It is plain from Homeric descriptions of palaces, and of works of art, that his age had not lost touch with or memory of the Aegean culture. Whether some great Aegean or Mycenaean palaces with friezes of cyanus (dark blue glass paste), and of metals, were still in a habitable state, in Homer's days, or whether only the tradition of their glory survived,--as memories of Roman buildings dwell in the early Anglo-Saxon poem on the _Ruined City_ of the Romans in England,--it is clear that plenty of Aegean artistic work in gold and other metals, cups and sword hilts, was preserved, and known to the poet. The Achaeans did not invade merely to destroy, like the Anglo-Saxon invaders of Romanised Britain. Far more civilised and refined than these rude hordes, they could appreciate and preserve as well as burn and break,--in an hour of furious sack,--the treasures of the more civilised race. But these treasures they could not imitate and reproduce, apparently (they are often spoken of as the work of the god Hephaestus), and the ancient Aegean art waned and passed under new and crude influences. Much as Homer delights in works of art, and vividly as he describes them, and describes the toil of weavers, carpenters, shipwrights, ploughmen, reapers, and vintagers, he never shows us a painter at work on wall or vase, nor a mortal hand delineating, in any material, men and women; except when Helen is weaving a great purple web, and embroidering thereon, or interweaving there-with, "many battles of horse-taming Trojans and mail-clad Achaeans."[9] This art implies some knowledge of drawing and painting: from the Homeric age we have no relics of this art; but such webs might, like the Bayeux tapestry, last long, and might be imitated, and it may have been from such old Aegean fabrics or copies of them that Homer took his idea. [1] The bard of the Macdonalds in the year of Montrose. [2] _Iliad_, xviii. 497-504. [3] ix. 632-634. [4] _Eumenides_, 273. [5] _Iliad_, ix. 186, 189. [6] _Odyssey_, iv. 70-75. [7] _Ibid._ iii. 464-469. The word for bath, ἀσαμἰνθος, is thought, like other words with the same termination, to be of the language of the Aegean race, whoever they may have been: the termination is common in place-names, and names of flowers. [8] Kinkel, _Epicorum Graecorum Fragmenta_, p. 11. [9] _Iliad_, iii. 125-127. CHAPTER V MEN AND WOMEN In all modern times Homer has been admired for his noble, tender, and chivalrous sense of what is due to women; for his pictures of the perfect mother, Thetis; the perfect wife, Andromache; the perfect maiden, frank, stainless, and kind, Nausicaa; for the woman of immortal charm, Helen; while, when he does touch on the less lovable humours of women,--on the nagging shrew, the light o' love, the rather bitter virgin,--he selects his examples from the divine society of the Gods.