Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 2.djvu/78

 56 HISTORY OF ART IN PHOENICIA AND ITS DEPENDENCIES. Some of the moulds used for these statuettes have been found, and the Sardinian archaeologists believe they can recognize the very banks of clay from which their materials were obtained. 1 The cemeteries of Carthage itself and of the rest of Phoenician Africa have, so far, yielded very few statuettes ; with a single exception, and that only a fragment, all the statuettes from Carthage in the Louvre bear unmistakeable signs of Greek influence. 2 From the fifth century onward Hellenic art began to prevail all over the Mediterranean, and to take its place as an international art ; at that period, or perhaps a little later, during the fourth century, the great commercial city of Carthage, influenced by continuous inter- course with the Greeks of Sicily and Italy, with the Etruscans and with the semi- Hellenic populations of Latium and Campania, must have at least partly abandoned the poor and ill-organized forms of Phoenician art for those of the richer style she saw rising all around her. There are times when art is of no country ; when the neces- sities of a free and elegant life cause it to leap the barriers traced by religion and race. 3 When the Carthaginians began to strike money they employed Greek artists to make their dies (Vol. I. Figs. 11, 12, 233). From every town captured in their Sicilian wars their generals carried off Greek statues to decorate the temples and public squares of their native city. After his final victory Scipio invited the Sicilian cities to reclaim the property of which they had been deprived, 4 and when they had each taken their own, enough statues still remained to afford a handsome booty for the Roman triumph of the conqueror. 5 Among the examples of Greek art thus transported to Rome there were some, no doubt, to which their original owners had failed to make good their claim, but others had been commissioned from Greek artists by the Carthaginians themselves. Thus Diodorus tells us that when the Carthaginians laid siege to Syracuse in 396, in the time of Dionysius the Elder, they penetrated into Achradina and profaned the temples of Demeter terra-cottas," he writes to roe, " seem to have a local physiognomy both from work- manship and the quality of clay used ; they appear to have been made in Sardinia with moulds brought from Phoenicia." 1 SPANO, Bull. Arch. Sardo, vol. iv. pp. 120-131. VIVANET, letter of February 19, 1884. 2 HEUZEV, Catalogue, Nos. 240-245. 3 Ibid, p. 100. 4 APPIAN, viii. 123. 5 Ibid. viii. 130.