Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/225

 ANIMALS. 201 opinion we may say, then, that these figures of centaurs must be anterior to the oldest found in Greece. And yet it has been affirmed that the centaur type is a creation of Greek genius. 1 It has even been contended that the horse is, in a sense, an Aryan invention, and that they were the first to conceive the notion of those hybrid animals into whose composi- tion his body entered.' An explanation for such an idea has been sought in the Vedas. 2 It cannot be denied that Greece gave to the horse a far more important and conspicuous role in its figured mythology than it had enjoyed in the East ; but this fact is to be explained very simply, and without having recourse to that argu- ment from race which has, in our days, supplied a pretext for so many gratuitous conjectures. The horse was not domesticated until Ipng after the ox. Neither Egypt, Chaldaea, nor Assyria began to drive the latter, still less to mount him, until long after the forms in which they expressed their religious ideas and their series of ornamental types were fixed. Once adopted by tradition these things hardly changed ; even their enrichment and improve- ment went on very slowly. On the other hand, when Greek art began to provide its demons and gods with bodies, the horse had long been the servant and companion of man. Our readers will remember the speaking horses in the Iliad, and the heroes who wept for their deaths as for those of human friends. A century or two later, when vases with black figures appear, we find horsemen armed with lances careering round the swelling sides of crater and amphora. There is nothing to astonish us, then, in the fact that, in its ideal world of art and mythology, the Greek imagination gave to the horse a place which corresponded to the one he occupied in the real life of the nation ; but we should be mistaken if we supposed that the horse was unknown to what we may call the ornamental and mythological fauna of the East. Certainly he 1 This is the opinion of CURTIUS. In his paper entitled Das archaische Bronze- relief am Olympia (in the proceedings of the Berlin Academy for 1879, p. 26) he says : " Das Wild (der Kentaur) das hier verfalgt vird, ist eine Mischgestalt griech- ischen Erfindung." In his interesting paper upon the Representations of Centaurs in the paintings upon Greek rases (Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. i. pp. 107-167), Mr. Sydney Colvin expresses the same opinion : "The notion of the centaur is of Greek and not of Asiatic origin " (p. 128). 2 See M. ADRIEN WAGNON'S work entitled Egypte et Gnr, OH comparison dts Kuvres de sculpture chez les Grecs et ehez les Egyptiens (8vo, Geneva, 1884). VOL. II. *> D