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.
Footnote 403:
Genthe, _Ueber den Etruskischen Tauschhandel nach dem Norden_, p. 102.
Footnote 404:
_Odyssey_, xv. 460; xviii. 295.
Footnote 405:
Scheins, _De Electro Veterum metallico_, p. 17.
For here once more Mycenæ teaches an object-lesson. Innumerable amber
beads, of varied sizes, the largest nearly an inch and half in diameter,
were found in the graves there. All were perforated, and they had
manifestly once been connected together to form necklaces. And the
remains of amber necklaces have likewise been disinterred from the
archaic tombs of Præneste and Veii,[406] from British barrows, and from
a prehistoric necropolis at Hallstadt in Austria. The earliest Italian
amber seems to have been conveyed from the Gulf of Lyons along the
Ligurian coast; but a subsequent and more lasting stream of supply
flowed directly to the Po-delta from near the site of Dantzic. Among the
early Italian specimens, are some neck-pendants carved into the forms of
apes, necessarily from Oriental models in a different material—most
likely, ivory.
Footnote 406:
_Archæologia_, vol. xli. p. 205.
The particular and widespread preference for amber as a means of
decorating the throat had a superstitious motive. An idea somehow
originated that the substance, thus worn, was potent against malefic
agencies, and the persuasion doubtless accompanied it on its travels,
and added to its popularity. There is, to be sure, no sign that Homer,
though he only employs amber in the fitting shape for its exercise, had
any knowledge of this prophylactic power; but then his indifference to
rustic lore has repeatedly come to our notice. Penelope, however, and
the ladies of Mycenæ, may have been less unconcerned on the point, and
perhaps gave some credence to the rumours of mysterious virtue that
enhanced the value of the beautiful shining substance from the dim
North. That their amber was truly hyberborean has been chemically
demonstrated. Fragments of Mycenæan beads, analysed for Dr. Schliemann
by Dr. O. Helm, of Dantzic, proved to contain no less than 6 per cent.
of succinic acid; and the presence of succinic acid is distinctive, for
‘there has been no instance hitherto,’ Dr. Helm states, ‘of a product
physically and chemically identical with the Baltic amber being found in
another spot.’[407] The characteristic ingredient in question, for
instance, is wholly wanting in Sicilian amber, a fact strongly
confirmatory of the historically attested insignificance, in
Mediterranean traffic, of small local supplies. Tin and amber thus agree
in testifying to the wide extension, westward and northward, of
prehistoric trade; yet the first of these far-travelled materials occurs
in the Iliad, and is absent from the Odyssey, while the second figures
in the Odyssey, but has no place in the Iliad.
Footnote 407:
Schuchhardt and Sellers, _Schliemann’s Excavations_, p. 196.
The Greek name for amber, _elektron_, might be freely translated
‘sun-stone,’ a meaning partially preserved in the Latin term _lapis
ardens_, Teutonicised into _Brennstein_, or _Bernstein_. The English
_amber_ is a loan from the Arabic, negotiated at the time of the
Crusades; but the original Achæan word survives in _electricity_ and its
derivatives. For the first production of that still mysterious agency
was by rubbing a piece of amber, the endowment of which thereby with an
attractive faculty for light objects was noted with no particular
emphasis by Thales, the sage of Miletus.
The ‘Electrides Insulæ,’ or ‘amber-islands,’ of the ancients,
corresponded, in vagueness of geographical position, with the
Cassiterides or ‘tin-islands,’ of which the Phœnicians long kept the
secret. The former were eventually located in the Adriatic, whither the
historical Greeks succeeded in tracing the Baltic product, transported
in those later days, along a second overland route from the Vistula to
the Danube, and thence, by intermediary Venetian tribes, to the Istrian
shore. Yet Herodotus was without any definite notion as to the
derivation of amber, one of his spasmodical fits of scepticism
forbidding him to admit its reported origin from a river called the
Eridanus, said to flow into the sea somewhere at the back of the North
wind.[408] The Eridanus, in fact, had a ‘name’ long before it had a
‘local habitation.’ Æschylus was doubtfully inclined to identify it with
the Rhone, showing that he was chiefly acquainted with amber shipped at
Massilia;[409] Pherecydes, knowing more of Adriatic supplies,
established the ‘fluviorum rex Eridanus,’ in the bed of the Po, where it
has remained. The myth of the Heliadæ, or sun-maidens, who, after their
merciful transformation into poplars, continued to weep tears of amber
for the fate of their brother, the lucklessly ambitious Phaethon, took
definite shape in the hands of the Attic tragedians. Homer gives no hint
of acquaintance with it.
