Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/242

 Troy. 219 The requirements of the narrative would involve the naming of some distinct feature in the landscape, such as a hill of peculiar shape, or some point on the coast or the low stretches of ground which should at once appeal to the memory of his auditors. The ease with which the names of localities are pressed into service, the precise and picturesque epithets he applies to them, such as ** lofty," "beetling,'' *' precipitous," **low," and the like, the mention of two rivers furrowing the surface, the position of the various centres of population scattered over it, everything tends to prove that both author and the public he addressed were equally familiar with the sites forming as it were the decoration of the stage on which the piece was acted. To have done this he must either have lived in the Troad or the adjacent districts, within a walking or visiting distance of the Hellespont, over which the ships from Phocaea and Smyrna, from Miletus and Ephesus, sailed to and fro. Quaintness and peculiarities of details in the landscape were not lost upon him, but sank into a mind both receptive and keenly alive to impressions of this kind. The images thus formed are faithfully reflected in his verse, and could not fail to enlist the sympathy of hearers similarly experienced ; emphasized, moreover, by vivid colouring, applied with a few broad, cunning touches. Thus perpetual appeal was made to the recollections of the audience, and it was necessary that its testimony should be in unison with those of the poet. Accordingly, in what may be called the descriptive part of the Iliad, we ought to find the general characteristics of the Trojan plain, and such peculiarities and leading lines in the landscape as are likely to at once strike the traveller. The fundamental data of the Iliad, and the whole cycle connected with it, take for granted another real element : namely, that long before these poems came into being, there existed somewhere in this plain a lofty citadel with beetling crags, ruling it far and wide ; that it was taken after a long siege ; that the remembrance of this event and its natural consequences were still fresh enough in the minds of the people to induce poets to seek on this spot subjects for lays that should gratify the pride of the Greeks holding the coast, and flatter the vanity of their princes as well. We are inclined therefore to hold that, on some point not far removed from the entrance to the straits, close to the confluence of the Scamander and Simois,