Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/125

 SUMMARY OF THE HISTORY OF CYPRUS. 103 soil and the want of all need for great personal exertion must have greatly conduced. The desire for the best, the instinct of progress, was not readily awakened. Although the Greeks of Cyprus made a serious effort to throw off the yoke of Persia during the revolt of Ionia, the attempt was never renewed ; it must have been with the aid of Hellenic mercenaries that Evagoras held out so long against the Satraps. The Cypriots were too rich for willing submission to the chances of war. Their placidity, not to say sloth, did not escape their contemporaries, who called any one steeped in idle well-being, a Cyprian ox. By one of those surprises, those natural paradoxes, which are not rare in history, it was in Cyprus that the founder of the highest moral system known to the ancients was born ; Zeno, the Stoic, was, as we know from Cicero, " a Phoenician of Citium." We are compelled to bring our resumt of its history to a conclusion at the point where Cyprus became part of the Roman Empire, but our readers will understand from what we have said how important was the part played by the island in that struggle between the east and the west in which the whole history of the human race down to the discovery of America was summed up. That importance was not due to the character of the mixed race who peopled it, a character soon enervated in the too bountiful caresses of the climate. In spite of its Grecian population Cyprus cannot claim to be the nursery of any school of poets and artists, like Chios, Lesbos or Samos ; from that point of view she is of less account than even Thasos or ^Egina. She did not produce a single great writer, a single eminent painter or sculptor. Her only philosopher, Zeno, was such an unique and strange exception that we might here almost pass him by in silence. The importance of Cyprus was of another kind. It was situated exactly on the line of contact between the east and the west, on the border between contending empires which seemed to be constantly occupied with nothing but war, but were in fact continually ex- changing both ideas and merchandize. It was placed at the point of juncture between two hostile and yet inseparable currents. from a Cypriot historian of the Alexandrian period, Clearchus of Soli (ArHEN.tus, iii. TOO; vi. 257 ; xiii. 586-594. Cf. TERENCE, Adelphi, . 2; PLAUTCS, Pa-nulus, 1251 et sey.). The monarchic regime to which the Cypriot cities were sub- jected offered features curious enough to attract the attention of the Montesquieu of antiquity, Theophrastus ; one of his lost treatises was entitled, Bao-tAet'u TW, Tlie Kingdom of the Cv/riaiis.