Footnote 408:
Lib. iii. cap. 115.
Footnote 409:
Helbig, _Atti dell’ Accad. dei Lincei_, t. i. p, 422, ser. iii.
The decorative use of amber disappeared from classical Greece. It had
been adopted from the East, as part of a semi-barbaric system of
ornament, and was abandoned on the development of a purer taste. The
substance was, indeed, as Helbig has remarked,[410] ill-adapted for the
expression of artistic ideas, and so had little value for those who
directed towards the achievement of such expression their best efforts
for the ennoblement and refinement of life. No amber, then, is found in
the tombs of the Hellenic Greeks, nor in those of the Cimmerian
Bosphorus, where the Milesian colony Panticapæum held the primacy. Even
in Italy, the once prized product was left to be largely appropriated by
Gallic barbarians and Istrian and Umbrian peasants. But the ‘whirligig
of time,’ as usual, ‘brought about its revenges.’ As artistic feeling
decayed, the favour of amber returned, and it grew under the Empire to a
higher pitch than it had ever before attained. Whereupon a cavalier was
despatched from Nero’s court on an exploratory expedition to the
original and genuine home of the article; direct trade was opened with
the Baltic, and the morning mists which had so long enveloped the origin
of the ‘sun-stone’ were at length dispersed. Nevertheless, Pausanias,
who saw an amber statue of Augustus at Olympia in the second century
A.D., still believed the rare substance composing it to have been
collected from the sands of Eridanus.[411] Traditional errors possess
strong vitality.
Footnote 410:
Helbig, _Atti dell’ Accad. dei Lincei_, t. i. p. 425.
Footnote 411:
_Descriptio Græciæ_, v. 12.
Both in the Iliad and Odyssey, Homer shows perfect familiarity with
ivory. But he is entirely unconscious of its source. No rumour of the
elephant had reached him. He would surely, if it had, have shared the
surprising intelligence with his hearers. In the judicious words of
Pausanias,[412] he would never have passed by an elephant to discourse
of cranes and pygmies. The _début_ in Europe of the strange great beast
ensued, in point of fact, only upon the Indian campaign of Alexander.
His tusks were, however, in prehistoric demand all through the East; and
the relations of archaic Greeks were almost exclusively Oriental.
Assyrian ivory-carvings enjoyed a just celebrity; the palaces of Nineveh
and Babylon were softly splendid with the subdued lustre of their costly
material. Solomon’s ivory throne, and Ahab’s ivory house exemplify its
profuse availability in Palestine; Tyrian galleys were fitted with
ivory-bound cross-benches; musical instruments were ivory-dight and
wrought; ebony and ivory furniture made part of the tribute of Ethiopia
to Egypt; and the spoils of Indian elephants were in demand in Italy
before the Etruscans had penetrated the Cisalpine plain. Thus, gold,
silver, amber, ivory, and coloured glass combined with beautiful effect
in a kind of so-called ‘Tyrrhene’ ornaments, extant specimens of which
have been taken from the Regulini-Galassi tomb, and other coeval
repositories.[413] In Troy and Mycenæ, ivory was relatively plentiful.
Pins and buckles were made of it, and perhaps the handles of knives and
daggers.[414] Ivory plates, round and rectangular, and perforated, in
some cases, for attachment to wood or leather, have been, in both spots,
sifted out from surrounding _débris_, and may be imaginatively supposed
to have once enriched the horse-trappings of Hector or one of the
Pelopides. The art of carving in ivory, however, was in both these
places in a rude stage, and appears unfamiliar to Homer. He barely
recognises the use of the material in substantive constructions, while
availing himself of it freely for veneering and inlaying. The only piece
of solid ivory met with in the poems is the handle of the ‘key of
bronze’ with which Penelope opened the upper chamber to take thence the
fateful bow of Odysseus.[415] For the sheath of the silver-hilted dagger
given to the Ithacan stranger by the Phæacian Euryalus,[416] was
assuredly not _formed_ of ivory, although spirally decorated with it.
This can be gathered from the re-application, in the Iliad, of the same
phrase to designate the ornamentation with tin laid on in a curving
pattern, of the cuirass of Asteropæus;[417] and it recurs, undoubtedly
in a similar sense, in the following passage of the Odyssey:
Footnote 412:
_Ib._ i. 12.
