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PROFESSOR D'ARCY WENTWORTH THOMPSON ON 



is an ancient simile in literature. It is hard, indeed, to believe that these allusions and 

 representations refer to actual combat of the two animals, or to depredations on the part 

 of the lion upon the peasant's kine. The allusion is far more subtle and more mystical. 

 Pace Herodotus, it is hard to believe that there is the smallest proof of the existence of 

 lions in Greece within historic times : the bull would, in any circumstances, be an animal 

 seldom attacked by the lion ; it would never be found near the haunts of the lion in 

 Africa, and probably not very often in Assyria ; and the conventional picture of the 

 combat is stereotyped and unnatural. The stories of the Eagle attacking the Bull are 

 scarcely more untrue to nature, and are equally mystical in their interpretation. 



The following sketch, taken from a shield found at Amathus in Cyprus (Cesnola, 

 Cyprus, pi. xx.), where certainly lions never occurred, represents the conventional picture, 

 which we find repeated over and over again. The Bull is to the left of the Lion ; its 



Fig. 2. — Lion and Bull in Combat, from a Cyprian Shield. 



attitude is that of the constellation Taurus, and we note in particular its bent knee as 

 Aratus describes it (Phaen. 517) : — 



Ta vpov Se (TKeXewv oacrtj -TrepicbaiveTai o/cAa£, 



or in Cicero's translation : — " Atque genu flexo Taurus connititur ingens." 



If we pass to the great and much-neglected store of ancient symbolism in coins and 

 gems, we find the same subject again and again. And here, though it is not my 

 purpose in this short essay to deal fully in argument with other views, I must make one 

 brief digression. Professor Ridgeway's now widely accepted views on the patterns of 

 ancient coinage would, as it seems to me, give a meaning to coin-types where numismatists 

 had none to offer before, but it is a meaning foreign to all we know of ancient symbolism. 

 His theory that not merely the ox, but the tortoise, the fish, the silphium plant, the ear 

 of corn, and so forth, represent articles of general or local commerce whose barter the 

 coins replaced, is to give to the nations of antiquity a numismatique boutiquiere, which 

 might be paralleled in modern times were the people of Gushetneuk to stamp a red 



