Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/244

 228 HISTORY OF ART IN ANTIQUITY. adjustment or details, were discarded in the tomb of Gherdek Kaiasi ; it is no more than a Greek monument of the decadence, one we might as readily expect to see elsewhere as in Phrygia (Fig. 91), and in all likelihood is coeval with the Seleucidae, mayhap the Roman proconsuls of Asia. On looking at it, we feel that when the artist designed it all meaning and tradition of rock- cut architecture were already forgotten ; the slender supports of the faade, the wide intercolumnation which separates them, ill agree with the massiveness of the native rock in which the sepulchre was hollowed. Taken as a whole, it falls short of the air of strength and solidity which a rock-cut structure ought to possess. The fact of Oriental types having died exceedingly hard about the tombs in the vicinity of Nacoleia is to be explained by the memories and associations which attached to the canton. Packed away in a hilly well-timbered region, untraversed by the military or commercial highways, it was in the nature of things that it should have lain forgotten by Greek and Latin writers by those, at least, who have come down to us. Mention of it may have been made in the pages of those monograms entitled <&pvyia.Ka {Histories and Descriptions of Phrygia], but such works are lost. Fortunately for us, the silence of texts is supplemented by monu- ments both varied and numerous ; they permit us to guess that the situation of this district did much to mould the character of the real Phrygian people, those of the Gordioses and Midases, as well as the light in which they were held by their Hellenized descendants, who for centuries were wont to engrave on their coins the effigy of their ancestor Midas (see tailpiece, end of chapter), and who, in the age of the Antonines, would not have readily believed in the efficacy of the formulas incised on their funereal stelas, had not letters of their ancient and, doubtless, obsolete language been interpolated with them. The tribes that fought the battles around the head-springs of the Sangarius, the echo of which reached Homer, tribes that secured to their descendants possession of part of the plateau of Asia Minor, had here their first religious and political centre. Under the protecting shadow of rock-hewn strongholds, they gathered themselves around sanc- tuaries, consecrated, mayhap, by the former owners of the soil, whose religion was adopted and continued by the new-comers. As the spring came round, these sylvan scenes would resound with the voice of young life ; lambs, kine and colts that frolicked under