Footnote 413:
Dennis, _Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria_, p. 82.
Footnote 414:
Schliemann, _Mycenæ_, pp. 152, 359.
Footnote 415:
_Odyssey_, xxi. 7.
Footnote 416:
_Ib._ viii. 404.
Footnote 417:
_Iliad_, xxiii. 560; cf. Leaf’s annotations, vols. i. p. 110; ii. 413.
Now forth from her chamber came the wise Penelope, like Artemis
or golden Aphrodite, and they set a chair for her hard by the
fire, where she was wont to sit, a chair deftly turned and
wrought with ivory and silver, which on a time the craftsman
Icmalius had fashioned, and had joined thereto a footstool, that
was part of the chair, whereon a great fleece was wont to be
laid.[418]
Footnote 418:
_Odyssey_, xix. 53-59.
The word rendered in English as ‘turned,’ however, does not refer to
‘turning’ with a lathe, as the earlier commentators followed by the
translators supposed, but to such helical designs as Mycenæan artwork
exemplifies to superfluity. And it was in the same style that Odysseus
beautified his couch at Ithaca—the couch wrought of a still rooted olive
tree. He reminds his queen, as yet dubious of his identity, how
Thence beginning, I the bed did mould
Shapely and perfect, and the whole inlaid
With ivory and silver and rich gold.[419]
Footnote 419:
_Ib._ xxiii. 199-200 (Worsley’s trans.).
The chest of Cypselus must have been an analogous piece of work, though
more highly elaborated; and the ‘beds of ivory,’ denounced by the
Prophet with the rest of the ostentatious luxury in which Jerusalem
attempted to vie with haughty Tyre, may have displayed similar
ornamental designs. In the Homeric palace of Menelaus, an ideal of
splendour exotic in the West, but fitting in naturally with Oriental
surroundings, was sought to be realised. Some such model doubtless
floated before the eyes of the poet as the house of Ahab, magnificent
with panellings of that loveliest of organic substances bartered by the
‘men of Dedan’ for the finely-wrought bronze, the purple-dyed and
embroidered cloths of Phœnicia. _Domus Indo dente nitescit._
The door of deceptive dreams imagined by Penelope, may possibly, on the
other hand, have had a Mycenæan prototype.
Two diverse gates there are of bodiless dreams,
These of sawn ivory, and those of horn.
Such dreams as issue where the ivory gleams
Fly without fate, and turn our hopes to scorn.
But dreams which issue through the burnished horn,
What man soe’er beholds them on his bed,
These work with virtue, and of truth are born.[420]
It has been conjectured that the imperfect transparency of laminæ,
whether of horn or ivory, caused those materials to be associated with
the shadowy forms of dreamland; but the apportionment of their
respective offices was plainly determined by a play of words
unintelligible except in the original Greek.[421] And it must be
admitted that scarcely a worse pair of puns could be produced from the
whole of Shakespeare’s plays than those perpetrated by our ‘bonus
Homerus’ in a passage replete, none the less, with poetical suggestions
largely turned to account by his successors.
Footnote 420:
_Odyssey_, xix. 562-67 (Worsley’s trans.).
Footnote 421:
See Hayman’s _Odyssey_, vol. ii. p. 361.
It is scarcely likely that complete tusks ever found their way to
archaic Greece, yet the comparison—used twice in the Odyssey—of purely
white objects to ‘fresh-cut ivory,’ decidedly proves a working
acquaintance with the material. Its creamy tint was, in Egypt and
Assyria, constantly set off by skilful intermixture with ebony; but
ebony formed no part of the Homeric stock-in-trade.
One cannot but be struck by finding that, in the Iliad, ivory is
employed _only_ for embellishing equine accoutrements, but in the
Odyssey, _only_ for purposes of domestic decoration. So far as it goes,
this circumstance tends to reinforce the contrast of sentiment towards
the horse apparent in the two poems. Thus, a species of art practised,
we are given to understand, exclusively by foreigners, helps to conjure
up more vividly the effect of the rush of crimson blood over the white
skin of the fair-haired Menelaus: ‘As when some woman of Maionia or
Karia staineth ivory with purple to make a cheek-piece for horses, and
it is laid up in the treasure-chamber, though many a horseman prayeth to
wear it; but it is laid up to be a king’s boast, alike an adornment for
his horse, and a glory for his charioteer.’[422] And the simile was
adopted by Virgil to expound a blush.
