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Finally, still other portions of this same Mycenaean wall show on the outside a near approach to what is called ashlar masonry, in which the blocks are rectangular and laid in even horizontal courses. This is the case near the Lion Gate, the principal entrance to the citadel.
In either alternative, and one or other must be actual, there was time enough for many changes in the culture of the Mycenaean prime to be evolved. These changes, we say, are represented by the descriptions of culture in the Iliad. That hypothesis explains, simply and readily, all the facts.
In short, the Homeric poet undeniably treats the age of his heroes as having already, in the phrase of Thucydides, "won its way to the mythical," and therefore as indefinitely remote. It is impossible here to discuss in detail the complex problems of Mycenaean chronology.
The favorite elements of design are bands and spirals and a variety of animal and vegetable forms, chiefly marine. Quadrupeds and men belong to the latest period of the style, the vase-painters of the early and central Mycenaean periods having abstained, for some reason or other, from those subjects which formed the stock in trade of the gem-engravers.
What Homer really meant by such epithets as "equal every way," "very circular," "of a good circle," cannot be ascertained, since Homeric epithets of the shield, which were previously rendered "circular," "of good circle," and so on, are now translated in quite other senses, in order that Homeric descriptions may be made to tally with Mycenaean representations of shields, which are never circular as represented in works of art.
Knights no longer, as in Europe, fought from chariots: war was conducted by infantry, for the most part, with mounted auxiliaries. With the disappearance of the war chariot the huge Mycenaean shields had vanished or were very rarely used. The early vase painters do not, to my knowledge, represent heroes as fighting from war chariots. They had lost touch with that method.
Leaf states precisely the opinion for which we argue. The Homeric poems describe an age later than that of the famous tombs so rich in relics of the Mycenaean acropolis, and earlier than the tombs of the Dipylon of Athens.
The material of the Mycenaean artist may be gold, his work may be elegant and firm, but he traces the selfsame ornament as the naked Arunta, with feebler hand, paints on sacred rocks or on the bodies of his tribesmen. What is true of ornament is true of myth, rite, and belief.
We really cannot believe that a poet of the seventh century had made excavations in Mycenaean graves. If he did and put the results into his lay, his audience not wearing boars' tusks would have asked, "What nonsense is the man talking?" Erhardt, remarking on the furs which the heroes throw over their shoulders when aroused, says that this kind of wrap is very late.
After that date we cannot hope to find any certain evidence of connection, for by that time the Mycenaean civilization had probably come to an end. In the days of the XIIth and XVIIIth Dynasties a great and splendid power evidently existed in Crete, and sent its peaceful ambassadors, the Keftiu who are represented in the Theban tombs, to Egypt.
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