Page:The Journal of Classical and Sacred Philology, Volume 1, 1854.djvu/252

 242 Journal of Philology. and the Mithra, I can only beg my readers to believe that it is one which comparative archaeology fully corroborates : aye ! and philology too, I might add ; for the Persian mihr, (a contraction for mithra) means : " Mithra/' " love," and " sun." Just as in the autonomous coins of Dyrrachium, and in a temple at Acrocorin- thus (see Pausanias) we find Aphrodite, Eros, Helios, conjoined. Said I not well, that archaeology and philology should each support the other ? I take this then as my starting point, viz. the identity of the Venus Urania the primitive Venus Urania or Venus Mylitta with the Mithras, and I thence infer, with M. Lajard of the Institute, that, whenever a female deity is represented in a Mithraic group, it is the Venus Urania or Mylitta, and not a Nik (as I believe Gerhard and others con- tend), that the artist designed to represent. I would now request the reader to turn again to the Phocica of Pausanias, where he will find that the passage already quoted from the 38th chapter of that book is immediately succeeded by the following words : 'Acppobirrj de c^ei p,ev ev a-TrrjXaico ripas. You must remember that of the Mithraic groups the (nrrjkaiov, or grotto, is an essential feature ; and further, that the districts adjoining Naupactus were traditionally tinged with Asiatic influences. From which I have myself no difficulty in concluding that the Aphrodite mentioned by Pausanias in I. c. is the Urania whose identity with Mithras Herodotus intimates and archaeology con- firms. You must also bear in mind that of Naupactus was the Menaechmus apud Pausaniam a native, and that Mithraic was the group executed by the Menaechmus apud Plinium. From which again I have still less difficulty in concluding that these two Menaechmi are one and indivisible. I have said nothing about a third Menaechmus, the author of the 2tKvoaviaKa, and of a book nep rex^T&v, who lived under the first Ptolemy (Vossius, Hist. Gr. p. 102. Ed. Westermann), because I believe that the title of the latter work has nothing to do with what we call artists. I would here crave permission to remark, generally, that the language of the Greeks has no equivalent for artist. Defining rtvff as they did to be a  /3ta>, they made no distinc- tion between the useful and the ornamental. Artist and artisan they placed on the same level ; works of art, which we hoard up in museums, or use as wastepipes for a lordly rent-roll, were to the