Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/128

 io6 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. resemble figures of quite different origin, but, like the races of mankind, they nevertheless bear sure signs of their birth. Their singularity springs from two causes. Entirely Semitic in Phoenicia, the population in Cyprus was composed of two elements, which were intermingled in different proportions in the various parts of the island. Of these two elements the larger, numerically, and far the more richly endowed aesthetically, was the Greek. Moreover the soil yielded a material for the sculptor which, without having all the merits of the Greek marbles, lent itself more kindly to the chisel than the coarse limestones and lavas of Phoenicia. Although the Greeks of Cyprus followed the march of their kinsmen of Hellas at a respectful distance, we must not forget that they were members of the same race, and that a race which has shown a deeper admiration for human beauty and rendered it with greater skill than any other. No doubt the island was far enough from the great centres of Greek activity, but nevertheless the Cypriot Greeks kept up their relations with their kinsmen of Ionia and Hellas. Compared with those which united Corinth, Chalcis and Athens to the coasts of Asia Minor and the islands of the ^gaean, these relations were neither close nor active, but they sufficed to keep alive, and in some measure to develop, the native faculties of the race. The sculptors of the great schools of Greece do not seem to have been in the habit of visiting Cyprus, and their example only had a feeble and late effect on Cyprian art. But in default of plastic art there was poetry. In its greater nobility the latter came very early to awake and exercise the intellect. The Greek colonists, when they first set foot upon the shore of Cyprus, possessed a rich accumula- tion of poetic myths, the spontaneous offspring of the national genius. When the Ionian singers began to make use of all this wealth of material and to celebrate their gods and princes in their ringing hexameters, the echo of their songs reached as far as Cyprus ; at the courts of Salamis, Curion and Soli the verses of Homer and of many a forgotten singer were recited. Thanks to all this, the adventures of Hercules, of Perseus, and other sons of Zeus, were familiar to the Cypriot mind and were treated in the native sculpture. Here, too, we find an explanation of a fact that at a first glance seems surprising ; in certain objects whose style and workmanship bear a strong mark of oriental taste we meet with themes which are only to be explained by Hellenic legends ;