In Asia, gold was discovered next after copper, the Massagetæ, described by Herodotus, exemplifying this stage of progress; silver, or ‘white gold’ succeeded, bringing lead in its train; then, little by little, tin crept into use; while iron, destined to predominate, came last. All the six, however, are enumerated in a Khorsabad inscription;[[313]] they were familiar to the ancient Egyptians, to the Israelites of the Exodus, and to the Homeric Greeks.
[313]. Lenormant, Trans. Soc. Bibl. Archæology, vol. vi. p. 345.
Gold was with Homer supreme among terrestrial substances. It represented to him beauty, splendour, power, wealth, incorruption. It was the metal of the gods, and mortals by its profuse employment, borrowed something of divine glory. Its availability for them had, nevertheless, narrow limitations unfelt supernally. For the visionary metal of Olympus might be dispensed at will without restrictions either as to quantity or qualities. Inexhaustible stores of it lay at command; and it could be rendered infrangible and impenetrable by some mythical process unknown to sublunary metallurgists. Hence the golden hobbles with which Poseidon secured his coursers might have proved less satisfactory for the restraint of commonplace Thracian or Thessalian horses; the golden sword of Apollo would surely have bent in the hand of Hector; the golden mansion of the sea-god built for aye in the blue depths of the Ægean, could not have supported its own weight for an hour on realistic dry land; nor would the process of lifting earth to heaven by hauling on a rope have been facilitated by making that rope (as Zeus proposed to do for the purpose in question) of gold. Of gold, too, were the garments of the gods, their thrones, utensils, implements, appurtenances; the pavement of their courts was ‘trodden gold’; golden were the wings of Iris, golden was the beauty of Aphrodite. No doubt, all these attributions were half consciously metaphorical, but their main design was to set off immortal existence by decorating it with an enhanced degree of the same kind of magnificence marking the dignity of mortal potentates.
It is remarkable that the Olympian gold in the Shield of Achilles retained some part of the occult virtue properly belonging to it only in that elevated sphere. Of the five metallic layers composing the great buckler, the middle and most precious one gets the whole credit of having arrested the quivering spears of Æneas and Asteropæus.[[314]] The verses, to be sure, recording its superior efficacy are held to be spurious, and the inclusion of a hidden stratum of gold does indeed seem without reason, as it is certainly without precedent. Yet the original poet would not have altogether disavowed the inspiring idea of the passage; and the alleged impenetrability of the gold-mail of Masistius[[315]] may be held to imply that traces of its old mystical faculty of resistance lingered about the metal so late as when Xerxes invaded Greece.
[314]. Iliad, xx. 268; xxi. 165; and Leaf’s annotations.
[315]. Herodotus, ix. 22.
The metallic treasures allotted to the gods in the Iliad are confiscated for human enrichment in the Odyssey. For the golden automata of Hephæstus are substituted the golden watch-dogs and torch-bearers of Alcinous; resplendent dwellings are erected, no longer on Olympus or at Ægæ, but in Sparta and Phæacia; Helen shares with Artemis in the Odyssey the golden distaff exclusively attributed to the latter in the Iliad; the ‘dreams of avarice,’ in short, are tangibly realised, in the Epic of adventure, only by human possessions; they shrink for the most part into shadowy epithets where divine surroundings are concerned. Nor is this diversity accidental or unmeaning. It indicates a genuine shifting of the mythological point of view—an advance, slight yet significant, towards a more spiritualised conception of deity.
Oriental contact first stirred the auri sacra fames in the Greek mind. That this was so the Greek language itself tells plainly. For chrusos, gold, is a Semitic loanword, closely related to the Hebrew chârûz, but taken immediately, there can be no reasonable doubt, from the Phœnician. The restless treasure-seekers from Tyre were, indeed, as the Græco-Semitic term metal intimates,[[316]] the original subterranean explorers of the Balkan peninsula. As early, probably, as the fifteenth century B.C. they ‘digged out ribs of gold’ on the islands of Thasos and Siphnos, and on the Thracian mainland at Mount Pangæum; and the fables of the Golden Fleece, and of Arimaspian wars with gold-guarding griffins, prove the hold won by the ‘precious bane’ over the popular imagination. Asia Minor was, however, the chief source of prehistoric supply, the native mines lying long neglected after the Phœnicians had been driven from the scene. Midas was a typical king in a land where the mountains were gold-granulated, and the rivers ran over sands of gold. And it was in fact from Phrygia that Pelops was traditionally reported to have brought the treasures which made Mycenæ the golden city of the Achæan world.
[316]. Schrader and Jevons, Antiquities of the Aryans, p. 155; Much, Die Kupferzeit in Europa, p. 147.
The Epic affluence in gold was not wholly fictitious. From the sepulchres of Mycenæ alone about one hundred pounds Troy weight of the metal have been disinterred; freely at command even in the lowest stratum of the successive habitations at Hissarlik, it was lavishly stored, and highly wrought in the picturesquely-named ‘treasure of Priam;’ and has been found, in plates and pearls, beneath twenty metres of volcanic debris, in the Cycladic islands Thera and Therapia.[[317]] This plentifulness contrasts strangely with the extreme scarcity of gold in historic Greece. It persisted, however, mainly owing to the vicinity of the auriferous Ural Mountains, in the Milesian colony of Panticapæum, near Kertch, where graves have been opened containing corpses shining ‘like images’ in a complete clothing of gold-leaf, and equipped with ample supplies of golden vessels and ornaments.