HOMERIC METALLURGY.
MAN is a tool-shaping animal. He alone infuses matter with purpose, and
so makes it effective for widening and strengthening his wonderful
dominion over physical nature. What is more, his thoughts themselves
grow with the means at his command, and their growth in turn inspires a
further restless seeking after instruments of fresh conquests. The first
metal-workers, accordingly, crossed a gulf destined to divide the ages.
It was not for nothing that legendary honours were paid to them; they
were the vague recognition of a really momentous advance. Its importance
consisted, not so much in the immediate gain of power, as in the
implication of what was to come. For metallurgy is an art which does not
easily stand still. Even in its crudest stages it demands some technical
skill; and technical skill cannot be attained without division of
labour, differentiation of classes, and development of intelligence by
its direction into special channels, and towards feasible ends. There
are, then, few better tests of civilisation than the degree of command
acquired over the metals.
The wide compass of metallic qualities was in itself stimulating to
ingenuity. There was always something new to be found out about them,
and they lent themselves with facility to every variety of treatment.
This versatility contrasted strongly with the rigid and impracticable
nature of the stony substances they tended to supersede. Thus, the six
primitive metals not only presented, at first sight, a great number of
diverse characteristics, but those characteristics proved, on the most
elementary trials, highly susceptible of change. They could be
surprisingly modified, for instance, by mutual admixtures, and, in a
lesser degree, by differences of manipulation. Secrets of the craft
hence multiplied, and invited, as they continue to invite, further
experiments and research.
Of still greater consequence to civilisation at large was the
comparatively recondite occurrence of the metals. They are not to be met
with, like flints or pebbles, strewing the bed of every stream; their
distribution is defined and restricted. The demand for them could, for
this reason, only be supplied by opening long lines of communication; it
led to extended intercourse between nations, and created wants
stimulating to traffic.
Metals, besides, present themselves only by exception in the native
state; they are commonly disguised under some form of ore,
subterraneanly bestowed. Nature holds them concealed in her bosom, or at
most attracts the eye with niggardly samples of her treasures. The very
word _metal_, indeed, records a ‘quest,’ a searching for something
hidden; and it is remarkable that these substances have been least
effective for promoting culture just where they have come most readily
to hand. By the shores of Lake Superior pure copper can be quarried like
sandstone; and it was, in fact, cut away and hammered into axes and
knives by Indian tribes long before they came into contact with
Europeans. A similar use has been made of meteoric iron by the
Esquimaux. But no development of ingenuity resulted in either case. And
for this reason among others, that the metal was used _cold_. It
received essentially the treatment of stone, and made very much the same
kind of response. Because smelting processes were not needed, forging
processes were not thought of. The furnace was absent, and with it the
power of rendering metals plastic to human wants and purposes. There
was, then, good warrant for the figuring, as the arch-metallurgist of
mythology, of the incorporated element of fire.
Hephæstus was the Homeric Wayland Smith. He embodied the antique,
universal notion of magic metallurgy, but embodied it after a dignified
manner suitable to the grand epical standard. Homer was not given to
repeating folk-stories current among the lower strata of—shall we
say?—Pelasgian society. His associations were with courts and camps, his
sympathies with heroic achievements and maritime adventures in distant,
perhaps fabulous, countries. There, indeed, grotesque aboriginal fancies
might be permitted to flourish; but they were excluded as much as
possible from the sunlit spaces of the Hellenic world. Even here they
crept in unbidden, for the Homeric theology is by no means exempt from
the influence of rustic persuasions. But these were only admitted after
passing through the alembic of fine fancy or ennobling thought. Thus,
Hephæstus, although he has not wholly put off the semblance of the
‘drudging goblin’ of caves and cairns, stands for a formidable
nature-power, and possesses the capability of being sublime. Panting,
perspiring, shaggy, and limping, he is still no dubious divinity, but a
genuine Olympian. His dwelling is on the mountain of the gods; he shares
their councils; his operations are at the command of none; he is
self-directed and self-inspired with his art, having taken to the hammer
and anvil as spontaneously as the infant Hermes took to music and
thievery. Indeed, the ill-used, yet not ill-natured, son of Heré
surpasses his progenitors in one important respect. He is the only one
of the Homeric gods in whom some remnant of creative power remains
active. He alone commands a glimmer of the Promethean spark, half-hidden
though it be in the ashes of material conceptions. Not, indeed, life in
any true sense, but faculties of perception and animation are his to
give to the works of his hands. His forge can turn out intelligent
automata. Among its products are golden handmaidens,[363] conscious
without being self-conscious, endowed with all the useful attributes,
while devoid of the inconveniences of personality. Their efficiency was
purely altruistic; they acted, but neither sought nor suffered. The
bellows, too, of the great Iliadic armourer could be left to blow at
discretion; and his wheeled tripods repaired to, and withdrew from, the
assembly of the gods, at fit times, unsummoned and undismissed. This
lingering of the creative tradition, completely dissociated from the
mighty Zeus, about the misshapen nursling of Thetis, illustrates his
connexion with Pthah, the creative and at the same time the
metallurgical deity of the Nile-valley.