Footnote 422:
_Iliad_, iv. 141-45.
Indum sanguineo veluti violaverit ostro
Si quis ebur.
Ivory-staining does not seem to have been in vogue outside of Asia
Minor. Tablets of ivory were, at Nineveh, often inlaid with lapis
lazuli, and ornaments of ivory were gilt; but there are no surviving
signs of the application to them of colouring matters.
The second mention of ivory in the Iliad is in connexion with the
slaying, by Menelaus, of Pylæmenes, chief of the ‘bucklered
Paphlagonians,’ when it is said that Antilochus simultaneously smote his
charioteer Mydon with a great stone on the elbow, and ‘the reins, white
with ivory, fell from his hands to earth, even into the dust.’[423] The
overlaying, in a decorative design, of leathern bands with small slips
and rosettes of ivory, may here doubtless be understood; and a similar
fashion of lending splendour to horse-trappings can, as already pointed
out, plausibly be inferred to have prevailed at Hissarlik.
Footnote 423:
_Iliad_, v. 583.
Homer’s name for ivory is identical with ours for the beast producing it
for our benefit. And the word _elephant_ is held to be cognate with the
Hebrew _aleph_, an ox. Hence the designation came to the Greeks almost
certainly from a Semitic source. It was exported, we may unhesitatingly
say, from Phœnicia with the wares it served to label.
No Homeric crux has been more satisfactorily disposed of by actual
exploration than that relating to the identity of ‘cyanus,’ or ‘kuanos.’
In later Greek, the term was of perfectly clear import. It signified
lapis lazuli, either genuine or counterfeit. But the simple hypothesis
of a continuity of meaning was met by difficulties of two kinds. The
first regarded colour, always a perplexed subject in the Homeric poems.
For uniformly, throughout their course, ‘cyanean’ betokens darkness of
hue, if not absolute blackness. The epithet frequently recurs, and only
once with a possible, though doubtful suggestion of _blueness_. It is
never used to qualify the summer sea, a serene sky, the eyes of a fair
woman, or the flowers of spring. Usually, the idea of sombreness, pure
and simple, is unequivocally attached to it. As when Thetis, in sign of
mourning, covers herself with a cyanus-coloured robe, ‘than which no
blacker raiment existed.’[424] Invisibility and the shade of approaching
death are each typified as a ‘cyanean cloud’; the brows of Zeus and
Heré, the waving locks of Poseidon, the mane of the Poseidonian steed
Areion, the gathering tempest of war, are of ‘cyanean’ darkness; the
beard of Odysseus, the raven curls of Hector, bear the same adjective,
which cannot well be construed otherwise than as a poetic equivalent for
_black_. Nor is there any ground for supposing that it meant to convey
any special shade or quality of blackness. Fine-drawn distinctions of
every kind are totally alien to the spirit of Homeric diction.
Footnote 424:
_Iliad_, xxiv. 94.
The second objection to identifying cyanus with lapis lazuli or
ultramarine related to function. The uses to which it is put in the
Iliad and Odyssey seemed, to anxious interpreters, inconsistent with its
being either of a stony or of a glassy nature. ‘Cyanus ordinarily enters
into the composition of the polymetallic works described in their
verses. It forms, for instance, a dark trench round the tin-fence of the
vineyard represented on the shield of Achilles; and it is especially
prominent in the decoration of the armour of Agamemnon. Cinyras, king of
Cyprus, was the donor of this magnificent equipment; not through pure
friendship. Intimidated by the Greek armament, he probably dreaded being
compelled to take an active share in the enterprise it aimed at
accomplishing, and purchased with a personal gift to its supreme chief,
liberty to retain his passive attitude of ‘benevolent neutrality.’ The
breastplate alone was a ransom for royalty.
Therein were ten courses of black cyanus, and twelve of gold,
and twenty of tin, and dark blue[425] snakes writhed up towards
the neck, three on either side, like rainbows that the son of
Kronos hath set in the clouds, a marvel of the mortal tribes of
men.[426]
Footnote 425:
The original has simply ‘of cyanus.’
Footnote 426:
_Iliad_, xi. 24-28.
The comparison of the snakes to rainbows may possibly refer only to
their arching shapes; it is not easy to connect iridescence with a
substance just previously noted expressly as _black_. The shield of
Agamemnon resembled his cuirass in workmanship, but was diversified as
to pattern.
