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And, most suggestive of all, there are the Mycenaean bay leaves of beaten gold, so incredibly thin one might imagine them to be the withered crown of a nameless singer in a forgotten tongue, grown brittle through three thousand years and more.

No mortal ever dreamt that this was so till Reichel tried to make out that the original poet describes no armour except the large Mycenaean shield and the mitre, and that all corslets in the poems were of much later introduction. Possibly they were, but they had plenty of time wherein to be evolved long before the eighth century, Reichel's date for corslets.

Taking the relics in the graves of the Mycenaean Acropolis as a starting- point, some things would endure into the age of the poet, some would be modified, some would disappear. We cannot tell how long previous to his own date the poet supposes the Achaean heroes to have existed. He frequently ascribes to them feats of strength which "no man of such as now are" could perform.

For it seems clear that the "Mycenaean" civilization developed little which can be called artistic in the highest sense of that term. The real history of Greek art that is to say, of Greek architecture, sculpture, and painting begins much later.

The masonry of the city wall, shown on the vase in the Mycenaean grave, is not the ordinary masonry of Mycenae itself. On the vase the wall is "isodomic," built of cut stones in regular layers. Most of the Mycenaean walls, on the other hand, are of "Cyclopean" style, in large irregular blocks. Art, good and very bad, exists in many various stages in Mycenaean relics. Grosse.

There had been a storm. The sun had come out again. The fields were steaming. The ripe fruit was falling from the apple-trees into the wet grass. Spiders' webs, hanging from the branches of the trees, still glittering with the rain, were like the ancient wheels of Mycenaean chariots.

In the decoration of this facade rosettes and running spirals played a conspicuous part, and on either side of the doorway stood a column which tapered downwards and was ornamented with spirals arranged in zigzag bands. This downward-tapering column, so unlike the columns of classic times, seems to have been in common use in Mycenaean architecture.

On the Mycenaean silver bowl, representing a siege, the archers draw to the breast, in the primitive style, as does the archer on the bronze dagger with a representation of a lion hunt. We now take the case of axes. We never hear from Homer of the use of an iron axe in battle, and warlike use of an axe only occurs twice.

But that, if he lived in the Mycenaean age, when, so far as art shows, CHITONS were not worn at all, or very little, and scarcely ever in battle, and when we know nothing of bronze-plating on shields, the poet should constantly call a monstrous double- bellied leather shield, or any other Mycemean type of shield, "a bronze chiton," seems almost unthinkable.

Yet nobody dreams of saying that the poets describe a purely fanciful form of interment. They speak of what they know in daily life. If it be argued that the late poets preserve, by sheer force of epic tradition, a form of burial unknown in their own age, we ask, "Why did epic tradition not preserve the burial methods of the Mycenaean prime, the shaft grave, or the tholos, without cremation?" Mr.