Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 2.djvu/269

 222 Primitive Greece: Mycenian Art. hearts filled with cruel apprehensions for the fate of their sons ; these carried on the strife unceasingly." ^ Here too, shrieking and gesticulating women stand on the wall, whilst old men without the ramparts watch the affray, but take no share in it. One is almost tempted to ask whether the poet did not describe de visu the composition under considera- tion. If, aware of the many centuries during which the antiquity has lain in sepulchral gloom, we are obliged to dismiss the con- jecture, we must yet accept the fact that the earliest artists had a great liking for the subject, and that they repeated it often enough to have caused it to pass in the stock-in-trade of the workshops. The imagination grew familiar with this and similar representations ; it became accustomed to see it in the pictures offered by the sculptor and the painter ; it would have felt cheated and robbed had it been absent from descriptions wherein poetry challenged the plastic arts. Epic poets picture with no less complacency scenes of the chase, the heroes' contests with wild beasts, and above all the murderous exploits of the king of the forest, his ravages among the hapless flocks and the efforts of their guardians to repel their attacks. Works of the Mycenian epoch may not unlikely have furnished the subjects for their pictures, in the same way as they supplied the theme for the finest intaglios ; and above all for the blades of a certain class of daggers found in the fourth and fifth tomb of the Mycenian acropolis. The forms, inserted in hollows previously sunk for the purpose, are slightly raised on the surface, and have all the appearance of a low-relief (PI. XIX. 6). Although the salience is less perceptible in the other daggers, the style and mode of execution of all these pieces are sufficiently alike to permit us to class them together. When the silversmith models the living form, the lesser or greater degree of salience he gives to his figures matters not ; in either case he does sculptors' work. The ornaments seen on these daggers, like the scene representing a beleaguered city, were detected by M. Koumanoudis, whilst cleaning the different objects which Schliemann had deposited in the building of the Archae- ological Society, As the thick coating of oxide was removed from the daggers, it revealed inlaid work which bears witness to practical knowledge of no mean order. M. Koumanoudis ^ Hesiod, Shield of Heracles,