CYPRUS AND MYCENÆ.

UNDER ordinary circumstances it would be thought a far cry from Cyprus to Mycenæ, and, in point of fact, these two places are here associated less from any real connection between them in antiquity than from the coincidence with which certain very remarkable discoveries in both were lately laid before the public. In the one Dr. Schliemann finds the bones (horresco referens) and armour of Agamemnon, perhaps the self-same cuirass which Cinyras had presented to him, and with which he girded himself bravely at Troy (Iliad xi. 20). In the other General Cesnola has been finding abundant evidence of the early art of the Phoenicians. Assuming that Agamemnon had received other presents from the same quarter, and had brought them back from Troy, we might reasonably expect to find certain resemblances among the things obtained now from his house or his tomb at Mycenae and from Cyprus. But apart from speculation of this kind, which is too much in the vein of Dr. Schliemann, it may be worth while to recall the ancient connection between the two places implied in the friendship of their contemporary rulers, Cinyras and Agamemnon, and in the prominent position held by Cyprus in the legendary events consequent on the fall of Ilium. It matters not what truth there may have been in the belief that Homer had been a native of that island, or that he had bestowed his daughter on one of its poets, Stasinos, the author of the Cypria. It is enough to be certain that, in an age which could not have been long after Homer, and most probably was immediately subsequent, the whole island rang with song in praise of deeds arising out of the war of Troy, and that most of its cities claimed to have been founded by heroes returning from that expedition. From this it will be seen that the influence of the poet of the Iliad must have been very considerable there. On his part also a distinct knowledge of what was always the chief characteristic of Cyprus-its metal-working—is implied in his description of the cuirass already mentioned. When he says that Tychios, who made the shield of

1 Cyprus, its Cities, Tombs, and Temples, by General Cesnola. London, 1878: John Murray. Mycenæ and Tiryns, by Dr. Schliemann. London, 1878: John Murray.

Ajax (Iliad vii. 220), lived in Hyle, it does not absolutely follow, as has been supposed, that he meant Hyle in Boeotia. There is at least the possibility of its having been the town of that name in Cyprus. In the Odyssey Athene on one occasion, and the king of the Taphians on another, go to Cyprus for copper, while Ulysses himself experiences the kindness of a king of that island. But apart from isolated cases, it seems impossible to hit upon any other spot in the ancient world which could have furnished the poet so completely, as does Cyprus, with the knowledge of art and handicraft displayed in his descriptions of armour, utensils, and embroidered dresses. Its richness in metal and natural products attracted from a very remote time those Phoenicians whom he knows as skilled workmen (πоλυSaídano), and the development of their industry in the making of armour, utensils, embroidery, and in the preparation of oils and perfumes, must have attained considerable dimensions as early at least as the eighth century B.C., and in any case long before similar occupations had been taken up with success among the Greeks. When he represents Helena (Iliad iii. 125) in the act of embroidering a dress with scenes of combat between Greeks and Trojans, we feel that there must be an anachronism in the lines, since it is in the highest degree improbable that art could then have reached that very advanced stage when it takes to rendering contemporary events. It is more likely that he ascribes to her a performance which he may have seen in his own time, when the incidents in question had become the common property of art, and in that case we have again recourse to Cyprus, which above all places was as renowned for this kind of work as it was for its delight in the incidents of Troy. When he speaks of Nestor's goblet (Iliad xi. 632) as ornamented with figures of doves, we are not obliged to conclude, from the importance of the dove as a symbol in Cyprus, that the vessel was necessarily imported from there. Still that is a possibility.

The question then resolves itself into whether it is not highly probable that Homer's knowledge of art, armour, and dress was drawn mainly from what he saw of the products of Phoenician workshops in Cyprus as well as in Sidon, and whether on that theory it would not be better to look for illustrations of his text among the antiquities and records of this island than to reap vexation in the attempt of reconciling him with the discoveries at Mycenae or Troy. As regards the Phoenicians it is to Mr. Gladstone that the honour belongs of having demonstrated and insisted upon the striking relation in which they stand to the arts and industry of the Homeric poems; and considering how, guided mainly by literary studies, he anticipated, at a time when little or no attention had been devoted to the subject, the general results which are now on the lips of every one, it must seem strange to observe the constancy with which his early work in VOL. V.-No. 23.

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this field is overlooked. On a previous occasion' I had endeavoured to point out the singular coincidences which exist between the condition of art and skilled workmanship as gathered from references in the Iliad and that of Assyrian monuments, drawing the inference that the poet's acquaintance with things of this class would be due to copies of them circulated by the Phoenicians, who were a sort of middle people between the Assyrians and Egyptians on the one hand, and the Greeks on the other. But at that time the facts which go to define the position of the Phoenicians as an artistic people were neither so numerous nor so striking as they have become since the publication of General Cesnola's extensive and interesting discoveries in Cyprus. Without saying that any particular object found by him is either as old as the time of Homer or furnishes a complete illustration to any particular passage, I would nevertheless ask whether the whole scheme of decoration on the shield of Achilles is not distinctly called to mind by the fragment of a circular silver dish engraved on pl. xix. (Cesnola, p. 277), first by the method of disposing the various scenes in concentric bands, and secondly, by the representation on the outermost band. There obviously is the 'city at war' of the Homeric shield, though necessarily not with the minute details of the battle such as may be seen vividly illustrated on one of the sculptured slabs brought by Mr. Layard from Assyria (Layard, pl. 66). Outside the city are two men felling trees, which may serve to suggest the outdoor occupations on the shield. On another circular vase is figured a dance headed by musicians, reminding one of the chorus on the shield. A third is very richly decorated with designs, partly Egyptian and partly Assyrian. Now, however much any one of these objects may be thought to fall short of Homeric descriptions of works of art, this at least is absolutely certain, that they were designed and executed by those very Phoenicians from whom, among other much valued articles, came the silver crater, in beauty above everything else in the world, which Achilles presented as a prize at the funeral games of Patroclos (Iliad xxiii. 741). It had been made by Σιδόνες πολυδαίδαλοι and brought over the sea by Phoenicians.

