Pl. 20.
Trees of Life.
1, 2, 3, 5. Assyrian. 4. Sicilian Silk. (Birdwood’s “Indian Arts,” pp. 331, 335, 336, 337.)
Aristophanes, in “The Frogs,” laughs at the Persian carpet patterns—their unnatural birds and beasts and flowers—whilst he claims for his own frogs, that they at least have the merit of being natural.[109] This little touch of art throws a gleam of inner light on the struggle towards originality and truth which characterized the Greek principles of beauty and fitness in literature and art, in direct contrast to that which was always turning back to those fossil forms which were only respectable on account of their age and their mystery, but of which the tradition and intention were already lost.
Roman patterns were merely Greek adaptations with an Etruscan flavour, which was a survival of the earliest Italian art. Perhaps the indigenous element had been already modified by Phœnician influence.
In taking stock of Oriental symbolical patterns, we find that one of those of the widest ancestry and longest continuity is the “Sacred Hom.”[110] (Pl. [20-24].) This is to be found in Babylonian, Persian,[111] Indian, Greek, and Roman art; and consequently it prevails in all European decoration (except the Gothic), where it was reduced to unrecognizable forms.
Sir George Birdwood says the Hom or Homa was the Sanskrit Soma, used as an intoxicating drink by the early Brahmins, and was extracted from the plant of that name, an almost leafless succulent Asclepiad. It appears to have changed its conventional form as other plants by fermentation came to the front, containing what appeared to be the “spirit of life”—the aqua vitæ.
The palm, with its wonderful fruit, which is convertible into intoxicating drinks, and afterwards the vine itself, were each of them moulded into analogous conventional fruit forms, which keep as much as possible within the limits of the original cone shape. (Pl. [21].)