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The domestic quarter of the palace still reveals in some of its rooms the environment of luxury and beauty in which the Minoan royalties lived. The Queen's Megaron may be taken as typical. A row of pillars rising from a low, continuous base divides the room into two parts.
The essential portion, which originally formed the whole interior accommodation of the Latin house, was the -atrium-, that is, the "blackened" chamber, with the household altar, the marriage bed, the table for meals, and the hearth; and precisely similar is the Homeric megaron , with its household altar and hearth and smoke-begrimed roof. We cannot say the same of ship-building.
The main result of the season of 1902 was the practical reconstruction of a large part of the Eastern or Domestic Quarter of the palace. The chief room in this part of the building was the Queen's Megaron, an inner chamber divided transversely by a row of pillars, along whose bases ran a raised seat, where, no doubt, the maids of honour of the Minoan Court were wont to sit and gossip.
Noack objects that when Odysseus fumigates his house, after slaying the Wooers, he thus treats the megaron, AND the doma, AND the courtyard. Therefore, Noack argues, the megaron, or hall, is one thing; the doma is another. Mr. Monro writes, "doma usually means megaron," and he supposes a slip from another reading, thalamon for megaron, which is not satisfactory.
The essential portion, which originally formed the whole interior accommodation of the Latin house, was the -atrium-, that is, the "blackened" chamber, with the household altar, the marriage bed, the table for meals, and the hearth; and precisely similar is the Homeric megaron , with its household altar and hearth and smoke-begrimed roof. We cannot say the same of ship-building.
Adjacent to the Queen's Megaron was a small bathroom, constructed for a portable bath a fragment of which, in painted terra-cotta, was found in the portico of the adjoining hall.
Such passages, so considered, are no tests of earlier composition in one place, of later composition in another. We now look into Noack's theory of the Homeric house. Where do the lord and lady sleep? They sleep mucho domou; that is, not in a separate recess in the house, but in a recess of the great hall or megaron. Cf.
But if doma here be not equivalent to megaron, what room can it possibly be? Who was killed in another place? what place therefore needed purification except the hall and courtyard? No other places needed purifying; there is therefore clearly a defect in the lines which cannot be used in the argument. Is this quite certain? He is in, is there another room whence she can hear him?
The little bath-tub in the Queen's Megaron at Knossos takes its place with the children's toys of the Twelfth Dynasty town at Kahun in bringing home to us the actual humanity of the people who used to be paragraphs in Lemprière's 'Classical Dictionary' or Rollin's 'Ancient History.