Footnote 363:
Ilmarine, the Finnish Hephæstus, made himself a wife of gold.
The Teutonic Wieland sprang from the same mythological stock. He could,
however, lay claim to no trait of divinity, but was merely an artist of
supreme skill, taught by subterranean pygmies. He was lamed by King
Nidung, an early art-patron, eager for a monopoly of his services; but
eventually escaped by means of a flying-apparatus of his own
construction, his maladroit brother Ægil barely escaping the fate of
Icarus. Here, then, Wieland merges into Dædalus, who is only once
mentioned by Homer, and that as a builder. In a passage full of the
‘local colour’ of Crete, he is said to have constructed the ‘chorus,’ or
dancing-place of Ariadne.[364] The dream of a levitative art lurked
nowhere within the Homeric field of view. Least of all had it been
mastered by the ‘eternal smith’ of Olympus, who owed his life-long
infirmity to the want of a parachute. His ‘summer’s day’ fall from the
‘crystal battlements’ of Olympus ‘on Lemnos, th’ Ægean isle,’ crippled
him incurably; and his return thither was effected by other than
aeronautic means. But the story of his alliance with Dionysus is not
Homeric, so we have nothing to do with it.
Footnote 364:
_Iliad_, xviii. 592.
Still less Homeric is the comparatively late account of his localisation
in the Lipari Islands:
Vulcani domus, et Vulcania nomine tellus.
And yet it is worth recalling, as evidence that the prime metallurgists
of Northern and Southern Europe were offshoots from the same stem. Every
one knows that, in the days of old, travellers’ horses were wont to be
privily shod, ‘for a consideration,’ at a cromlech at Ashbury in
Berkshire,[365] by a certain ‘Wayland Smith,’ who had no doubt his own
reasons for eschewing public observation. It seems, however, from the
testimony of Pytheas, a Massilian Greek of Alexander’s epoch, that the
Liparine Hephæstus conducted himself in just the same kind of way.[366]
He worked invisibly, but could be hired to do any given job. This shows
a marked decline from his palmy Iliadic days, when his services might by
exception be had for love, but never for money. From the position of a
god, he had sunk to that of a mere mercenary troll or kobold.
Footnote 365:
Wright, _Archæologia_, vol. xxxii. p. 315.
Footnote 366:
Scholium to Apoll. Rhod. _Argonautica_, iv. 761.
