Cretan and mainland tombs have produced many examples of weapons adorned with gold. Modest ornaments are gold caps on the rivets joining hilt and blade, but the whole hilt is often cased in gold. An example from Mycenae has a cylindrical grip of openwork gold flowers with lapis-lazuli in their petals and crystal filling between them ; the guard is formed by similarly inlaid dragons. The most splendid Mycenaean blades are bronze inlaid with gold, electrum, silver and niello. Here again the work is done on inserted copper plates. This kind of flat inlay seems to have been originally Egyptian. It occurs on daggers from the tomb of Queen Aah-Hotep, which are contemporary with the Mycenaean (c. i600 B.c.), and it is significant that two of the Mycenae designs have Egyptian subjects, though their style is purely Minoan. These are the scenes of cats hunting ducks among papyrus-clumps beside a river in which fish are swimming. An other blade bears Minoan warriors fighting lions, and lions chas ing deer. A dagger from Thera has inlaid axe-heads ; one from Argos, dolphins ; and fragments from the Vaphio tomb show men swimming among flying-fish. These are masterpieces of Minoan craftsmanship; in the long decadence of the Mycenaean age there seems to have been no invention, and later pieces of goldsmith's work repeat conventional forms and ornaments.
Greek and Etruscan.—The period of transition from the Bronze to the Iron Age, when Aegean external relations were vio lently interrupted, was not favourable either to wealth or art, and the only considerable pieces of plate that have come from Greece are the embossed and engraved silver bowls made by Phoenicians. Most of them bear elaborate pictorial designs of Egyptian or Assyrian character, and are evidently foreign to Greece; but some simpler types, decorated with rows of animals in relief or wrought in the shape of conventional flower-bowls, can hardly be dis tinguished from the first Hellenic products. Early Greek work is rare. A severe and elegant silver bowl in the Metropolitan Mu seum, New York, represents the flower-type in its finest style. It is cast and chased, and probably belongs to the 5th century B.C. Other pieces of the same age are simply moulded, and no special kind of decoration seems to have been developed for work in precious metals.
Silver vases and toilet instruments have been found beside the commoner bronze in Etruscan tombs. A chased powder-box of the 4th century is in the Metropolitan Museum, New York. The bronze reliefs of the archaic chariot in the same collection have their opulent counterparts in some hammered silver and electrum fragments in London, Munich and Perugia. The electrum details are attached with rivets.
Roman.—About the 4th century B.C. there was revived the fashion of ornamenting silver vessels with relief, and this type of work, elaborated in the Hellenistic age and particularly at Antioch and Alexandria, remained the usual mode of decoration until the end of the Roman empire. Various fabrics of moulded pottery correspond to the successive styles of metalware. A silver vase in the British Museum, bearing a frieze of chariots between floral bands, is nearly a reflex of an earthenware Calene bowl (3rd century B.c.) in the same collection. Pliny names Greek silversmiths whose work was valued highly at Rome, and laments the disappearance of the art in his own day. He must
refer only to its quality, for Roman silverware has been abun dantly preserved. Many rich hoards in modern collections were buried by design during the calamitous last centuries of the ancient world, and the most sumptuous, the Boscoreale treasure, was accidentally saved by the same volcanic catastrophe that de stroyed Herculaneum and killed Pliny. This treasure (1o8 pieces) is mostly in the Louvre. A hardly inferior hoard (7o pieces) found at Hildesheim and now in the museum of Berlin, also belongs to the early empire. The acquisition and apprecia tion of silver plate was a sort of cult at Rome. Technical names for various kinds of reliefs were in common use (emblemata, sigilla, crustae), weights were recorded and compared and osten tatiously exaggerated. Large quantities of bullion came to Rome with the spoils of Greece and Asia in the 2nd century B.C., and Pliny says that even in republican times there were more than 150 silver dishes in the city of a hundredweight apiece. The Emperor Claudius had a slave who possessed a five-hundredweight dish. Weights of vessels are often marked on their bases.
Cups and jugs of Augustan style are usually covered with orna ment in high relief. The subjects are very diverse : historical, mythological and mystic scenes, formal and naturalistic designs of flowers and foliage, graceful studies of animals and birds. Others have conventional fluting, petals or gadroons, Bacchic instruments and masks, embossed or engraved wreaths, gilt or inlaid with niello. Silver and niello inlay was commonly applied to bronze plates. A singular type of silver bowl (patera clipeata) has a central ornament in high relief or even in the round : por trait-busts are not uncommon in this place. In course of time the ornament was restricted, and later Roman plate is largely plain with narrow border-friezes, small central medallions, and handles embossed in low relief. One of the very few gold pieces that survive, a shallow bowl found at Rennes and now in the Biblio theque Nationale of Paris, is exceedingly elaborate. It measures 25 centimetres across and weighs 1,315 grammes. The central medallion and its surrounding frieze contain scenes of a bibulous contest between Bacchus and Hercules; between these and the edge is a row of 16 gold coins each framed in a foliate wreath. The coins range from Hadrian to Caracalla. In the same collec tion are several examples of very large silver plates (c/ipei or missoria), in which the whole field is embossed with mythological or historical subjects. The largest (called the shield of Scipio) is 72 centimetres in diameter and weighs 10,300 grammes. An other bears the name of Gelimer, king of the Vandals and Alans (6th century). The "shield of Theodosius" at Madrid shows the emperor, seated between Valentinian and Arcadius among his guards, with an allegorical group in the exergue. The persistence of classical and even pagan subjects in early Christian work is well illustrated by the silver and gilt casket of Projecta, the centrepiece of the Esquiline treasure in the British Museum. It was a wedding-present ; some of its many panels contain inci dents in the marriage ceremony, others have groups of Venus and her attendants, and the lid bears the pious exhortation : Secunde et Proiecta vivatis in Christo.