[401]. Helbig, op. cit. p. 277.
[402]. Ib. p. 387.
Smiths are not included among the Homeric demiurgi. The class of persons specially distinguished for their serviceableness to the community is made up of physicians, soothsayers, carpenters, and poets. Nevertheless, there were metal-workers in Ithaca who might have competed in general utility with the best of the native wizards. A smithy, described as a place of common resort, was situated close to the Odyssean palace; and the demand for spears, swords, axes, and knives must have been continual, and was certainly met by a local supply. There is much doubt, however, as to whether objects claiming an artistic character were produced in Ithaca. It seems more likely, on the whole, that the few existing there had been imported from the Peloponnesus. There, presumably, Nestor’s Cup, stated to have been brought by him from Pylos to Troy, was manufactured; and the Brooch of Odysseus might very well have been turned out from the same workshop. It is true that a Peloponnesian origin is never expressly attributed to objects for which particular admiration is sought to be enlisted. Such are either left undetermined, claimed for Hephæstus, or said to have come from Egypt, Sidon, or Cyprus. Achæan was thus plainly ranked below foreign industry. And this in itself indicates a falling off from the ‘golden prime’ of Mycenæ, when Achæan craftsmen were, to say the least, not utterly below compare with those of lands earlier illuminated by the rising sun of civilisation. Hence, products of everyday familiarity to Agamemnon had become strange and wonderful to his sacer vates; yet the abounding vitality has not left them. They come before us in his songs, animated with the energy of his thought, fragments of palpitating life, true prognostics of the perfect art which the future was to bring to Greece.
Homeric metallurgy thus plainly represents a declining stage of Mycenæan metallurgy; and this again included conspicuous elements from Egyptian, Phœnician, and Phrygian sources. Of the two first springs of influence, our poet shows full consciousness, but none of the last; since his admiration for spiral patterns, derived, according to the best authorities, from the banks of the Sangarius, came to him at second-hand from Mycenæ. The metallurgical traditions of Phrygia find, moreover, no place in his verses. The dæmonic artificers of Asia Minor—the hammer-and-anvil goblins, sons or servants of Hephæstus, who of old intangibly colonised the shores and islands of the Levant, make no figure in the Iliad or Odyssey. Cabiri, Curetes, Corybantes, Idæan Dactyls, Rhodian Telchines, are all equally ignored in the Homeric world. Hephæstus there works alone. He has neither aides-de-camp nor coadjutors, apart from his spontaneously helpful bellows. His predilection for Lemnos was obviously due to the existence there of an active volcano; for Mosychlus did not become extinct until about the time of Alexander the Great. He, however, consulted perhaps in the choice rather his primitive elemental character than his derived industrial function. The establishment of Cyclopean forges in the craters of volcanoes seems to have been a mythological after-thought. Its appropriateness did not at any rate strike Homer. He indeed betrays no direct acquaintance with subterranean fires. His Island of the Cyclops is entirely devoid of volcanic associations, and indeed the genealogy of Polyphemus was scarcely consistent with any such relationship. He sprang from Poseidon; and Poseidon’s wrath at the evil entreatment by Odysseus of his amiable offspring was a main factor in the development of the subsequent narrative. For the resentment of the sea-god was not to be trifled with by hero or mariner who had slipped unawares into that outer region of much sea and little land, where he reigned supreme. Hinc illæ lachrymæ.
CHAPTER XI.
AMBER, IVORY, AND ULTRAMARINE.
Many ages ago, in early Tertiary times, a great forest of conifers covered the bed of the present Baltic Sea. Their copious gummy exudations had the leisure of perhaps some hundreds of centuries to accumulate, and have in fact furnished the greater part of the amber brought into commerce from before the dawn of history until now. The value set on the commodity probably gave the first impulse to the establishment of systematic relations between the north and south of Europe; and supplied means for the diffusion, far up towards the Arctic circle, of many of the secrets of Mediterranean culture. Scandinavia exchanged her amber for bronze, and the improvements that the use of bronze implied and introduced. They travelled in opposite directions, one as the correlative of the other, from the mouth of the Elbe to the mouth of the Rhone,[[403]] the ever-ready Phœnicians carrying the prized Eocene product eastward. There, much inequality in its distribution was prescribed by variety of tastes. In Egypt and Assyria, it had no great vogue; it is not mentioned in the Bible; but it found a ready market among the younger communities by the Ægean, just then eagerly appropriating the elements and ornaments of civilisation. In the Odyssey, the crafty Phœnician traders who kidnapped Eumæus when a child in the island of Syriê, are represented as diverting attention from their plot by the chaffering sale of ‘a golden chain strung here and there with amber beads’; and ‘a golden chain of curious work, strung with amber beads, shining like the sun,’ was presented by the suitor Eurymachus to Penelope.[[404]] To critics of an earlier generation, it seemed indeed incredible that a material of such remote and exclusive origin should have been familiar in the Levant nine centuries before the Christian era. But recent experience has enforced, as well as qualified, the maxim Ab Homero omne principium[[405]]: enforced it, by frequent archæological verifications; qualified it, by the disclosure of a pre-Hellenic world, by no means completely reflected in the Homeric Epics.
[403]. Genthe, Ueber den Etruskischen Tauschhandel nach dem Norden, p. 102.
[404]. Odyssey, xv. 460; xviii. 295.
[405]. Scheins, De Electro Veterum metallico, p. 17.