Among the Achæans at the time of the siege of Troy, works in metal[367]
of traditional repute were ascribed to Hephæstus no less freely than
swords and cuirasses in the Middle Ages to Wieland or his French
equivalent, Galand, or than fiddles in later days to Straduarius. A
Wieland’s sword, first brandished by Alexander the Great, was said to
have been transmitted successively to Ptolemy, Judas Maccabæus, and
Vespasian; Charlemagne’s ‘Durandal’ and Taillefer’s ‘Durissima’ were
from his master-hand, which armed as well the prowess of Julius Cæsar,
and Godfrey of Bouillon. Part at least of the armour of Beowulf was also
from the cavernous northern workshop which reproduced the forge on Mount
Olympus, where the behest of Thetis was carried into execution; and to
this day in Kurdistan King David is believed to labour, in a desolate
sepulchre among the hills, at hauberks, greaves, and cuirasses.[368]
Never on earthly anvil
Did such rare armour gleam,
as that supplied by Hephæstus to Achilles, after his original outfit had
been stript by Hector from the dead body of Patroclus. Only the shield,
however, is described in detail. It was a world-picture—a succession of
typical scenes of human life:
All various, each a perfect whole
From living Nature—
wrought in gold, silver, tin, and enamel on a bronze surface. The
implements at hand were hammer, anvil, tongs, and bellows. A
self-supporting furnace—we hear of no fuel—contained crucibles, in which
the metals were rendered plastic by heat, but not, it would appear,
melted. The bronze used was presumably ready-made.[369] Processes of
alloying, like processes of mining and smelting, are ignored in the
Homeric poems. They seem to have lain outside the range of ordinary
Achæan experience, and can have been carried on only to a very limited
extent on Greek soil, and there, perhaps, by foreigners. No part of the
‘clypei non enarrabile textum’ was cast. Forged throughout, inlaid and
embossed, it was a piece of work of which the great Mulciber had no
reason to be ashamed.
Footnote 367:
Besides some of mixed materials, such as the Ægis of Zeus and the
Sceptre of Agamemnon.
Footnote 368:
Mrs. Bishop’s _Travels in Persia_, vol. i. p. 85.
Footnote 369:
Beck, _Geschichte des Eisens_, p. 383.
The technique employed by him has, within the last few years, received a
curiously apposite illustration. The Homeric description is of a series
of vignettes depicted by means of polymetallic combinations, in a manner
wholly alien to the practice of historic antiquity. But now prehistoric
antiquity has come to the rescue of the commentators’ perplexity. From
the graves at Mycenæ were dug out some rusty dagger-blades, which
proved, on being cleaned and polished at Athens, to be skilfully
ornamented in coloured metallic intarsiatura. The ground is of bronze,
prepared with a kind of black enamel for the reception of figures cut
out of gold-leaf tinted of various shades, from silvery-white to
copper-red, the details being brought out with a graver.[370] Groups of
men and animals, mostly in rapid motion, are thus depicted with
considerable vigour, and forcibly recall the naturalistic effects
suggested by the plastic power of the poet. ‘On these blades,’ Mr.
Gardner remarks,[371] ‘we find fishes of dark gold swimming in a stream
of pale gold; drops of blood are represented by inserted spots of red
gold; in some cases silver is used. What could be nearer to Homer’s
golden vines with silver props, or his oxen of gold and tin?’
Footnote 370:
Koehler, _Mitth. Deutsch. Archäol. Institut_, Bd. vii. p. 241;
Schuchhardt and Sellers, _Schliemann’s Excavations_, p. 229.
Footnote 371:
_Macmillan’s Magazine_, vol. liv. p. 377.
This peculiar kind of damascening work was completely forgotten before
the classical age. It seems to have originated in Egypt at least as
early as 1600 B.C.[372] and Egyptian influences are palpable both in the
decorative designs on the Mycenæan blades and in the mode of their
execution. The papyrus, for instance, is conspicuous in a riverside
scene. Nevertheless, these remarkable objects were certainly not
imported. They were wrought by native artists inspired by Egyptian
models. The freedom and boldness with which the subjects chosen for
portrayal are treated make this practically certain. A specimen of the
same style of work, brought from the island of Thera (now Santorin) to
the Museum of Copenhagen, suffices to show that acquaintance with it was
at one time pretty widely diffused through the Ægean archipelago, and
hence cannot serve to localise the origin of the Homeric poems.
