Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/100

92 position by the side of these flourishing marts. Its influence on the development of Greece and of all the European peoples was deep and significant. As Roman civilization exercised a creative and shaping work long after the Germans had broken the power of the southern people, so also did Semitic civilization continue prominent among the Hellenic peoples long after the emancipation of the Greeks.

If we take the progress of the Greeks in metal-working especially into view, it reveals its dependence upon the Orient. According to their traditions, the Greeks received the processes of preparation and the applications of the metals from the Phrygians, but learned the higher technics of metal-work from the Phœnicians. Intercourse with the latter people also introduced the Oriental art forms to the West. All the productions of the earlier Grecian art bear an Oriental stamp; Mynias, who reigned in Orchomenos a generation before the Trojan War, was celebrated for his treasures of metals. He had an arched treasure-house, the walls of which were covered, after the Assyrian-Phœnician fashion, with plates of metal. He held intercourse with the Phœnicians, from whom he learned the art of building canals and irrigation. The treasury of Atreus, at Mycenæ, was likewise covered with metallic plates. Ulysses remarked the same style of ornamentation in the palace of Alcinous, where the walls were covered with plates of copper and the cornice was made of iron. In all of these cases we are informed from descriptions and from the latest excavations concerning the measure of Oriental influence in ancient Greece.

The useful metal in those times was almost exclusively the brown "chalkos." Of it consisted alike the finer wares which the Phœnicians introduced and the common fabrics which were imported from the neighboring islands, or were already made at home. It is significant of that early time that the smith was bluntly called "chalkeus"—copperer, or bronze-smith. The material, especially the home-made bronze, may not, it is true, have been of the best. The lances would bend, and the swords would break off at the handle. The better kinds of weapons, at least in Homer's time, seem to have been designated as "foreign," or as the gift of the gods. But after the dispersion of the Grecian tribes, following this period, a domestic industry of a better kind sprang up. The mines of Euboea were exploited; the copper-smiths of Delos furnished metallic chairs and beds; from Ægina came all kinds of bronze vessels, and thence originated also the first stamped money. Most important of all was the development of statue-casting, which was introduced in the fiftieth Olympiad, and quickly reached a high perfection. The Spartans had already in a former age built their temple of Minerva with its bronze reliefs, rich in figures. At a later period, every city had its statues of metal, and some cities, during the time of their vigor, had thousands of them.

While thus bronze served at first quite generally, afterward predominantly for artistic purposes, iron in the course of time came to