Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/377

 METALLURGY. 339 A few centuries later we find Achilles offering as a race prize at the funeral of Patroclus " a silver crater holding six measures, and, by its beauty, without rival upon earth ; it was made most carefully by skilful Sidonian artists, and brought by Phoenician merchants across the misty sea, shown in the ports, and then given as a present to Thoas." 1 Elsewhere we find a king of Sidon presenting a silver crater to Menelaus, and this, according to the poet, was the work of Hephaistos, which is as much as to say that Phoenician things of the kind were so fine as to be thought worthy of attribution to the god of smiths himself. 2 FIG. 266. Vessels figured in the tomb of Rekhmara. From Wilkinson. A reader of Homer fifty years ago would have had no little difficulty in imagining what those craters or bowls were like ; now- adays we are more advanced ; even the Egyptian paintings are not our best authorities as to their appearance; we possess some of the things themselves, and their number grows every year. We may even venture to say that of all the products of Phoenician industry the most authentic are the works in metal we are about to describe. The Egyptians made none of them ; as for Chaldaea and Assyria, they seem to have been content with very simple models, in which decorations are far less complex and figures far less numerous than in Phoenicia, while the Greeks had no sooner begun to chase and beat metal than they gave to it unmistakable evidence of their own 1 HOMER, Iliad, xxiii. 704-745. 2 Ibid. Odyssey, iv. 615-619; and xv. 115-119.