Footnote 372:
‘A sword exactly in the style of the Mycenæan blades was taken from
the grave of Aa Hotep, the mother of Ah Mose, who freed Egypt, about
1600 B.C., from the Hyksos.’—Schuchhardt, _op. cit._ p. 316.
In its entirety, the Shield of Achilles was beyond doubt an ideal
creation. The poet described something imaginatively apprehended as the
_chef-d’œuvre_ of a superhuman artist, but claiming no existence out of
the shining realm of fancy. Only the elements of the creation were taken
from reality. The idea dominating its construction, of moulding a work
of art into a comprehensive world-picture, is eminently Oriental. It
recurs in the mantle of Demetrius Poliorcetes, and, more or less
abortively, in various Indian and Moorish embroideries. And the
arrangement of the sequence of scenes in concentric circles on the ‘vast
circumference’ of the ‘orbed shield’ was certainly copied from
Assyrio-Phœnician models.
In its manufacture no iron was employed; and this was quite in
accordance with Homeric usage. The latest metallic acquisition of the
fore-time boasted no traditional consecration; it could impart neither
beauty nor splendour; the part its nature assigned to it was one of
prosaic usefulness. It is accordingly excluded from the Mycenæan scheme
of ornament imitated in the Shield, and may, indeed, have been unknown
to the artists by whom that scheme was elaborated. The Olympian
Demiurgus, at any rate, was acquainted with no such substance; but then
the gods of Greece were never quick to adopt new improvements. So far as
Homer tells us, the only Olympian use of iron was in the chariot of
Heré, thus described in the Fifth Iliad:
And Hebe quickly put to the car the curved wheels of bronze,
eight-spoked, upon their axletree of iron. Golden is their
felloe, imperishable, and tires of bronze are fitted thereover,
a marvel to look upon; and the naves are of silver, to turn
about on either side. And the car is plaited tight with gold and
silver thongs, and two rails run round about it. And the silver
pole stood out therefrom; upon the end bound she the fair golden
yoke, and set thereon the fair breast-straps of gold.[373]
Footnote 373:
_Iliad_, v. 722-31.
This passage shows, as Dr. Leaf points out,[374] that the chariots of
those times, being very light, were, in the intervals of use, taken to
pieces and laid by on stands. That they were then covered with linen
cloths is told to us elsewhere in the Iliad. Not all were furnished with
eight-spoked wheels. The emphasis laid upon the fact as regards the
goddess’s car indicates that it was exceptional; and the indication is
confirmed by the four-spoked wheels of every vehicle in the Mycenæan
reliefs. As to the iron axletree, it was plainly meant, not for show,
but for strength; yet its introduction, even in that humble capacity,
among the appurtenances of a divine being, can scarcely have been
warranted by prescription, and may have appeared a no less daring
innovation than the serving-out of gunpowder to the infernal host in
‘Paradise Lost.’
Footnote 374:
Leaf’s _Iliad_, vol. i. p. 186.
Homeric archæology has assumed a new aspect since the opening of the
prehistoric graves at Mycenæ. The doubts of centuries have now at last
met a criterion of truth; the debates of centuries are in many cases
already virtually closed. And this is only a beginning. If the spade be
the best commentator, it will hardly be laid aside until further light
has been thrown upon still twilight places in Homeric controversy. What
has been done is indeed surprising enough. Not very rarely, what might
pass—allowing for some slight poetical amplification—for the originals
of implements or utensils described in the Epics, have been unearthed in
the course of the excavations begun by Dr. Schliemann. Among them is an
excellent model, on a reduced scale, of Nestor’s Cup, an acquisition
almost as surprising as would have been the recovery of Jason’s Mantle,
or Penelope’s Web.
The Pramnian beverage prepared by the skilled Hecamede for the
refreshment of Nestor and Machaon was served in ‘a right goodly cup that
the old man brought from home, embossed with studs of gold, and four
handles there were to it; and round each two golden doves were feeding;
and to the cup were two feet below.’[375]
Footnote 375:
_Iliad_, xi. 631-39.
