It is remarkable that the Olympian gold in the Shield of Achilles retained some part of the occult virtue properly belonging to it only in that elevated sphere. Of the five metallic layers composing the great buckler, the middle and most precious one gets the whole credit of having arrested the quivering spears of Æneas and Asteropæus.[314] The verses, to be sure, recording its superior efficacy are held to be spurious, and the inclusion of a hidden stratum of gold does indeed seem without reason, as it is certainly without precedent. Yet the original poet would not have altogether disavowed the inspiring idea of the passage; and the alleged impenetrability of the gold-mail of Masistius[315] may be held to imply that traces of its old mystical faculty of resistance lingered about the metal so late as when Xerxes invaded Greece. Footnote 314: _Iliad_, xx. 268; xxi. 165; and Leaf’s annotations. Footnote 315: Herodotus, ix. 22. The metallic treasures allotted to the gods in the Iliad are confiscated for human enrichment in the Odyssey. For the golden automata of Hephæstus are substituted the golden watch-dogs and torch-bearers of Alcinous; resplendent dwellings are erected, no longer on Olympus or at Ægæ, but in Sparta and Phæacia; Helen shares with Artemis in the Odyssey the golden distaff exclusively attributed to the latter in the Iliad; the ‘dreams of avarice,’ in short, are tangibly realised, in the Epic of adventure, only by human possessions; they shrink for the most part into shadowy epithets where divine surroundings are concerned. Nor is this diversity accidental or unmeaning. It indicates a genuine shifting of the mythological point of view—an advance, slight yet significant, towards a more spiritualised conception of deity. Oriental contact first stirred the _auri sacra fames_ in the Greek mind. That this was so the Greek language itself tells plainly. For _chrusos_, gold, is a Semitic loanword, closely related to the Hebrew _chârûz_, but taken immediately, there can be no reasonable doubt, from the Phœnician. The restless treasure-seekers from Tyre were, indeed, as the Græco-Semitic term _metal_ intimates,[316] the original subterranean explorers of the Balkan peninsula. As early, probably, as the fifteenth century B.C. they ‘digged out ribs of gold’ on the islands of Thasos and Siphnos, and on the Thracian mainland at Mount Pangæum; and the fables of the Golden Fleece, and of Arimaspian wars with gold-guarding griffins, prove the hold won by the ‘precious bane’ over the popular imagination. Asia Minor was, however, the chief source of prehistoric supply, the native mines lying long neglected after the Phœnicians had been driven from the scene. Midas was a typical king in a land where the mountains were gold-granulated, and the rivers ran over sands of gold. And it was in fact from Phrygia that Pelops was traditionally reported to have brought the treasures which made Mycenæ the golden city of the Achæan world.