Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/210

This page needs to be proofread.

194 HISTORY OF ART IN ANTIQUITY. when they affirmed that they could move 120,000 men into the field, including a well-mounted cavalry. 1 The meaning covered by these words is that the powerful ^maritime centre had every interest to secure the amity of native chiefs, who could at any moment oblige her inhabitants to keep within her walls, and close up the routes followed by her trade with Phrygia, Cappadocia, the distant provinces of the Taurus, and the basin of the Halys. The bulk of her transport, as well as her import traffic, was right through Paphlagonia. Her caravans, laden with all manner of manufactured goods, collected in the workshops of Ionian cities, moved slowly along the circuitous mountain path, distributing them everywhere. They brought back in return not merely hides, but corn and wool ; not only mineral substances, such as minium or vermilion, but textiles, bronzes, ivories, enamelled terra-cottas, jewellery in fact, the whole luxury of the East. Thus was created a flux and reflux which led through the land of the Paphlagonians ; so that these could not wholly escape being influenced by two sets of cultures, the Greek and the Asiatic, between which they acted the part of middlemen. The transactions in which they took part brought them in touch with polished nations ; similar relations, and the models created by skilled labour thus brought to them, could not but awake in their breasts a taste and feeling for the refinements of life. The fact, therefore, that monuments within the territory of Paphlagonia bear upon them the impress of noble and con- siderable effort, should cause no surprise. Towards the centre of Paphlagonia, in a valley which we may well imagine to have been thickly populated from the earliest age, hard by the little town of Kastamouni, Kastamboul, there appears a whole series of tombs hollowed in the depth of a low cliff of a certain length. 2 Some notion of the general arrangement of the whole may be formed from the annexed plan (Fig. 131). The principal hypogseum (i) is preceded by a portico composed of two square pillars, about 4 m. high, and corresponding antae. These pillars are without base ; above is a rude capital with cavetto and abacus. Over this again an architrave and pediment, which 1 XENOPHON, Anabasis, V. vi. 9. 2 The name of Kastamouni does not appear in history until the thirteenth century of our era, but the presence of ancient remains about the place leads to the inference that a settled population had long been established here.