Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/297

 THE TEMPLE IN CYPRUS. 275 During the Jewish war, Titus, as we are told by Tacitus, "was seized with a desire to visit a sanctuary so frequented by native and foreign pilgrims." And here the historian digresses for a moment to describe in a few words " the origin of the worship, the rites practised in the temple, the form in which the goddess is adored, a form which is to be found nowhere else." What he says on the first of these points is insufficient and obscure, but he gives us a few precise details upon the rules for sacrifices and upon the image of the goddess, " who is not represented in human form, but in that of a circular cone-shaped block of stone. The reason for this shape is unknown." Tacitus adds that "the emperor took pleasure in contemplating the wealth of the temple and the gifts which had accumulated in it under the ancient kings, as well as many antique objects to which the vanity of the Greeks gave an exaggerated age." But this can have been no Greek temple in which, towards the end of the first century of our era, the eye encountered no better substitute for a statue of the goddess of beauty than a rude block of stone, perhaps a phallic emblem. Those altars of which Tacitus speaks, on which, although sacrifices were offered on them under the open sky, no drop of rain ever fell, were a survival from that form of worship in the open air which was the first practised by the Canaanitish tribes. In the temple at Paphos everything must have borne marked traces of its Syrian origin. The presence of a conical stone in the place of honour in the sanctuary was, if we may use such a metaphor, the dominant note ; but the observant visitor would certainly perceive it echoed in the general arrangement of the temple, in the costumes of the priests, and in the rites they imposed on the people. Elsewhere we find plenty of confirmation of what Tacitus has told us. Upon a whole series of bronze coins struck under the Roman Emperors, from Augustus to Macrinus, in the name of the 1 TACITUS, History, ii. 3. 2 "Simulacrum deae non effigie humana ; continuus orbis latiore initio tenuem in ambitum, metse modo, exsurgens, et ratio in obscuro." M. HALVY believes that he has unravelled the puzzle that baffled Tacitus. At one of the recent sittings of the Societe asiatique (October i2th, 1883), he expounded the idea that one of the Semitic names for the divinity, !, is to be explained by its other primitive signifi- cance, column ; and the columns which we find in Phoenician temples would be nothing more than summary representations of the mountain, the earliest fetish worshipped by the Syrian populations.