Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/83

RELIGION. 63 with a geographical epithet that takes away much of his general and superior character. 1 In the immediate neighbourhood of Phoenicia, i.e. among the Jews, monotheism had, by the time of the Assyrian triumphs, reached its logical conclusion. The Phoenicians lived in intimate relations with the Jews, especially with those belonging to the kingdom of Israel ; they spoke almost the same language ; a native of Gebal or Sidon would have no difficulty in understand- ing the passionate invectives of an Elijah, an Elisha, or an Isaiah ; and yet there is no evidence to prove that the words of those orators and poets ever found an echo in the cities of the Phoenician coast, or that the inhabitants of the latter associated themselves, even for a moment, with the great religious movement that was going on so near at hand. If certain expressions in the Phoenician texts seem to hint that, at Tyre as at Thebes, men sought now and then to raise themselves to the notion of a first o cause, it is none the less true that in the Phoenician spirit, which did not take kindly to metaphysics, the notion in question was never anything more than a vague and fleeting aspiration. The example set by the Greeks must have counted for much in this indifference. Certain gods and goddesses disembarked with the Phoenicians on all the coasts of Europe ; it was to the Phoenicians that the antique world owed many of the divine types to which it was most attached. These types the Greek imagination clothed in more definite shapes and imbued with a warmer life than they had ever known before. As soon as the plastic genius of the Greeks arrived at its full development, the Phoenicians found themselves confronted, on every shore, by the gods whom they worshipped and whom their fathers had wor- shipped before them ; and they found them transfigured by an incomparable art and lodged in temples which compelled admira- tion by the unequalled grandeur of their lines. Merchants and sailors, the greater part of their lives was passed away from their native country, and wherever they went they were met by the rites of a frankly polytheistic religion. In every foreign sanctuary they saw presentments of the chief gods of their own pantheon, but saw them beautified and enlarged. In every country at which 1 In the Sardinian inscription to which we here allude he is called " the Baal-Samai'm of the isle of Hawks." Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticanun. par.t i.. No. 139.