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On the broad parade ground outside the Dipylon, the towering northwestern gate, the procession gathered. Themistocles the Handsome, never more gallant than now upon the white Thessalian, was ordering the array, the ten young men, “stewards of the Panathenæa,” assisting. He sent his last glance down the long files, his ivory wand signed to the musicians in the van. “Play! march!”
How did the ancient method return, overlapping and blent with the method of cremation, as in the early Dipylon interments? We can only say that the Homeric custom is definite and isolated, and that but slight variations occur in the methods of Homeric burial.
Thus the Homeric custom comes between the shaft graves and the latter tholos graves, on the one hand, and the Dipylon custom of burning or burying, with sunk or rock-hewn graves, on the other. The Homeric poets describe the method of their own period.
But at the Dipylon Gate an end was put to their converse with the past. The whole Roman colony of students was there to meet them, and it was evident that the crowd was mastered by some unprecedented emotion. Marcus darted forward, and it was he who turned to Horace with whitened face, and said in a curiously dull voice, "Julius Caesar was assassinated on the Ides."
Leaf does not think them borrowed from the "later" VII. 79, 80, but that VII. 79, 80 are "perhaps borrowed" from XXII. 342, 343. Leaf's "kernel" alludes to cremation. What is "late"? In this case it is not the Dipylon period, say 900-750 B.C. It is not any later period; one or two late barrow burials do not answer to the Homeric descriptions.
Leaf's own conclusion is that the people of Mycenae were "spirit worshippers, practising inhumation, and partial mummification;" the second fact is dubious. "In the post-Mycenaean 'Dipylon' period, we find cremation and sepulture practised side by side.
This is commonly called Dipylon pottery, from the fact that the cemetery near the Dipylon, the chief gate of ancient Athens, has supplied the greatest number of specimens. Some of these Dipylon vases are of great size and served as funeral monuments. It is four feet high. Both the shape and the decoration are very different from those of the Mycenaean style.
The design of men in three shields of different shapes, from a Dipylon vase, is reproduced, with permission, from the British Museum Guide to the Antiquities of the Iron Age; and the shielded chessmen from Catalogue of Scottish Society of Antiquaries. Thanks for the two ships with men under shield are offered to the Rev. Mr. For the Mycenaean gold corslet I thank Mr. Macmillan and Mr.
Apparently they had not done so in the age of the poet, but iron had certainly ceased to be "a precious metal"; knives and woodcutters' axes are never made of a metal that is precious and rare. I am thus led, on a general view, to suppose that the poems took shape when iron was very well known, but was not yet, as in the "Dipylon" period in Crete, commonly used by sword-smiths. Thus he says:
A file of mules and wagons was ploughing through the multitude with marble for some new building. Every instant the noise grew. Pandora’s box had opened, and every clamour had flitted out. At the northern end, where the porticos and the long Dromos street ran off toward the Dipylon gate, stood the shop of Clearchus the potter.
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