The golden beaker now, after three millenniums of sepulture, exhibited
in the Polytechnicon at Athens,[376] has two, instead of two pairs of
dove-surmounted handles; but the support of each by a separate prop
riveted on to the base, corresponds strictly to the construction with
‘two feet below’ (πυθμένες), as described in the Iliad. The real and
imagined objects unmistakably belong to the same class and epoch, and
their agreement is in itself strong evidence of coherence between
Homeric and Mycenæan civilisation. The ‘studs of gold’ embossing the
Nestorean drinking-cup were doubtless the ornamental heads of the nails
used as rivets. The art of soldering, in the proper sense, was a later
discovery;[377] but the Mycenæan goldsmith sometimes had recourse to a
cement of borax for fastening pieces of gold together. In general,
however, decorative adjuncts were separately cast, and afterwards
attached with rivets to the objects they were intended to embellish. In
this way, probably, the purely ornamental use of metallic knobs and
bosses grew up. The Homeric epithets ‘silver-studded’ and ‘bossy,’
applied to sword-sheaths, chairs, and shields, have been copiously
illustrated by the discovery at Mycenæ of innumerable gold, or rather
gilt, discs and buttons, which had evidently once formed the adornment
of the sheaths and shields lying alongside.[378] At Olympia, too, bronze
sheathings have been found set with rows of solid silver nails,[379] by
means of which they may have been fastened to chairs of the exact type
of those described in the Iliad.
Footnote 376:
Schliemann, _Mycenæ_, p. 236; Helbig, _Das Homerische Epos aus den
Denkmälern erläutert_, p. 371; Schuchhardt and Sellers _Schliemann’s
Excavations_, p. 241.
Footnote 377:
Riedenauer, _Handwerk und Handwerker in den Homerischen Zeiten_, p.
122.
Footnote 378:
Schuchhardt and Sellers, _op. cit._ p. 237, &c.
Footnote 379:
Furtwängler, _Bronzefünde aus Olympia_, p. 102.
For his effects of palatial splendour, Homer relied all but exclusively
on the metals. Upholstery was for him non-existent. Small carpets for
placing under the feet of distinguished persons, and rugs for their
beds, were the utmost luxuries known to him in this line, and they were
mere individual appurtenances. But for producing general effects, his
means were exceedingly limited. He could dispose neither of rich
draperies, nor of silken hangings. Polished and rare woods lay outside
his acquaintance; the marbles of Paros and Pentelicus had not yet been
quarried; porphyry, jasper, alabaster, and all other kinds of ornamental
stones seem to have been strange to him. Not so much as a coat of
plaster, or a dash of distemper, clothed the bareness of his walls.
Floors of trodden earth, rafters blackened with smoke, chimneyless and
windowless apartments, belonged even to the royal residences of his
time, at least in Ithaca. But in a few of the more opulent houses of the
Peloponnesus, something was done to dispel this sordid aspect by means
of metallic incrustations; and the possibility was made the most of by
the poet. Nor need the looks of Mammon have been ‘always downward bent’
in the radiant dwellings imagined by him, since their riches lay on
every side. They are, in the Iliad, appropriated exclusively to the
gods, and are vaguely characterised as ‘golden,’ or ‘of bronze,’ all
details of construction being omitted. But the terrene magnificence of
the Odyssey is more distinctly realised.
‘Son of Nestor, delight of my heart!’ [exclaimed Telemachus,
entering the ‘megaron’ or banqueting-saloon of Menelaus], ‘mark
the flashing of bronze through the echoing halls, and the
flashing of gold and of amber,[380] and of silver and of ivory.
Suchlike, methinks, is the court of Olympian Zeus within, for
the world of things that are here; wonder comes over me as I
look thereon.’[381]
Footnote 380:
See _supra_, p. 241.
Footnote 381:
_Odyssey_, iv. 71-75.
His experienced sire was little less astonished at the pomp surrounding
the Phæacian king. All the ‘cities of men’ visited by him in the
progress of his long wanderings had not prepared him for the dazzling
effect of those stately halls.
