Homeric metallurgy thus plainly represents a declining stage of Mycenæan metallurgy; and this again included conspicuous elements from Egyptian, Phœnician, and Phrygian sources. Of the two first springs of influence, our poet shows full consciousness, but none of the last; since his admiration for spiral patterns, derived, according to the best authorities, from the banks of the Sangarius, came to him at second-hand from Mycenæ. The metallurgical traditions of Phrygia find, moreover, no place in his verses. The dæmonic artificers of Asia Minor—the hammer-and-anvil goblins, sons or servants of Hephæstus, who of old intangibly colonised the shores and islands of the Levant, make no figure in the Iliad or Odyssey. Cabiri, Curetes, Corybantes, Idæan Dactyls, Rhodian Telchines, are all equally ignored in the Homeric world. Hephæstus there works alone. He has neither aides-de-camp nor coadjutors, apart from his spontaneously helpful bellows. His predilection for Lemnos was obviously due to the existence there of an active volcano; for Mosychlus did not become extinct until about the time of Alexander the Great. He, however, consulted perhaps in the choice rather his primitive elemental character than his derived industrial function. The establishment of Cyclopean forges in the craters of volcanoes seems to have been a mythological after-thought. Its appropriateness did not at any rate strike Homer. He indeed betrays no direct acquaintance with subterranean fires. His Island of the Cyclops is entirely devoid of volcanic associations, and indeed the genealogy of Polyphemus was scarcely consistent with any such relationship. He sprang from Poseidon; and Poseidon’s wrath at the evil entreatment by Odysseus of his amiable offspring was a main factor in the development of the subsequent narrative. For the resentment of the sea-god was not to be trifled with by hero or mariner who had slipped unawares into that outer region of much sea and little land, where he reigned supreme. _Hinc illæ lachrymæ._ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CHAPTER XI. AMBER, IVORY, AND ULTRAMARINE.