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pensing weal or wo. The general notion of a
damon comprehended every species of myste-
rious, supernatural agency, which the imagina-
tion had not conceived under a distinct form,
and afforded a basis for the personifying of all
abstract properties and relations, by which they
acquired an influence over the feelings, inde-
pendent of poetical fancy. Whatever, either in
nature or in man, excited admiration or won-
der by its excellence or singularity, was con-
sidered as partaking of this character. With-lent construction on his words, and to draw
out entering into this feeling, we shall be una-
ble to comprehend the prodigality with which
heroic honours were conferred by the Greeks,
as when we find the people of Segesta erecting
a chapel, and instituting sacrifices at the grave
of a slain enemy, with no other motive than his
extraordinary beauty. The heroes, with whom
the notion of a dæmon was thus associated, ap-
proach very near to the fairies and goblins of
other mythologies. Greek superstition repre-
sented them as always active, sometimes be-
neficent, but not unfrequently wanton and mis-
chievous.

*

We have dwelt the more largely on this subject here, because the changes which took place in the Greek religion after the age of Homer affect its external aspect rather than its essential character. Its relation, indeed, to the state, to science, and to morality, did not continue always the same as fresh avenues opened for commerce with foreign regions, some new objects of worship were introduced: the progress of wealth and art multiplied and refined its rites; but the germe, at least, of every important religious principle and institution is visible in the Homeric poems.

IV. It is not our intention fully to describe the state of knowledge and of the arts in the heroic ages, or to combine all the scattered touches by which Homer has illustrated it, into a picture as complete as they might enable us to form. We must confine ourselves to selecting a few of the most striking, which may serve to mark the limits of the progress which the Greeks of this period had made in intellectual acquirements, and in their application to the purposes of life.

A just but indiscriminating veneration for Homer's genius led the Greeks of later times, when science and erudition flourished, but the spirit of poetry was nearly extinct, to form very exaggerated notions of his learning. They could not bring themselves to believe that the divine bard, who for so many centuries had fashioned the mind of Greece, whose wisdom they had been accustomed to revere from their infancy, should have been ignorant of things which, in their own day, were familiar to the vulgar, and that his conceptions of the objects which lay beyond the narrow range of his knowledge should have been at once mean and extravagant to a degree which a more enlightened age finds it difficult to comprehend. Strabo employs a considerable space in the introductory part of his work to refute Eratosthenes, who had presumed to inaintain that the poet's aim was merely to afford entertainment, that his geographical information was confined to the countries inhabited by Greeks, and that, as

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in the description of foreign regions he had free-
ly indulged his fancy, his expositors only wasted
their time in labouring to reconcile his accounts
with later discoveries. Strabo himself profess-
es to observe a mean between this irreverent
criticism and the excessive zeal of those who
ragarded Homer as a master of all arts and
sciences; yet, rather than admit that he was
not acquainted with the rudiments of geogra-
phy, he does not scruple to put the most vio-
the most improbable inferences from them.
At present, perhaps, there is more danger of
pushing the opinion of Eratosthenes too far,
than of running into the opposite extreme.
Some modern writers seem to have assigned
too narrow limits to Homer's knowledge of the
earth; and they have, perhaps, sometimes forgot-
ten that his conceptions of its unknown regions,
and of the rest of the universe, were probably
very vague and indefinite as well as erroneous,
and have attributed a precision and consistency
to his views which he may never have aimed
at. On the other hand, it may be fairly assu-
med that his descriptions of these objects are
not mere poetical fictions, and that, if they do
not exactly represent the popular opinion, they
are never without some groundwork of general
belief. The Homeric cosmology is just such a
scheme as might have been expected to be
formed by men who gaze upon gature with un-
hesitating confidence in the intimations of their
senses, and are satisfied with the rudest expe-
dients for explaining and reconciling them, and
who willingly allow their imagination to range
beyond the bounds of their experience in search
of the marvellous.

