Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/31

 HISTORY AND ORIGIN OF THE PHRYGIANS. 15 and the Smyrnian Gulf. As time rolled on, these heights were abandoned for the level plain below ; populous cities, as Magnesia, were built in the plain, or on the shore, as Smyrna. But Sipylus, even when deserted, did not lose its hold on the regard of the natives ; it continued to be venerated as the favourite abode of the great Asiatic goddess, Rhea or Cybele. The monuments, left by generations that had been the first to cast the seeds of civiliza- tion on a soil from which Greek genius was to reap such splendid fruit, 1 were visited with pious curiosity ; but they elicited no ques- tioning as to their chronological order, and whether due to one or several epochs. The traditions relating to this commonwealth had assumed a mythic form ; they led back to that fabulous age when gods descended upon earth and lived in intimacy with men ; they clustered about two single names, those of Tantalus and Niobe, whose transcendent magnificence and insolent prosperity had roused the wrath of jealous deities, and caused their headlong fall. Then, too, had followed catastrophes as sudden as they were strange ; earthquakes had shaken the mountain to its very base ; yawning chasms had engulfed the royal city of Tantalis, with her prince and inhabitants, and amidst the crash of falling boulders streams had gushed forth from the abyss, and where once had been the proud city, stood now a lake, in whose waters at low tide the ruinous mass of palace and dwellings could be descried. 2 The legend of Niobe, daughter of Tantalus, whose numerous and happy offspring are all struck down, may be taken as foreshadow- ing the ruin of a brave and proud community, suddenly blotted out of the roll of nations by the wholesale massacre of its male adults. Many are the variations of the myth of Tantalus and Niobe ; 3 1 This is implied by Pausanias, who returns again and again to the curiosities of Sipylus, often in the following words : " As I myself saw on Sipylus." 2 The Odyssey (xi. 582) puts Tantalus in Tartarus, but does not say to what mis- demeanour he owed the famous punishment that goes by his name. PINDAR (Olymp., i. 54-64) indicates as his crime the theft of nectar and ambrosia. On the destruction of Tantalis or Sipylus by an earthquake, see ARISTOTLE, Meteorologica, ii. 8; Strabo, I. iii. 17; XII. viii. 18 ; PLINY, ff. N., edit. Littre', ii. 93, v. 31. Pausanias writes that in his day the ruins of Tantalis were still to be seen in the depths of the waters (VII. xxiv. 13). 8 These various traditions have been collected in book form, and discussed by K. B. STARK, Niobe und die Niobiden in ihrer literarischcn, kunstlcrischcn mid mythologischer Bedciitung, 464 pp. and 20 plates, 8vo, Leipzig, 1863.