Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/28

 12 HISTORY OF ART IN ANTIQUITY. personage among the nobles of Miletus, who claimed descent from Neleus, is the hero of a story which Plutarch borrowed from some old historian ; now, the name in itself is proof sufficient of the friendly intercourse which existed between the sovereigns of Phrygia and the Ionian princes, whose ancestors play so con- spicuous a part in the Homeric poem. 1 If the names of Gordios and Midas do not appear in Homer, that may have been due to one of two causes : either he had no opportunity for introducing them, or, what is more likely, it was because those princes did not begin to reign until after the recension of the Iliad by the Rhapsodists ; than which no better reason could be invoked in support of the comparatively recent culture of Phrygia. Had the epic singers been contemporaries of those monarchs, some passing allusion would be found in one or other of the poems to that fabulous wealth which the fervid imagination of the Greeks ascribed to the kings of Phrygia ; Midas, that Midas who turned everything he touched into gold, would seem to have been for the lonians, before Croesus, the type of the monarch who could draw at will from inexhaustible treasures. The Iliad, it is true, makes repeated mention of the Phrygians as the allies of Priam ; it places some of the tribes in Ascania, a region subsequently known as Hellespontic Phrygia; 2 it knows of others established in the interior of the continent on the banks of the Sangarius, who wage perpetual war with the Amazons, that is to say, with an enemy from beyond the Halys. 3 All are agriculturists, and 1 It is Curtius' remark, Hist, of Greece, torn. i. p. 291. 2 Iliad, ii. 860. The name of Ascania disappeared as a local designation ; in the days of Strabo, however, the basin subsequently known as " Lake of Nicasa " still went by the name of Ascanian lake. One of Priam's numerous offspring, and the son of ^neas, are called Ascanius. Ascanius is a river of the Troad; the small group of islets fronting the latter are the Ascanian islands ; the name is also found in a harbour situated on the Troadian and Lydian border. Ascania, accord- ing to Xanthus, was a European district, whence the Phrygians passed to Asia (Strabo, XIV. v. 29). Some hold that to have left so many traces in literary records, the name must have represented at one time the whole Phrygian people, or at least one of its tribes ; an hypothesis confirmed by the fact that in the list of the sons of Corner (Gen. x. 3), Ashkenaz, whom Lenormant would recognize as the father of the Phrygians, is placed side by side with Togarmah, the ancestor of the Armenians. The reader will find the reasons that invest the hypothesis with a great degree of probability in FR. LENORMANT, Les Origines de Vhistoire, torn. ii. PP- 388-395. [According to Lenormant and other authorities, Ascanios, Ascaniaus, is but the Greek rendering of Ashkenaz. TRS.] 3 Iliad, lii. 184-189; xvi. 718.