If we begin by endeavouring to ascertain the
extent of the poet's geographical knowledge,
we find ourselves almost confined to Greece
and the Egean. Beyond this circle all is for-
eign and obscure: and the looseness with which
he describes the more distant regions, espe-
cially when contrasted with his accurate de-
lineation of those which were familiar to him,
indicates that, as to the others, he was mostly
left to depend on vague rumours, which he
might mould at his pleasure. In the catalogue,
indeed, of the Trojan auxiliaries, which proba-
bly comprises all the information which the
Greeks had acquired concerning that part of
the world at the time it was composed, the
names of several nations in the interior of Asia
Minor are enumerated. The remotest are prob-
ably the Halizonians of Alybé, whose country
may, as Strabo supposes, be that of the Chal-
deans on the Euxine. On the southern side of
the peninsula, the Lycians appear as a very
distant race, whose land is therefore a fit scene
for fabulous adventures: on its contines are
the haunts of the monstrous Chimera, and the
territory of the Amazons; farther eastward,
the mountains of the fierce Solymi, from which
Poseidon, on his return from the Ethiopians,
descries the bark of Ulysses sailing on the
western sea. These Ethiopians are placed by
the poet at the extremity of the earth; but as
they are visited by Menelaus in the course
of his wanderings, they must be supposed to
reach across the shores of the inner sea, and
to border on the Phoenician: and it is prob-
able that the poet assigned no great extent

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KNOWLEDGE AND ARTS.

to the intermediate tract. We find no intima-
tion that Menelaus left his ships on the coast
of Syria to nenetrate inland. Nestor, indeed,
speaks of this voyage of Menelaus in terms
which, at first sight, might seem to indicate
that the regions he visited were quite out of the
reach of ordinary Greek navigation: "He has
just returned from parts whence a man could
never hope to return, when once driven into a
sea so vast and fearful, that even the birds
come not back within the same year." This,
however, is an exaggeration, which indicates
For
only the timidity of the Greek mariners, not an
erroneous conception of the distance.
elsewhere we find Ulysses describing a voyage
which he performed in five days, from Crete to
Egypt and the Taphians, though they inhabit
the western side of Greece, are represented as
engaged in piratical adventures on the coast of
On the other hand, one general
Phonica.
idea, which the poet frequently expresses with
regard to these eastern lands, can scarcely have
been derived from the experience of his coun-
trymen. He describes their inhabitants as not
only abounding in wealth, but in the highest
degree hospitable and munificent. The palace
of Menelaus is filled with the precious presents
which he has collected during his stay in the
East; and, in the story told by Ulysses, though
his comrades have provoked the Egyptians by
plundering their fields, and he surrenders him-
self a prisoner, yet not only is his life spared
by the king, but he is loaded with treasures by
the people. It is, perhaps, of less moment that
the Phoenicians and Egyptians mentioned have,
for the most part, purely Greek names. But as
to Egypt, it seems clear that the poet's infor-
mation was confined to what he had heard of a
river Ægyptus, and a great city called Thebes.
Of its distance from the mouth of the river he
seems to have no distinct conception. The
fertility of the soil is marked by an abundant
growth of poisonous and medicinal herbs, and
the wisdom of the people by their skill in the
healing art, in which they are said to excel the
rest of mankind. He mentions the Isle of Pha-
ros, but places it at a day's sail from the mouth
of the river, and Strabo, to save his credit, is
forced to suppose that he meant to intimate the
enlargement of the Delta, which Menelaus
might have heard of, and which might have in-
duced him to substitute the distance by which
Pharos had once been separated from the coast
for that at which he must himself have found
it. What part of Africa Menelaus is conceived
to have visited does not appear. He describes
it as a fortunate land, in which the ewes yean
twice a year, and the lambs are horned from
their birth. The position of the part of Libya
where Ulysses found the Lotus-eaters, whose
favourite fruit still grows under the name of the
jujube, on the same coast, is more precisely
fixed by its vicinity to the land of the Cyclops;
from which it seems that the poet imagined
less than a day's voyage to intervene between
Sicily and the nearest point of Africa. It seems
to be implied that a regular traffic subsisted
between Libya and Phoenicia.*

On the whole, we may observe, and it is a re-
mark of some importance, that whatever Ho-
mer's knowledge of these eastern and southern