So far then it will appear as if Cyprus were chiefly interesting as regards the times of Homer and his immediate followers in the office of bard. It would not, however, be fair to the services rendered by General Cesnola if we left it to be supposed that his discoveries had been confined to works of the Phoenician settlers in that island. On the contrary, among the vast number of sculptures exhumed by him there are many belonging to the best period of Greek art. To have hit upon the underground treasure-chambers of a Greek temple is a stroke of fortune which has never yet befallen another, and to have extracted from them successfully a series of objects of extraordinary beauty and in some cases of unrivalled 2 Contemporary Review, January 1874.

interest, is a title to those rewards of praise which lovers of antiquity only sparingly bestow. Yet singular, and never too much admired, as is the minute knowledge and perfect skill with which the Greeks, even in minor occupations like that of the goldsmith or vase-painter, carried out their designs, it is not after all to be forgotten that between works of this order and the productions of the true sculptor or painter working with freedom and with the prospect of his work living for ever, there is a wide gulf, perhaps wider than it should be. It is General Cesnola's merit to have discovered, among many sculptures of more or less value, several of this very high order, and if we speak of the gold ornaments and other minor objects as of much less importance from an artistic point of view, it is not to disparage them, but for the purpose of calling attention to the fact that owing to recent discoveries there is some danger of classical archæology coming to be regarded as the mere study of trinkets and odds and ends such as it was mainly before the time of Winckelmann. Under his impulse it was the custom to suppose that the paramount object of classical archæology was the study of the development of art in its best phases at different periods, and under the conditions of perfect freedom thus secured, all minor works of art would fall readily into their places.

We have assumed that the descriptions of works of art in the Iliad, including even the shield of Achilles, must be taken as evidence of the condition of art in the time of the poet and within his knowledge, not, however, in the sense of placing unnecessary limitations on the exercise of his imaginative faculty in the amplification and enrichment of actual designs. As regards the shield, it must be admitted that, taken altogether, the various scenes on it present just such a view of the world and mundane affairs as a poet might conceive to be the view of a divine artifice. It is like a Greek compared with a Semitic or Chaldæan account of the Creation; and who knows how far the various scenes may not have been worked out by the forerunners, as they were by the successors, of Homer? In one of the scenes he expressly follows a work of art by Dædalos, and in at least another he may fairly be taken to have had an artistic representation before him-I mean in the passage where herdsmen lead their cattle by a river's side and lions attack them. The lion, as Homer elsewhere knows very well, makes his attack at night, and on such stray cattle as have not been withdrawn to shelter. The herdsmen would not be out with their herds at night; and on this view of the case the scene on the shield would be an impossibility, whereas it suits well the numerous representations in art of lions attacking bulls. It may be argued that it would surely be as easy for the poet to create designs as it was for the artists of those prototypes which we suppose him to have followed. But they had the advantage of traditions accumulated through centuries in the develop

ment of their art. How far he also may have had the same advantages is beyond discovery. All we know is that he represents the culmination of his own special branch of the poetic art which previously must have passed through long stages of development. The war of Troy may have been first sung by him, but similar wars, and possibly similar shields, had been sung before, if always with less poetic power. Round new names and doubtless with the purpose of appealing to a new audience, he would weave the traditional story of adventures, of heroes, and gods. Does it follow that these names were supplied to him by existing traditions among the Achæans? Not necessarily, since though we know Agamemnon, for example, as a local hero of Mycenae, we must remember that he was also a hero among the Tauri, a Scythian people, as may be inferred from the fact (according to Herodotus, iv. 103) that they worshipped his daughter Iphigeneia, and sacrificed human victims to her. The Scythians, it is true, had learned much from the Greeks. But whatever may be the explanation, and however much may be admitted on conjecture, it can scarcely be considered safe to go beyond what till lately was the most generally accepted position, that it was Homer who created Agamemnon and localised him at Mycenæ, and that Agamemnon and the other heroes celebrated with him were but glorified and entirely unreal types of an adventurous and noble race. That he assigned Agamemnon to Mycenae is no proof that he knew anything more of it than its name, if indeed the name also was not a creation of the poet's, afterwards appropriated by that town. The persons and adventures who furnished the material of his types, as far as they had not been created and handed down by previous poets, may have been collected by him from many quarters, not even necessarily in Greece proper. On such a view of the case it would be folly to dig for either the Troy or the Mycena of the poet. But this is confessedly an extreme view, since it would appear from his introducing, among other incidents outside of his main design, for example, the story of Bellerophon (Iliad vi. 168), that he was acquainted with certain local legends of the district, and with this the way would clearly be open for him to be believed to have collected from Mycenæ itself the local features for his characterisation of Agamemnon also. That is a possibility which might be entertained if we were quite certain that those traditions were independent of Homer which connected Argos with Lycia, ascribed the building of the walls of Mycena to Cyclopes from Lycia, and pointed out the tomb of Agamemnon.

Meantime it may seem a waste of words to argue the matter in this way when we are told that Dr. Schliemann has settled the whole question by finding the very bones of Agamemnon on the spot where tradition had placed them. We do not forget that he had previously discovered Troy and rescued from its ruins the treasure of Priam