Fig. 46.—A Couthon.
M. de Witte, in making his catalogue, decides that the Greek word near the manager who is pointing to the scales means silphium or asafœtida: the most odious of flavors to us, but one which still provokes delicious titillations in some Orientals. Altogether, we get a glimpse of life in this early Pindaric time; we see that a king then was not a mere figure-head, but a real king who oversaw his cargoes, and probably loved asafœtida, and was fond of making money, as some of our sovereigns are to-day.
The number of these vases, cups, etc., now existing in Europe is very great—at least 20,000, and some experts make the number as high as 70,000. The best-known collections are—at Naples in the Museo Borbonico, 2,000; in the Vatican at Rome, 1,000; at Florence, 700; at Turin, 500; at Vienna, 300; at Berlin, 1,690; at Munich, 1,700; at Dresden, 200; at Carlsruhe, 200; at Paris, the Louvre, 1,500; Bibliothèque Nationale, 500; at London, British Museum, 2,600. There are also a great many in private collections throughout the world.
What the keen and artistic mind wants to know is, not only what fine work was done by the Greeks, but why they did it—what, indeed, made that life more beautiful than any we find in all the earlier histories of man.
Through the wrecks and convulsions of time this crowd of delicate, perishable things still exists; what vast numbers must have been made and destroyed in the varying populations of Greece, Rome, Tyre, Carthage, and wherever Grecian civilizations and tastes made their way, it is not easy for the mind to compass. And we must remember that these things we now describe were not in every man’s hand; they were in a good degree for the rich and well-to-do. No slave (and slaves then abounded) used a kylix from which to drink his wine, nor an œnochoe from which to pour it.