countries may have been, his description of
them is extremely well fitted to excite curiosity
concerning them in his countrymen, and to im-
pel the spirit of adventure in this direction.
With the opposite quarters of the world the re-
verse is the case. They are either wrapped in
obscurity, or presented under a forbidding as-
pect, as only to be approached through the
midst of perils, which make the courage of the
hardiest quail. Strabo argues that Homer must
have been acquainted with the Cimmerian Bos-
a people on the margin of Ocean, near the en-
porus, because he speaks of the Cimmerians as
trance of the lower world, who are covered with
perpetual mist and cloud, and never see the
light of the sun. In like manner, he concludes
that the poet, who has mentioned the European
Mysians, cannot have been a stranger to the
Danube. Yet he elsewhere remarks, that in
the time of Homer the Euxine was regarded as
another ocean, and those who sailed into it were
thought to roam into as distant a region as those
who proceeded beyond the Pillars of Hercules.
In fact, it appears highly probable, from the man-
ner in which Homer describes the voyage of
the Argonauts, that he was ignorant of the ex-
istence of the northern shores of the Euxine,
and supposed Jason to have sailed from the land
of Eetes, round the north of Greece and Italy,
into the western sea. In later times the Argo-
nauts were made to go up the Danube, and then
to descend by another arm into the Adriatic.
But Homer was probably not so well informed
as to see any need for such a fiction. On the
western side of Europe, the compass of his
knowledge seems to be bounded by a few points
not very far distant from the coast of Greece.
A modern writer has even attempted to prove
that the author of the Odyssey was so imper-
fectly acquainted with the group of islands
among which the kingdom of Ulysses lay, as to
assign a totally false position to Ithaca itself.*
It seems, however, possible to reconcile his de-
scriptions accurately enough with its real site.†
The northern part of the Adriatic he appears,
as we have observed, to consider as a vast open
sea. The opinion which has generally prevail-
ed among both the ancients and the moderns,
that in describing the marvellous island of the
Phæacians he had Corcyra in view, seems to
have no better foundation than the desire of as-
signing a definite locality to the poet's fictions:‡
as, in the same object, great pains have been
taken to investigate the abodes of Circe and of
Calypso. The situation of Corcyra may have
been very well known to him; but it was not
that which he required for his Phæacians; and
hence no conclusion can be safely drawn either
for or against his geographical learning, from
the freedom with which he has painted the won-
ders of their island. Farther westward, Sicily

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on Homer's Phracians, in the new series of the Rheinisches

This has been lately very satisfactorily shown by Professor Welcker, in a most ingenious and interesting essay Museum, i., 2. But I find it very difficult to assent to his grounds, that the poet does not mean to represent Scheria as an island. position, which he adopts apparently only on etymological

ther side, however, is land; but a land of darkness, which the sun cannot pierce; a land of Cimmerians, the realm of Hades, inhabited by the shades of the departed, and by the family of dreams. As to the other dimensions of the earth, the poet affords us no information, and it would be difficult to decide whether a cylinder or a cone approaches nearest to the figure which he may have assigned to it; and as little does he intimate in what manner he conceives it to be supported. But within it was hollowed another vast receptacle for departed spirits, perhaps the proper abode of Hades. Beneath this, and as far below the earth as heaven was above it, lay the still more murky pit of Tartarus, secured by its iron gates and brazen floor, the dungeon reserved by Jupiter for his implacable enemies.

and the southern extremity of Italy are repre- | ible line, admits of much doubt. On the farsented as the limits of all ordinary navigation. Beyond lies a vast sea, which spreads to the very confines of nature and space. Sicily itself, at least its more remote parts, is inhabited by various races of gigantic cannibals; whether, at the same time, any of the tribes who really preceded the Greeks in the occupation of the island were known to be settled on the eastern side, is not certain, though the Sicels and Sicania are mentioned in the Odyssey. The marvels with which the poet has embellished this part of his narrative were no doubt suggested by some real features in the nature of the scenes described, as the dangers of the straits and the appearance of the volcanic islands on the northern coast; but the boldness of his fictions seems to prove that he is only giving shape to an indistinct rumour. Yet the copper mines of Temesa are already so celebrated as to attract the Taphians, who carry iron to barter for it * But Italy, as well as Greece, appears, according to the poet's notions, to be bounded on the north by a formidable waste of waters.

The waters of Ocean, as they nourish the earth, also renovate and purify the lustre of the heavenly fires, among which one only never repairs its waste in the refreshing bath. The sun rises-it would seem out of a spacious reach which the river makes in the east-to perform his journey over the vault of heaven. The luminary itself is perpetually confounded with the power which animates it or controls its career. But the god does not appear under the form of a charioteer, who, as he climbs the heights of ether, darts his beams on the earth: nor is it certain how the poet conceived the close of his daily task to be connected with its renewal. There is no intimation that he was supposed to descend below the surface of the earth, nor, indeed, would such a revolution be consistent with the other parts of the mundane system. If the necessity of some additional supposition to explain the vicissitude of day and night had been observed, it was probably met by a fiction similar to that which became current in later times. The poet Mimnermus, who flourished between the seventh and sixth century B.C., may only have expressed an idea which had been long familiar to the Greeks, when he sang of the golden bowl which Hephaestus had wrought, and furnished with wings, as a floating couch for the god of day, who, after finishing his task, reposes in the enchanted vessel, and is rapidly transported over the surface of the water from the abode of the Hesperides to the land of the Ethiopians, where he finds another chariot and fresh steeds waiting to receive him.

