soil of a fabulous island.[385]

383.Helbig,op. cit.p. 436.

384.Schuchhardt and Sellers,op. cit.p. 147.

385.Critias, 116; Jowett’sPlato, vol. iii. p. 697.

The watch-dogs of Alcinous find analogues in the pairs of sphinxes, winged bulls, or other nondescript monsters, guarding Egyptian and Assyrian portals. There is nothing to show that they possessed automatic powers. In those unsophisticated times, works of consummate imitative skill would readily take rank as samples of magic metallurgy; and what was life-like so inevitably suggested animation, that the distinction could scarcely be drawn very clearly. Similarly, the torch-bearers in the banqueting-hall may be regarded as poetical anticipations of the Greek art of statuary, then still unborn, or at most in swaddling-clothes.

One of the rarities brought by Helen with her from Egypt to Sparta was a silver basket, mounted on wheels, for holding the wool which she industriously span into thread.[386]Now wheeled utensilswere presumably a Phœnician invention, since they are mentioned among the furniture of Solomon’s Temple (1 Kings vii.). Their occurrence in prehistoric Greece is hence one of many proofs of Oriental influence. The Iliad knows them as the handiwork of Hephæstus, who facilitated by means of subjacent wheels, the movements of his intelligent tripods; and Homeric indications have been substantiated by the unearthing, in the Altis at Olympia, of remnants of objects belonging, apparently, to the same category.[387]Others, probably incense-pans, were found, a quarter of a century ago, in tombs of great antiquity at Præneste, Veii, and Cære.[388]

386.Odyssey, iv. 125.

387.Furtwängler,Die Bronzefünde aus Olympia, p. 440.

388.Garrucci,Archæologia, vol. xi. p. 206.

Helen’s silver workbasket was gilt round the edges, like the ‘crater,’ or mixing-bowl, presented by Menelaus as a ‘guest-gift’ to Telemachus.[389]The latter was a work of Hephæstus, and had been presented to Menelaus by the king of Sidon, when he was driven thither on his way back from Troy. The process of gilding, however, is well known in the Odyssey, and was practised by native craftsmen. In the scene of Nestor’s sacrifice at Pylos,[390]the goldsmith Laerkes is summoned to gild the horns of the victim, which he evidently did by the simple expedient of overlaying them with gold-leaf. Fusion had indeed not yet been resorted to for the purpose; nevertheless the art ofplating silver with gold, to which is compared the beautifying action of Athene upon Odysseus, in order to his advantageous appearance before Nausicaa,[391]excites the extreme personal admiration of the poet, and is regarded as a direct fruit of divine tuition. And it is noticeable that the artists of Mycenæ, although in most respects far above the Homeric standard, found the operation of plating silver directly with gold so difficult that they commonly interposed a layer of copper to receive the more precious metal.[392]

389.Odyssey, iv. 615.

390.Ib.iii. 425.

391.Odyssey, vi. 232.

392.Schuchhardt and Sellers,op. cit.p. 249.

No gilt objects are expressly mentioned in the Iliad,[393]but the delineative inlaying of the Shield of Achilles involved the same sort of process as that required for producing them. The Iliadic Hephæstus, however, was somewhat behind his time. For the ‘latest thing out,’ one would be inclined to look elsewhere. He was, as we have seen, unacquainted with iron, and his models were often a trifle archaic. From the very outset of his career, when, as an infant and a foundling, he was cared for by Thetis and Eurynome, the divine artificer appears to have been more dexterous than inventive.

393.In the adventitious Tenth Book, v. 294, the practice of gilding the horns of victims for sacrifice is, however, alluded to.

‘Nine years,’ he himself afterwards related, ‘with them I wrought much cunning work of bronze; brooches, andspiral armbands, and cups and necklaces, in the hollow cave; while around me the stream of ocean with murmuring foam flowed infinite.’[394]

394.Iliad, xviii. 400-403.

But these ornaments were already of obsolete forms. Three of the four kinds mentioned find no place elsewhere in Homeric descriptions, and would probably have struck Homeric ladies as quaint and old-fashioned. They can, however, be more or less plausibly identified with compound spiral brooches and other decorative objects from pre-Hellenic, pre-Etruscan, and Scandinavian tombs.[395]

395.Gerlach,Philologus, Bd. xxx. p. 491; Helbig,op. cit.p. 279.

