Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/352

 336 HISTORY OF ART IN ANTIQUITY. When 'the country was sprinkled with flourishing cities teeming with population, the Lycians must have been less prone to move from place to place than their descendants. Within the towns were buildings with very thick walls, roomy houses of great solidity, standing in shady gardens kept green by irrigation ; nor was the air along the shore rendered deadly by pestilential miasmas, rising from the harbours (as at Patara, for example), which now are turned into so many swamps. Hence, whether along the sea edge or in the towns of the lower valleys, a large proportion of the inhabitants were stationary. Nevertheless, habits such as these so naturally find their explanation in climatic exigencies as to make it difficult to imagine that they do not travel back, at least within certain limits, to antiquity itself. 1 The hills are everywhere so near the plain, the slopes so steep and rugged, that one and all of these tiny communities doubtless found within their own terri- tory the needful summer station. If climate and vegetation are not constant in Lycia, its physical formation, on the other hand, is pretty much the same everywhere. The breccia and facilite found in the lowlands were detached from the mountains above, and precipitated down there. Formations of schist and serpentine occur to the south-eastward, in the mountain chain that skirts the Bay of Adalia ; the rest of the thick mass is a calcareous stone, which shoots up into perpendicular walls above ravine and valley. Its degree of compactness varies in places, yet it lends itself everywhere to be cut with ease ; whilst its tex- ture is fine enough and hard enough to have kept the shapes and inscriptions traced upon it by the chisel, infinitely better than the vast majority of the tufaceous rocks of Phrygia. Its colour is generally milky-white, like marble ; hence it is that travellers have often been deceived by its aspect, unmindful of the fact that no marble exists in Lycia. The rare monuments of that material encountered in the country are of foreign origin. 2 1 What makes one suspect that at that time social and religious existence was momentarily suspended, at least in the maritime cities, is a passage of Herodotus in reference to the oracle of Apollo at Patara, to the effect that he was silent during the summer months (i. 182 ; SERVIUS, ad ^Eneida, iv. 143). Again we read (Herodotus, i. 176) that when Xanthus fell to the hand of the Persians, eighty families were out of town (eru^ov TrjviKavra eVST/^eouo-at) a circumstance which sug- gests the idea that the households in question had left the city for their summer station before it was surrounded by the enemy, a BNNDORF, Reisen, torn. i. p. 39.