The trappings
of the horses, the various parts of the chariots, are formed of
various metals. The women's ornaments and the instruments of their
toilet are described--
porpas te gnamptas th' helikas, kalukas te kai hormous+
--the golden vials for unguents. Use and beauty are still undivided;
all that men's hands are set to make has still a fascination alike
for workmen [198] and spectators. For such dainty splendour Troy,
indeed, is especially conspicuous. But then Homer's Trojans are
essentially Greeks--Greeks of Asia; and Troy, though more advanced in
all elements of civilisation, is no real contrast to the western
shore of the Aegean. It is no barbaric world that we see, but the
sort of world, we may think, that would have charmed also our
comparatively jaded sensibilities, with just that quaint simplicity
which we too enjoy in its productions; above all, in its wrought
metal, which loses perhaps more than any other sort of work by
becoming mechanical. The metal-work which Homer describes in such
variety is all hammer-work, all the joinings being effected by pins
or riveting. That is just the sort of metal-work which, in a certain
naivete and vigour, is still of all work the most expressive of
actual contact with dexterous fingers; one seems to trace in it, on
every particle of the partially resisting material, the touch and
play of the shaping instruments, in highly trained hands, under the
guidance of exquisitely disciplined senses--that cachet, or seal of
nearness to the workman's hand, which is the special charm of all
good metal-work, of early metal-work in particular.
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