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The Pelasgi erected Cyclopean structures fifteen hundred years before Christ, as seen in the massive walls of the Acropolis at Athens, constructed of huge blocks of hewn stone, and in the palaces of the princes of the heroic times. The lintel of the doorway of the Mycenaean treasury is composed of a single stone twenty-seven feet long and sixteen broad.

Myres and Reichel say that the secondary sense of THOREX is not breastplate but "body clothing," as if a man were all breast, or wore only a breast covering, whereas Mycenaean art shows men wearing nothing on their breasts, merely drawers or loin-cloths, which could not be called THOREX, as they cover the antipodes of the breast.

But when they do strike, they cleave heads and cut off arms. They could not do this with bronze rapiers, such as those with which men give point over the rim of the shield on two Mycenaean gems. But Mr. Va. Taf. If his age had really good bronze, and iron as bad as that of the Celts of Polybius, a thousand years later, their preference of bronze over iron for weapons needs no explanation.

The examples given in proof are the offer by Achilles of a lump of iron as the prize for archery the iron, as we saw, being destined for the manufacture of pastoral and agricultural implements, in which Dr. So he speaks freely of iron. "But," we exclaim, "tools and implements, axes and knives, are not a perfectly new subject!" They were extremely familiar to the age of bronze, the Mycenaean age.

Moreover, the Phoenicians, who possessed the skill of sailors in the use of tackle, would have had little difficulty in handling large stones set dry in more or less regular courses, which was a characteristic feature of Cretan and Mycenaean building. It is too soon to describe the work as architecture. It is doubtful if the Phoenicians possessed any aptitude for the arts.

As for "the iron age," no "rhapsodist" introduces so much as one iron spear point. It is argued that he speaks of bronze in deference to tradition. Then why does he scout tradition in the matter of greaves and corslets, while he sometimes actually goes behind tradition to find Mycenaean things unknown to the original poets?

It appears, then, that the monstrous Mycenaean shield is a survival of an age when bows and arrows played the same great part as they did in the wars of the Algonquins and Iroquois.

Sometimes they pedantically "archaise," bringing in genuine, but by their time forgotten, Mycenaean things, and criticism can detect their doings in each case.

Great movements in the arts always owe some debt to the periods that have preceded them, but Minoan and Mycenaean art, at any rate in regard to architecture, was rather the last word of a decaying civilization than the first herald of the glorious art of Greece in the sixth and fifth centuries B. C. We are still far back in remote ages, remote that is so far as Greek art is concerned, anywhere between 2000 and 1000 B. C. or even earlier, back in the Minoan age of Crete with its rudimentary architecture, and its relatively high excellence in the crafts, and in the age of Mycenae and Tiryns, the age that produced the Lion Gate at Mycenae, and that strange half-barbaric work, if I may be pardoned the term, the Treasury of Atreus.

He thinks that the origin of the poems dates from "the Mycenaean period," and that the later continuators of the poems retained the traditions of that remote age.