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 from abroad. 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 century B.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 to imply 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.
[400]. Schliemann, Mycenæ, p. 156.