Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/250

 226 HISTORY OF ART IN PHCENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. there is all the patient invention, all the ardour and ceaseless ambition of the Greek genius ; and yet the chain is never broken. The path we have laid down will lead us to the feet of the Medicis Venus and the Venus of the Capitol ; and when we bend almost in worship before those deathless marbles, our minds will turn to the rude figures of stone and clay picked up on the sites where the first Greeks learned to adore Astarte the Syrian. Sometimes a father will attempt to trace in the girl arrived at the perfection of early womanhood the angular shapes of the daughter of ten years before, and the task of the archaeologist is much the same. Before his comparisons can be established, he must, in most cases, go through a long and patient study of detail. We shall, we hope, never shirk such study, but we might almost dispense with its more laborious collations when Aphrodite and her Eastern prototype are in question. This filiation has never been contested ; even now popular tradition affirms it. Cyprus is the home of Aphrodite ; there even the name of the mother of Christ is coupled with that of the heathen goddess, for the peasants adore her as Panaghia-Aphroditissa.