wrought in gold, silver, tin, and enamel on a bronze surface. The implements at hand were hammer, anvil, tongs, and bellows. A self-supporting furnace—we hear of no fuel—contained crucibles, in which the metals were rendered plastic by heat, but not, it would appear, melted. The bronze used was presumably ready-made.[369] Processes of alloying, like processes of mining and smelting, are ignored in the Homeric poems. They seem to have lain outside the range of ordinary Achæan experience, and can have been carried on only to a very limited extent on Greek soil, and there, perhaps, by foreigners. No part of the ‘clypei non enarrabile textum’ was cast. Forged throughout, inlaid and embossed, it was a piece of work of which the great Mulciber had no reason to be ashamed. Footnote 367: Besides some of mixed materials, such as the Ægis of Zeus and the Sceptre of Agamemnon. Footnote 368: Mrs. Bishop’s _Travels in Persia_, vol. i. p. 85. Footnote 369: Beck, _Geschichte des Eisens_, p. 383. The technique employed by him has, within the last few years, received a curiously apposite illustration. The Homeric description is of a series of vignettes depicted by means of polymetallic combinations, in a manner wholly alien to the practice of historic antiquity. But now prehistoric antiquity has come to the rescue of the commentators’ perplexity. From the graves at Mycenæ were dug out some rusty dagger-blades, which proved, on being cleaned and polished at Athens, to be skilfully ornamented in coloured metallic intarsiatura. The ground is of bronze, prepared with a kind of black enamel for the reception of figures cut out of gold-leaf tinted of various shades, from silvery-white to copper-red, the details being brought out with a graver.[370] Groups of men and animals, mostly in rapid motion, are thus depicted with considerable vigour, and forcibly recall the naturalistic effects suggested by the plastic power of the poet. ‘On these blades,’ Mr. Gardner remarks,[371] ‘we find fishes of dark gold swimming in a stream of pale gold; drops of blood are represented by inserted spots of red gold; in some cases silver is used. What could be nearer to Homer’s golden vines with silver props, or his oxen of gold and tin?’ Footnote 370: Koehler, _Mitth. Deutsch. Archäol. Institut_, Bd. vii. p. 241; Schuchhardt and Sellers, _Schliemann’s Excavations_, p. 229. Footnote 371: _Macmillan’s Magazine_, vol. liv. p. 377.