192 BIRD AND BEAST IN ANCIENT SYMBOLISM. 



of Art, on frieze and pediment, in tragedy and epic, were governed by what would at 

 first appear to be a tyrannical convention : which convention, however, so far from 

 hampering their genius, seems, under the influence of a wholesome restraint, to have 

 moulded their art into more beautiful, more poetic, and more sanctified forms. 



And we may stay a moment to remember that it is not only Art but Custom 

 also that was fettered by conventionality and sanctified by religion. At Olympia, 

 in the beginning of each Leap-year cycle, the noblest youth of Greece raced, round 

 the symbolic pillars, their horses emblematic of the Horses of the Sun ; thereby 

 glorifying a God whom they thus ignorantly worshipped. Even so. we read in the 

 second Book of Kings how their Phoenician cousins worshipped with like ceremony 

 the same God. And all the while, in the evening and the morning, priests and 

 irpocnroXoi watched, measured, and compared the rising and setting of Sun and Stars, 

 in temples that were astronomical observatories, to the glory of a religion whoso 

 mystery was astronomic science. 



This dominant priesthood, whose domain was knowledge, holding the keys of 

 treasured learning opened the lock with chary hand, and veiled plain speech in fantastic 

 allegory. In such allegory Egyptian priests spoke to Greek travellers who came to 

 them as Dervish-pilgrims or Wandelnde Studenten. It was this Sybilline knowledge; 

 that an iEschylus, an Ovid, or a Virgil, Master of Wizards, here and there half revealed. 

 It is this dragon-guarded treasure of secret wisdom that we may yet seek to interpret, 

 from graven emblem, from symbolic monument, from the orientation of temple- walls ; 

 from the difficult interpretation of non-Hellenic names, of hero and heroine, of Solar 

 God and Lunar Goddess, of mysterious monster and fabled bird, of celestial river and 

 starry hill : names that were first written in the ancient and learned language of a people 

 wiser and more ancient than the Greeks. 



