Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/254

Troy. 231 add to Its volume ; but we should strangely force the meaning of these words, if with Lechevalier we were to recognize in them the sources which give rise to the river. The springs of Bunarbashi form now, and never can have formed but a small rivulet, which after a short run used to join the Mendere, before it had its course diverted towards the ^Egean. How could a mere rill ever have been magnified into a river, and that river the Scamander, whose name lives on in the Mendere, and is found to water the upper and lower valley of Troy over a space of sixty miles ? Lechevalier now has recourse to an expedient which only a man driven at bay would think of using. Though obliged to admit that the stream called Mendere is the Scamander of Herodotus, of Scepsis, of Strabo, and in fact the whole of intelligent antiquity, he maintains that the name of Scamander only applies to the streamlet fed by the springs near Troy, and that the modern Mendere is in reality the Simois. Perplexing contradiction ! According to Lechevalier, the Scamander acquired its importance from the town situate near its rise ; the name was applied to its upper course only, before its confluence with the narrow stream. From this point onward, however, it was known as the Simois. Such were the denominations in the time of Homer ; later on the name of Simois was discarded, and that of Scamander retained from Mount Ida to the Hellespont. With the help of such stratagems Lechevalier succeeds in ferreting out, in the imme- diate vicinity of Bunarbashi, the two rivers of which he is in need, the Scamander or Xanthos, and the Simois, along with their confluence near the scene of action. To expatiate upon the whimsicality, to give it no harsher name, of such methods would be sheer waste of time. The use or rather the abuse of hypothesis has seldom been carried so far. Other features might easily be brought forward against the site proposed for Troy. Before his contest with Achylles, ^Eneas recalls the origin of the Trojan race and of his royal house in the following words : ** Then, sacred I lion did not yet rise in the plain, for our fathers had still their seats on the slopes of Ida abounding in springs." ^ Can a town be styled as ** rising in iv jTiilf wetroXiOTOf rrokig fitpoKwy dydputTnap, a XX* iff wirojpe/ac fxioy voXviriSaicn^ "I^^ijc*