‘Meanwhile,’ it is said, ‘Odysseus went to the famous palace of
Alcinous, and his heart was full of many thoughts as he stood
there, or ever he had reached the threshold of bronze. For there
was a gleam as it were of sun or moon through the high-roofed
hall of great-hearted Alcinous. Brazen were the walls which ran
this way and that from the threshold to the inmost chamber, and
round them was a frieze of blue, and golden were the doors that
closed in the good house. Silver were the doorposts that were
set on the brazen threshold, and silver the lintel thereupon,
and the hook of the door was of gold. And on either side stood
golden hounds and silver, which Hephæstus wrought by his
cunning, to guard the palace of great-hearted Alcinous, being
free from death and age all their days.... Yea, and there were
youths fashioned in gold, standing on firm-set bases, with
flaming torches in their hands, giving light through the night
to the feasters in the palace.’[382]
Footnote 382:
_Odyssey_, vii. 81-102.
Both here, and at Sparta, besides perhaps some gilding of smaller
surfaces with overlaid gold-leaf, the stone and woodwork of the houses
can be understood to have been coated with metal plates—a mode of
decoration usual in Mesopotamia from a very early date. Thus, the temple
of Bel at Babylon had its walls covered with silver and ivory, while the
shimmer of gold came from pavement and roof.[383] The fashion was
adopted in Egypt, and spread to Asia Minor, perhaps through the
conquests of Ramses II., who built at Abydos a temple to Osiris, plated
with ‘silver-gold.’ It was diffused as well among the pre-Dorian Greeks.
Both the so-called ‘Treasury of Minyas’ at Orchomenus, and the ‘Treasury
of Atreus’ at Mycenæ, bear evident traces of having once been
scale-plated with bronze, not, it is thought, uniformly, but in fixed
patterns.[384] So, here again, archæological research supplies the most
instructive gloss upon the Homeric text. Metallic incrustations lost
their charm when tinted marbles and manifold draperies had become fully
available; but a glint of their traditional splendour was introduced by
Plato into his Atlantis, where the temple of Poseidon was lined
interiorly with the semi-mythical ‘orichalcum’ (later identified with
brass), dug up appropriately in great profusion from the soil of a
fabulous island.[385]
Footnote 383:
Helbig, _op. cit._ p. 436.
Footnote 384:
Schuchhardt and Sellers, _op. cit._ p. 147.
Footnote 385:
_Critias_, 116; Jowett’s _Plato_, vol. iii. p. 697.
The watch-dogs of Alcinous find analogues in the pairs of sphinxes,
winged bulls, or other nondescript monsters, guarding Egyptian and
Assyrian portals. There is nothing to show that they possessed automatic
powers. In those unsophisticated times, works of consummate imitative
skill would readily take rank as samples of magic metallurgy; and what
was life-like so inevitably suggested animation, that the distinction
could scarcely be drawn very clearly. Similarly, the torch-bearers in
the banqueting-hall may be regarded as poetical anticipations of the
Greek art of statuary, then still unborn, or at most in
swaddling-clothes.
One of the rarities brought by Helen with her from Egypt to Sparta was a
silver basket, mounted on wheels, for holding the wool which she
industriously span into thread.[386] Now wheeled utensils were
presumably a Phœnician invention, since they are mentioned among the
furniture of Solomon’s Temple (1 Kings vii.). Their occurrence in
prehistoric Greece is hence one of many proofs of Oriental influence.
The Iliad knows them as the handiwork of Hephæstus, who facilitated by
means of subjacent wheels, the movements of his intelligent tripods; and
Homeric indications have been substantiated by the unearthing, in the
Altis at Olympia, of remnants of objects belonging, apparently, to the
same category.[387] Others, probably incense-pans, were found, a quarter
of a century ago, in tombs of great antiquity at Præneste, Veii, and
Cære.[388]
Footnote 386:
_Odyssey_, iv. 125.
Footnote 387:
Furtwängler, _Die Bronzefünde aus Olympia_, p. 440.
Footnote 388:
Garrucci, _Archæologia_, vol. xi. p. 206.
