Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/126

 io4 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. It served as an outwork now to the Phoenicians and the great Asiatic monarchies in their contest with Greece, now to the western world in its struggle with Asia and, in far later years, to Prankish chivalry in its attacks upon Phoenicians, Persians, Arabs and Turks. But even when Cyprus was playing these latter parts she was too near Syria to escape its influence. There are truces in every war, and when they last long enough they lead, by the force of circumstances, to many mutual borrowings on the part of the belligerents. Cyprus always had an active commerce with the neighbouring continent, so that whichever of the two great adversaries might happen for the moment to be beaten, could always manage to preserve some kind of foothold on the island. Many traces of these mutual relations are to be found in the industry, commerce, and agriculture of Cyprus. With each new master it gained some new vegetable, which afterwards became the basis of a profitable trade. Thus, in the course of the middle ages it received successively the mulberry-tree with the silkworm, the sugar-cane and the cotton-tree. With regard to the antique period we are, of course, often obliged tp resort to conjecture in any attempt to determine what each successive master gave to its prosperity. Cyprus has been a kind of huge jar din cC acclimatation for Europe ; it was there that Greeks and Franks first attempted to cultivate certain plants from Arabia, Persia, India and Egypt, and to accustom them to life in conditions different from those of their birth. Success crowned these efforts, and in time the plants were exported to Greece and Italy, to the Canaries, to Spain, to southern France and even to America. It was from Cyprus that the Portuguese carried the first vines planted in Madeira. In the history of vegetables useful to man Cyprus has, then, a very marked place ; but other seeds than these were there fortified for a new career. The same route was followed by certain religious ideas and by their visible embodiments in art. Cyprus was one of those points at which the conceptions of the Semitic mind had the strongest influence over Aryan Greece. By the long and intimate contact of the two races both ideas and symbols were profoundly modified, to be carried, in the mixed and composite form impressed upon them by the double influence, over the whole of the Hellenic, Etruscan, and Latin worlds, and into every country washed by the Mediterranean.