The armour of Agamemnon was of foreign manufacture. Cinyras, king of Cyprus, of semi-mythical fame as a metallurgist, had sent it to him, perhaps as a pledge of benevolent neutrality,[396]at any rate, more through fear than love. It was of a highly decorative character, being inlaid and embossed with gold and tin, silver and enamel. Fundamentally, of course, it was, like all Homeric armour, of bronze. Something further will be said about it in the next Chapter.

396.Cf. Gladstone,Studies in Homer, vol. i. p. 189.

The Baldric of Hercules, seen by Odysseus in Hades, constituted, one must admit, an incongruously substantial article of equipment for the thin remnant of a hero owning the sway of Persephone. Yet the horrified and shrinking glance with which it is regardedbrings it wonderfully into harmony with the sombre vision of the greateidolon, pursuing, in the under-world, a career of shadowy destruction. The golden shoulder-belt in question was from the hand of an unknown but exceptionally gifted artist. It was of chased, or repoussé work, and showed no diversity of colouring or material.

Also a wondrous sword-belt, all of gold,Gleamed like a fire athwart his ample breast,Whereon were shapes of creatures manifold,Boar, bear, and lion sparkling-eyed, expressed,With many a bloody deed and warlike gest.Whoso by art that wondrous zone achieved,Let him for ever from art’s labours rest.[397]

Also a wondrous sword-belt, all of gold,

Gleamed like a fire athwart his ample breast,

Whereon were shapes of creatures manifold,

Boar, bear, and lion sparkling-eyed, expressed,

With many a bloody deed and warlike gest.

Whoso by art that wondrous zone achieved,

Let him for ever from art’s labours rest.[397]

397.Odyssey, xi. 609-14 (Worsley’s trans.). Many critics regard the passage as spurious. Yet it makes part of a splendidly impressive picture.

The design indicated seems to be that of an animal frieze fencing in a series of fighting episodes[398]—an arrangement met with on Rhodian and Etruscan vases, and adopted in productions of the needle or the loom, from the Peplum of Alcisthenes to the Bayeux Tapestry. It does not appear to have made its way into pre-Hellenic Greece; and the Belt of Hercules bears, accordingly, a completely exotic stamp.

398.Gardner,Macmillan’s Magazine, vol. liv. p. 378.

The Brooch of Odysseus, on the other hand, might have been wrought within the Achæan realm. It was besides in his possession before his foreign wanderings began, and we are not told that it was procured fromabroad. At his setting out from Ithaca for Troy, it is said that:

Goodly Odysseus wore a thick purple mantle, twofold, which had a brooch fashioned in gold, with a double covering for the pins, and on the face of it was a curious device; a hound in his forepaws held a dappled fawn and gazed on it as it writhed. And all men marvelled at the workmanship, how, wrought as they were in gold, the hound was gazing on the fawn and strangling it, and the fawn was writhing with his feet and striving to flee.[399]

399.Odyssey, xix. 225-31.

The brooch, it is to be observed, was duplex. Two pins were received into two confronting tubes, opening opposite ways. The mechanism is exemplified in the ‘pin and tube’ fastening of some golden diadems from Mycenæ;[400]and, still more perfectly, in certain brooches exhumed at Præneste and Cære, each provided with two pins running into a pair of tubular sheaths, a kind of hook-and-eye arrangement behind serving to retain them in that position.[401]These were associated with a multitude of articles, known to be of Phœnician manufacture, imported into Etruria during the sixth centuryB.C.; but the stolid sphinxes surmounting them were replaced, in the Ithacan ornament, by a life-like representation, conceived in the true Greek spirit, although deriving its motive from the typical Oriental group of a lion tearing an ox, or deer.[402]This, however, had become so naturalised in Mycenæan art as by no means in itself toimply a foreign origin; and the same remark applies to the mechanism of the Odyssean fibula. The poet certainly regarded it as a rare specimen of superlative skill; but the like of it may not improbably yet be unearthed from Greek soil.

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