When we proceed to inquire how the imagination of the people filled up the void of its experience, and determined the form of the unknown world, we find that the rudeness of its conceptions corresponds to the scantiness of its information The part of the earth exposed to the beams of the sun was undoubtedly considered, not as a spherical, but as a plane surface, only varied by its heights and hollows; and as little can it be doubted that the form of this surface was determined by that of the visible horizon. The whole orb is girt by the ocean, not a larger sea, but a deep river, which, circulating with constant but gentle flux, separates the world of light and life from the realms of darkness, dreams, and death. No feature in the Homeric chart is more distinctly prominent than this: hence the Divine artist terminates the shield of Achilles with a circular stripe, representing the mighty strength of the river occan, and all the epithets which the poet applies to it are such as belong exclusively to a river. It is by no means easy to account for this notion, even if it should be supposed to have arisen before the Greeks were acquainted with the Asiatic continent: for still they saw nothing but land to the north; and even if they imagined the earth to be encompassed by waters, there was nothing to suggest the thought of a limitary river. It would rather seem that they must have been led to it in endeavouring to explain It does not appear that the poet was aware the origin of the liquid element by tracing it to of any distinction worth his notice between the a single source, which would naturally be fixed northern and the southern half of the terrestrial at the extremity of the earth. And, according-plane; but the regions subject to the immedily, Homer describes all the other rivers, all springs and wells, and the salt main itself, as issuing from the ocean stream, which might be supposed to feed them by subterraneous channels. Still it is very difficult to form a clear conception of this river, or to say how the poet supposed it to be bounded. Ulysses passes into it from the western sea; but whether the point at which he enters is a mouth or opening, or the two waters are only separated by an invis

* Od.. i, 184. It is not, however, certain that this Te mesa was in Italy; the direction in which the speaker is sailing is at least quite as favourable to the opinion of those who took it for a town in Cyprus. But see Eustr h.

ate influence of the rising and setting sun are scenes of wonder, and peopled by a peculiar race. The adjacent shores or islands are blessed with a double portion of light and heat, and teem with inexhaustible fertility. The Elysian plain, though not far remote from the land of darkness and dreams, enjoys an uninterrupted serenity of atmosphere. The people that inhabits these favoured regions of the extreme east and west attests the neighbourhood of the sun by their swarthy complexion, which is expressed by the name of Ethiopians: the gods themselves sometimes leave their celestial home to share the plenty of their banquets,

and to honour their piety and innocence. It half-decked boats: according to the calculation has been supposed that a rumour of a dark-col- of Thucydides, who seems to suspect exaggeroured race on the eastern shores of the Euxineation, the largest contained 120 men, the greatmay have suggested the thought of the fabulous est number of rowers mentioned in the cataEthiopians; but their colour was determined logue; but we find twenty rowers spoken of as by their position, and the seats of perfect inno- a usual complement of a good ship. The mast cence and justice could only be fixed at the was movable, and was only hoisted to take adfarthest ends of the earth. These Ethiopians vantage of a fair wind, and at the end of a day's became the model of a similar, perfect, happy, voyage was again deposited in its appropriate and long-lived race, which inhabited a paradise receptacle. In the daytime the Greek mariner in the extreme north, sheltered from the blasts commonly followed the windings of the coasts, of Boreas by a barrier of mountains; and when or shot across from headland to headland, or the Greeks became acquainted with the African from isle to isle; at night his vessel was usualtribes, Ethiopia was shifted to the shores of the ly put into port or hauled up on the beach; for southern sea, where, in the reign of Cambyses, though on clear nights he might prosecute his a people was believed to exist of extraordinary voyage as well as by day, yet, should the sky beauty, stature, and longevity, in whose coun- be overcast, his course was inevitably lost. try gold was more plentiful than copper, the ta- Engagements at sea are never mentioned by ble of the sun yielded every day spontaneously Homer, though he so frequently alludes to pia banquet of various meats, and a soft and fra- ratical excursions. They were probably of rare grant spring supplied an elixir of life. occurrence; but, as they must sometimes have been inevitable, the galleys were provided with long poles for such occasions. The approach of winter put a stop to all ordinary navigation. Hesiod fixes the time for laying up the merchant-ship, covering it with stones, taking out the rigging, and hanging the rudder up by the fire. According to him, the fair season lasts only fifty days: some, indeed, venture earlier to sea, but a prudent man will not then trust his substance to the waves.