Helen’s silver workbasket was gilt round the edges, like the ‘crater,’
or mixing-bowl, presented by Menelaus as a ‘guest-gift’ to
Telemachus.[389] The latter was a work of Hephæstus, and had been
presented to Menelaus by the king of Sidon, when he was driven thither
on his way back from Troy. The process of gilding, however, is well
known in the Odyssey, and was practised by native craftsmen. In the
scene of Nestor’s sacrifice at Pylos,[390] the goldsmith Laerkes is
summoned to gild the horns of the victim, which he evidently did by the
simple expedient of overlaying them with gold-leaf. Fusion had indeed
not yet been resorted to for the purpose; nevertheless the art of
plating silver with gold, to which is compared the beautifying action of
Athene upon Odysseus, in order to his advantageous appearance before
Nausicaa,[391] excites the extreme personal admiration of the poet, and
is regarded as a direct fruit of divine tuition. And it is noticeable
that the artists of Mycenæ, although in most respects far above the
Homeric standard, found the operation of plating silver directly with
gold so difficult that they commonly interposed a layer of copper to
receive the more precious metal.[392]
Footnote 389:
_Odyssey_, iv. 615.
Footnote 390:
_Ib._ iii. 425.
Footnote 391:
_Odyssey_, vi. 232.
Footnote 392:
Schuchhardt and Sellers, _op. cit._ p. 249.
No gilt objects are expressly mentioned in the Iliad,[393] but the
delineative inlaying of the Shield of Achilles involved the same sort of
process as that required for producing them. The Iliadic Hephæstus,
however, was somewhat behind his time. For the ‘latest thing out,’ one
would be inclined to look elsewhere. He was, as we have seen,
unacquainted with iron, and his models were often a trifle archaic. From
the very outset of his career, when, as an infant and a foundling, he
was cared for by Thetis and Eurynome, the divine artificer appears to
have been more dexterous than inventive.
Footnote 393:
In the adventitious Tenth Book, v. 294, the practice of gilding the
horns of victims for sacrifice is, however, alluded to.
‘Nine years,’ he himself afterwards related, ‘with them I
wrought much cunning work of bronze; brooches, and spiral
armbands, and cups and necklaces, in the hollow cave; while
around me the stream of ocean with murmuring foam flowed
infinite.’[394]
Footnote 394:
_Iliad_, xviii. 400-403.
But these ornaments were already of obsolete forms. Three of the four
kinds mentioned find no place elsewhere in Homeric descriptions, and
would probably have struck Homeric ladies as quaint and old-fashioned.
They can, however, be more or less plausibly identified with compound
spiral brooches and other decorative objects from pre-Hellenic,
pre-Etruscan, and Scandinavian tombs.[395]
Footnote 395:
Gerlach, _Philologus_, Bd. xxx. p. 491; Helbig, _op. cit._ p. 279.
The armour of Agamemnon was of foreign manufacture. Cinyras, king of
Cyprus, of semi-mythical fame as a metallurgist, had sent it to him,
perhaps as a pledge of benevolent neutrality,[396] at any rate, more
through fear than love. It was of a highly decorative character, being
inlaid and embossed with gold and tin, silver and enamel. Fundamentally,
of course, it was, like all Homeric armour, of bronze. Something further
will be said about it in the next Chapter.
Footnote 396:
Cf. Gladstone, _Studies in Homer_, vol. i. p. 189.
The Baldric of Hercules, seen by Odysseus in Hades, constituted, one
must admit, an incongruously substantial article of equipment for the
thin remnant of a hero owning the sway of Persephone. Yet the horrified
and shrinking glance with which it is regarded brings it wonderfully
into harmony with the sombre vision of the great _eidolon_, pursuing, in
the under-world, a career of shadowy destruction. The golden
shoulder-belt in question was from the hand of an unknown but
exceptionally gifted artist. It was of chased, or repoussé work, and
showed no diversity of colouring or material.
Also a wondrous sword-belt, all of gold,
Gleamed like a fire athwart his ample breast,
Whereon were shapes of creatures manifold,
Boar, bear, and lion sparkling-eyed, expressed,
With many a bloody deed and warlike gest.
Whoso by art that wondrous zone achieved,
Let him for ever from art’s labours rest.[397]
Footnote 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.
Footnote 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]
Footnote 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.
Footnote 400:
Schliemann, _Mycenæ_, p. 156.
Footnote 401:
Helbig, _op. cit._ p. 277.
Footnote 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._
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