‘And he took,’ we are informed, ‘the richly-dight shield of his
valour that covereth all the body of a man, a fair shield, and
round about it were twenty white bosses of tin, and one in the
midst of black cyanus. And thereon was embossed the Gorgon fell
of aspect, glaring terribly; and about her were Dread and
Terror. And from the shield was hung a baldric of silver, and
thereon was curled a snake of cyanus; three heads interlaced had
he growing out of one neck.’[427]
Footnote 427:
_Iliad_, xi. 32-40.
The Mycenæan method of inlaying bronze was followed in the construction
of both articles. But the arrangement of the contrasted metals on the
cuirass in alternating vertical stripes, although rendered perfectly
intelligible by Helbig’s learned discussion,[428] has not been
illustrated by any actual ‘find.’ The bosses of tin and cyanus
diversifying the shield, on the other hand, correspond strictly to a
Mycenæan plan of ornament,[429] and are reproduced in the round knobs of
gold and silver attached to the bronze surface of certain Phœnician
dishes dug up from the ruins of Nineveh.[430] The Gorgon’s Head,
however, does not appear in Greek art until the seventh century
B.C.;[431] yet the suspicion of spuriousness thence attaching to the
lines in which it is mentioned may prove to be unfounded. The emblem
was, at least, a favourite one in Cyprus, having been introduced
thither, according to some archæologists, from Egypt. Judging by the
evidence of Cyprian terracottas, it figured, surrounded with serpents,
very much as on the breastplate of Agamemnon, on the corslets of priests
and kings; and it seems to have been specially appropriated by a
priestly caste named ‘Cinyrades’[432] to signify their supposed descent
from Agamemnon’s dubious ally. The Cyprian partiality thus manifested
for the dread device goes far towards proving that genuine products of
Cyprian metallurgy were limned in the passages just quoted.
Footnote 428:
_Das Homerische Epos_, p. 382.
Footnote 429:
Schuchhardt and Sellers, _Schliemann’s Excavations_, p. 237.
Footnote 430:
Rawlinson, _Phœnicia_, p. 288.
Footnote 431:
Furtwängler in Roscher’s _Lexikon der Griech. Myth._; art.
‘Gorgoneion.’
Footnote 432:
Ohnefalsch-Richter, ‘Cypern, die Bibel, und Homer,’ _Das Ausland_,
Nos. 28, 29, 1891.
Cyanus is, then, in the Iliad employed exclusively as an adjunct to the
metallic inlaying of armour, and it is made similarly available in the
Hesiodic poems. But in the Odyssey its sole actual use is in a frieze
surmounting the bronze-clad walls of the Phæacian banqueting-hall. Hence
many futile debates and perplexities. The Homeric ‘cyanus,’ most critics
asserted, could not, since it was uniformly described as _black_, be a
mineral of cærulean hue, such as the cyanus of Theophrastus
unquestionably was; and it must be presumed to have been a metal, as
obtaining a place among metals in the decorative industry of the time.
It was hence variously held to be steel, bronze, even lead, while Mr.
Gladstone at one time thought of native blue carbonate of copper,[433]
later, however, preferring bronze. Lepsius alone recognised what is now
generally admitted to be the truth—namely, that the word retained its
significance unchanged from the time of Agamemnon to the time of
Theophrastus.
Footnote 433:
_Studies in Homer_, vol. iii. p. 496.
The Assyrians fabricated out of lapis lazuli, not only personal, but
architectural ornaments. Bactria was its sole available source, and
thence through the Mesopotamian channel it reached Egypt. Among the
Babylonian spoils of Thothmes III. were a necklace of ‘true’
_chesbet_, and a gold staff jewelled with the same beautiful
mineral. Artificial _chesbet_ was manufactured in Egypt from about
the fourteenth century B.C. It was composed of a kind of glassy
paste, tinted blue with salts of copper or cobalt, and it lay piled,
like bricks for building, in the storehouses of successive
monarchs.[434] Clay-bricks, too, were enamelled with it for use in
decorative constructions, still exemplified in the entrance to a
chamber in the Sakkarah pyramid; and the same fashion prevailed in
Chaldea and Assyria.[435] The Egyptian admiration for _chesbet_
spread to the Peloponnesus, where an architectural function was
assigned to it agreeing most curiously with the Odyssean use of
cyanus. The spade has, on this point, surpassed itself as an engine
of research; nothing is left to speculation; we seem to find at
Tiryns the very arrangement which caught the quick eye of the
eminent castaway in Phæacia. For in the palace[436] explored by Dr.
