We have
here, then, something plainly visible at a comparatively recent date,
something quite different from those perhaps wholly mythical objects
described in Homer,--an object which seemed to so experienced an
observer as Pausanias an actual work of earliest Greek art.
Relatively to later Greek art, it may have seemed to him, what the
ancient bronze doors with their Scripture histories, which we may
still see in the south transept of the cathedral of Pisa, are to
later Italian art.
Pausanias tells us nothing as to its size, nor directly as to its
shape. It may, for anything he says, have been oval, but it was
probably rectangular, with a broad front and two narrow sides,
standing, as the maker of it had designed, against the wall; for, in
enumerating the various subjects wrought upon it, in five rows one
above another, he seems to proceed, beginning at the bottom on the
right-hand side, along the front [227] from right to left, and then
back again, through the second row from left to right, and,
alternating thus, upwards to the last subject, at the top, on the
left-hand side.
The subjects represented, most of which had their legends attached in
difficult archaic writing, were taken freely, though probably with a
leading idea, out of various poetic cycles, as treated in the works
of those so-called cyclic poets, who continued the Homeric tradition.
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