Some of the epithets which Homer applies to the heaven seem to imply that he considered it as a solid vault of metal. But it is not necessary to construe these epithets so literally, nor to draw any such inference from his description of Atlas, who holds the lofty pillars which keep earth and heaven asunder. Yet it would seem, from the manner in which the height of heaven is compared with the depth of Tartarus, that the region of light was thought to have certain bounds. The summit of the Thessalian Olympus was regarded as the highest point on the earth, and it is not always carefully distinguished from the aerian regions above. The idea of a seat of the gods-perhaps derived from a more ancient tradition, in which it was not attached to any geographical site-seems to be indistinctly blended in the poet's mind with that of the real mountain. Hence Hephæstus, when hurled from the threshold of Jupiter's palace, falls from morn to noon, from noon to dewy eve, before he drops on Lemnos; and Jupiter speaks of suspending the earth by a chain from the top of Olympus.

The practical astronomy of the early Greeks consisted of a few observations on the heavenly bodies, the appearances of which were most conspicuously connected with the common occupations of life. The succession of light and darkness, the recurring phases of the moon, and the vicissitude of the seasons, presented three regular periods of time, which, though all equally forced on the attention, were not all marked with equal distinctness by sensible limits. From the first, and down to the age of Solon, the Greeks seem to have measured their months in the natural way, by the interval between one appearance of the new moon and A wider compass of geographical knowledge the next. Hence their months were of unequal and more enlarged views of nature would duration; yet they might be described in round scarcely have been consistent with the state of numbers as consisting of thirty days; and Henavigation and commerce which the Homeric siod speaks of a thirtieth day as if it belonged poems represent. The poet expresses the com- to every month; a mode of speaking which, mon feelings of an age when the voyages of the though it has occasioned dispute among modern Greeks were mostly confined to the Egean, in writers, was not liable to be misunderstood by the language used by Nestor in speaking of the his contemporaries, even if he has not himself wanderings of Menelaus. So, when Troy is furnished a hint for correcting it.* The comsaid to be at a vast distance from the Achæan putation of the days of the month seems to land, this is not to be considered merely as the have been important only in a religious point judgment of an Ithacan shepherd. We find the of view, partly through the popular superstition Greeks, after the fall of Troy, earnestly deliber-which stamped each day of the month with its ating at Lesbos on the long voyage which lay peculiar character of good or evil omen, and before them, and uncertain whether they shall partly through the sacred traditions which fixed cross the open sea from the north of Chios to the festivals of certain deities on certain days. Euboea, or steer along the coast of Cape Mimas. Hesiod devotes a part of his poem on husbandThe former course is adopted, and, on their ar-ry to the days of the month, which he enumerrival at Geræstus, they offer many victims to Poseidon, in gratitude for having been brought in safety over so great a sea. It accords with this view of the distance, that the failure of the first expedition against Troy was attributed to a mistake of the pilots, who guided the fleet to the coast of Mysia instead of the kingdom of Priat The vessels of the heroes, and probinterretation Handbuch der Chronologie, 1., p. 263), which By the hue 766, cỗ t' dv. K. T. X., according to Ideler's bly of the poet's contemporaries, were slender. is not overthrown by Goettling's objections.

ates and describes according to their various
imaginary properties, and he enjoins every
master of a house to take careful note of them
for the instruction of his domestics.
soon observed that the revolutions of the moon
were far from affording an exact measure of

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the goddess, who assumes the person of a Taphian chief, professing that she is on her way to Temesa, with a cargo of iron to be exchanged for copper; and in the Iliad, Jason's son, the prince of Lemnos, appears to carry on an active traffic with the Greeks before Troy. He sends a number of ships freighted with wine, for which the purchasers pay, some in copper, some in iron, some in hides, some in cattle, some in slaves. Of the use of money the poet gives no hint, either in this description or elsewhere. He speaks of the precious metals only as commodities, the value of which was in all cases determined by weight. The Odyssey represents Phoenician traders as regularly frequenting the Greek ports:* but as Phoenician

Phoenicians do not scruple, even where they are received as friendly merchants, to carry away Greek children into slavery.†

