Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/248

 224 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. Macedonian or even to the Roman conquest, but at present we are only interested in that first period of its development which ended with the final triumph of Greece. The works produced in those ages are, no doubt, mediocre in quality, but thanks to their composite character they yield more than one curious secret, and make us spectators, as it were, of the three-cornered duel that went on in the island between the three original schools of antiquity, the Chaldseo-Assyrian, the Egyptian, and the Greek, ending in the final victory of the last. Thus we find the Greek Hercules taking possession of a temple in a district which formed part of the Phoenician kingdom of Kition and Idalion down to the days of Alexander, and, at the same Kition, figurines of Aphrodite, rivalling the best of those turned out from Attic workshops, in which that goddess is represented with the features given to her by the greatest sculptors of Greece. Contemporaries may well have been deceived by the substitution, and may have failed to grasp the confused traces of a past already distant ; but we have methods and lights which they had not, and we can find in Cyprus the starting-points, the first sketches, of those types from which Greek genius was to draw such marvellous results. We have seen the ill-formed but robust little god whom the Egyptians called Bes furnish the elements of a body to that Phoenician Melkart who had no statue in his Tyrian temple, and, even if this may be doubted, we have seen him play the part of a valiant hunter and slayer of monsters ; we have seen him, in the giant from Amathus, the equal in height of the Hercules whom the Greeks made a son of Zeus, the god who certainly responded to the idea embodied in the Syrian Melkart. It was the same with Aphrodite. The shores of Cyprus were her birthplace, and nowhere was the multiplication of her image, robed or unrobed, more constant or more varied. In the first instance we shall find the Greeks adopting the draped figure for their goddess, and depending mainly upon elegance of pose and happy management of drapery for her charm. But a moment will come when they will return to the more ancient form, and gradually strip their Aphrodite of all her veils. But in the interval we shall see her character change, and the goddess of fertility become the goddess of beauty ; the virgin, in all the purity of her youthful forms, will take the place of the woman on whom maternity has left its mark. There is a wide difference, no doubt, between these