Schliemann within the citadel of Perseus, fragments of an alabaster
frieze, inlaid with dark blue smalt, were found strewn over the
floor of a vestibule, having fallen from their place on its walls;
and the smalt appears to be of precisely the same nature with the
manufactured _chesbet_ of Thothmes III., and the Cyprian and
Egyptian cyanus described by Theophrastus.[437] That it was also
identical with the substance turned to just the same architectural
account in the palace of Alcinous, may be taken as certain; and the
discovery constitutes one of the most telling verifications of
Homeric archæology. The particular prominence of cyanus, besides, in
the Cyprian armour of Agamemnon falls in admirably with what is
known of the history of imitation lapis lazuli; Cyprus, owing to the
abundant presence of the needful ores of copper, having become early
celebrated for its production. In addition to some tubes of
cobalt-glass, blue smalt trinkets in large quantities have been
brought to light at Mycenæ. But if Homer took no notice of such
small objects, it was probably because he deemed them too common for
association with the noble or divine heroines of his song.
Footnote 434:
Lepsius, _Les Métaux_, &c. p. 61.
Footnote 435:
Helbig, _Das Homerische Epos_, p. 81.
Footnote 436:
Schuchhardt, _op. cit._ p. 117.
Footnote 437:
_De Lapidibus_, lv. The Scythian kind of cyanus was genuine lapis
lazuli.
That the Homeric cyanus was really a kind of ultramarine enamel, seems,
then, thoroughly established. And it is the only form of glass
recognised in the poems. Yet the colour-difficulty survives. Our poet
remains under the imputation of inability to distinguish black from
blue—unless, indeed, we admit with Helbig that the word ‘cyanus’
comprised a jetty as well as an azure smalt. There is a good deal to be
said for the opinion. Theophrastus plainly distinguishes a dark and a
light variety, and even speaks of one of the derived pigments as being
_black_; and a black enamel formed part of the materials for the
Mycenæan inlaid-work. The stripes of Agamemnon’s cuirass were, according
to this hypothesis, of black, the curling snakes on either side of blue
cyanus. And this might help to explain the comparison of the latter to
rainbows. Not, to be sure, altogether satisfactorily, since the likening
to a simply blue object of the brilliant arch
Mille trahens varios adverso sole colores,
strikes the modern sense as absolutely inappropriate. Nevertheless, we
have to make allowance in Homer, above all as regards chromatic
estimates, for an _aliter visum_. And it happens that the sole
colour-epithet bestowed by him on the rainbow is _porphureos_,
signifying purple of a peculiarly sombre shade. The ‘crocus wings’ of
Iris were, then, less conspicuous to him than her violet sandals.
Amber, ivory, and cyanus, or ultramarine-enamel, are the only
non-metallic precious substances with which Homer shows himself
familiar. Precious stones of all kinds lay apparently outside his sphere
of cognisance. Mother of pearl, coral, and rock crystal are equally
strange to him. He takes no notice of the engraved gems of Mycenæ, no
more than of the porphyry, agate, onyx, and alabaster, there variously
employed to diversify the framework of life. No distinctions are made in
his verses between one kind of stone and another. White jade, brought
from the furthest confines of Asia, though in some request at Hissarlik,
may not have struck him as essentially different from any vulgar piece
of flint picked up by the shore of the Hellespont. Or, if it did, his
vocabulary was too scanty to allow of his expressing the sentiment.
Homeric mineralogy thus embraced exceedingly few species.
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● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ On page 236 there was a footnote for “_Blümner, Technologie der
Gewerbe_” but there was no anchor in the text. Those pages in
Blümner are a description to the use of silver in antiquity, so
the anchor was attached to the word “silver” in the text.
○ On page 255 the footnote for “Lepsius, _Les Métaux dans les
Inscriptions Égyptiennes_” is missing a page number, but page 52
contains hieroglyphics referring to iron. See Google Books for
scans of the pages.
○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
when a predominant form was found in this book.
○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_);
text that was bold by “equal” signs (=bold=).
○ The use of a caret (^) before a letter, or letters, shows that the
following letter or letters was intended to be a superscript, as
in S^t Bartholomew or 10^{th} Century.