Page:Book of the Riviera.djvu/238

188 Greek Antipolis, the town over against Nicæa, at the farther side of the bay. Almost all of the monuments bearing Greek inscriptions that have been found in such numbers in Provence belong to a date after the Roman annexation. But this is not the case with regard to a curious inscription discovered at Antibes on a black boulder, egg-shaped, of diorite, a kind of basalt. This stone had no shaping given to it by the hand of man, but on it was cut in archaic characters, this inscription:—

"I am Terpon, servant of the august goddess Aphrodite; may Cypris reward with her favours those who erected me here."

What does this mean? How could the stone be Terpon, a servant of the Goddess of Love? It would seem to have been one of those mysterious sacred stones which received worship from the most remote ages, a form of worship belonging to the earliest people of whom anything is known. This cult of rude unshapen stones, very generally black, prevailed among the Phœnicians; it forced its way into the worship of the Israelites. Such stones were set up even in the temple of Jehovah by some of the kings, who inclined to the superstitions of the Canaanites. The worship had so strong a hold on the Arabs that Mohammed could not extirpate it, and the Black Stone of Mecca still receives the veneration of the faithful. It forced its way into the religion of the ancient Greeks, and though quite incongruous with their mythology, held its own to the last. Prudentius, the Christian poet (died about 410) shows us how strong was the devotion, even in his day.