The general impression which the Homeric pictures of society leave on the reader is, that many of the useful arts-that is, those subservient to the animal wants or enjoyments of life

the apparent annual revolution of the sun, and that, if this were taken to be equal to twelve of the former, the seasons would pass in succession through all the months of the year. This in itself would have been no evil, and would have occasioned no disturbance in the business of life. Seen under the Greek sky, the stars were scarcely less conspicuous objects than the moon itself: some of the most striking groups were early observed and named, and served, by their risings and settings, to regulate the labours of the husbandman and the adventures of the seaman. But though for such purposes it was not necessary to adjust the order of the lunar months to that of the seasons, the interests of religion seem to have required that this should be done. The spirit of a cere-slaves are sometimes brought to Greece, so the monial worship prescribes a rigid adherence to the established rites, in all their forms and circumstances; and, accordingly, it was not held sufficient for the due celebration of a sacred festival among the Greeks, that it took place on a stated day of the month, if it did not also conform to the ancient rule in the season of the year. This is the remark, indeed, of a late--had already reached such a stage of refineGreek writer, but it is so consistent with the ment as enabled the affluent to live, not merewhole character of the earliest religion of his ly in rude plenty, but in a considerable degree countrymen, that it may safely be adopted, and of luxury and splendour. The dwellings, furapplied to the remotest times.* Hence it is niture, clothing, armour, and other such properhighly probable that, even before the time of ty of the chiefs, are commonly described as Homer, the Greeks had begun to compensate magnificent, costly, and elegant, both as to the for the defect of the lunar year by the occa- materials and workmanship. We are struck sional addition of an intercalary month. In the not only by the apparent profusion of the predivision of the seasons Homer seems to make cious metals, and other rare and dazzling obno distinction between summer and autumn;jects, in the houses of the great, but by the and the goddesses who preside over them-skill and ingenuity which seem to be exerted in the Hours-were originally three in number. Their name was not yet given to portions of the day; these the poet usually describes by the civil occupations belonging to them; as, the morning by the filling of the market-place, the noon as the time when the wood-cutter rests from his toil and takes his repast, the evening as the unyoking of the oxen, or as the time when the judge quits the seat of justice. In the night, the stars, as they supplied the place of a calendar to the husbandman, served as a clock for those whose habits made them conversant with the aspect of the heavens.

Commerce appears, in Homer's descriptions, to be familiar enough to the Greeks of the heroic age, but not to be held in great esteem. We find Ulysses taunted by one of the Phæacians, though themselves a maritime people, as a person whose appearance betokened that he was more used to command sailors in a merchant vessel, to take charge of a cargo, and to keep an eye on the outlays and the profits of a voyage, than to engage in athletic sports. And in such a capacity Ulysses, relating his fictitious adventures, describes himself as having been once employed by a Phoenician; but in the same narrative he mentions, with pride, that, though left an orphan, with a very slender provision, he could never bear to apply himself to any peaceful occupation for acquiring wealth at home: ships were his delight, and he had made many expeditions from Crete to foreign parts, but always with armed comrades, to enrich himself with the plunder of the coasts which he visited. Yet in the Odyssey we find *Geminus, Isag., 6, quoted by Ideler, i., p. 256.

working them up into convenient and graceful forms. Great caution, however, is evidently necessary in drawing inferences from these descriptions, as to the state of the arts in the heroic ages. The poet has treasures at his disposal, which, as they cost him nothing, he may scatter with an unsparing hand. It depends entirely upon himself with what degree of magnificence he shall adorn the various scenes which he depicts. Nor has he need of any real models to enable him to give a minute description of the most elaborate works. A very rude performance may sometimes be sufficient to suggest to him new combinations, more ingenious and artificial than any which his own experience had ever brought under his eye. These remarks are all applicable to Homer. The shield made by Hephæstus for Achilles cannot be considered as a specimen of the progress of art, since it is not only the work of a god, but is fabricated on an extraordinary occasion, to excite the admiration of men: and the figures in silver and gold which adorn the fairy palace of Alcinous, and which, in part at least, are ascribed to the same divine artist, are undoubtedly such as the poet had never beheld in any human habitation. But, besides this doubt as to the degree in which his imagination may have overstepped reality in his descriptions of such objects, another is suggested by several passages, which might lead us to suppose that, even where he had some real patterns before him, they were the productions, not of Grecian, but of foreign art Nor should it be forgotten, that if, as is at least + Ibid., xv., 452.

* Od., xiii., 272

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