Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/352

 330 HISTORY or AKT IN PIUKNICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. Ephesian Artemis was the sister of the Phoenician Astarte, she was in fact the same nature goddess under another name. 1 The two conceptions being almost identical, is it surprising that the rites had much in common, and that a similar community may be traced in the buildings in which those rites were performed ? From the artistic point of view the temples of Phoenicia seem far inferior to those of Egypt or Greece, but if we remember how a practical and industrious people like the Phoenicians, a people, too, who were fond of all that wealth can give, must have crowded their shrines with all that was rich and splendid, we shall under- stand what an impression such temples as those of Idalion and Golgos, of Amathus, of Paphos and Cythera, must have made on the still half-barbarous ancestors of the Greeks. The western visitors were transported by what they saw, and centuries after- wards the poetry of Greece showed by the epithets it lavished on the fair Aphrodite how profound had been the impression made by her gorgeous sanctuaries in the East. In his work devoted to Cyprus, Engel has made use of his rare knowledge of ancient literature to collect every passage in a classic author in which there is any allusion to the Cyprian form of worship; 2 Movers has done the same for Phoenicia. Collate these texts with the figured monuments which have travelled from Syria and Cyprus into our western museums, and you will have a bright vision of a whole vanished world, of Byblos and Paphos with their temples and sacred groves. In the first place you will see the wide quadrangles with their shady porticoes, with their pavilion of the god rising above a moving throng of worshippers, of image and amulet merchants, which filled them from morning to night. Here and there you may see pressing through the crowd the sellers of those sacred statuettes which pilgrims used to buy and take back to their homes. Athenseus has preserved the story of a miracle accom- plished by one of these little figures ; following Polycharmus of Naucratis he tells us how a ship on which a native of that city was taking one of the figures in question back to his home was saved from destruction in a storm by the goddess it represented. 3 1 See ERNEST CURTIUS, Die Gritchische Gotterlehre ran Geschichtlichem Standpunct, Svo, 1875 (reprinted from vol. xxxvi. of the Preussiche Jahrbiicher). - EXCEL, Kypros, 2 vols. Svo, 1841, Berlin. 3 ATHKX.KUS, XV. xviii.