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The round style of building in itself was Graeco-Italian as was the square form, and the former was appropriated to the store-place, the latter to the dwelling-house; but the architectural and religious development of the simple -tholos- into the round temple with pillars and columns was Latin. I. XV. Plastic Art in Italy II. V. Complete Submission of the Campanian and Volscian Provinces
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.
Cremation, with cairn burial of the ashes, is, then, the only form of burial mentioned by Homer, and, as far as the poet tells us, the period was not one in which iron was used for swords and spears. For other references, cf. There are examples of the same usage in Salamis, without iron. Cremation is attested in a tholos or beehive- shaped grave in Argos, where the vases were late Mycenaean.
The men shown on the vase and the lion-hunters on the dagger both have their hair close cropped, but on the vase they are naked, on the dagger they wear short drawers. On the Vaphio cups, found in a tholos chamber-tomb near Amyclae, the men are "long-haired Achaeans," with heavy, pendent locks, like the man on a pyxis from Knossos, published by Mr.
If this be so, cremation and urn burial in cairns may be nearly as old as the Mycenaean shaft graves, or as old as the THOLOS graves, and they endure into the age of the latest expansions.
Leaf's opinion might lead us to the conclusion that the usual Homeric form of burial occurs in a period PRIOR to an age in which the poet is apparently reminiscent of the work of two early epochs the epoch of shaft graves and that of THOLOS graves.
They are neither buried with their arms, in stately tholos tombs nor in shaft graves, as at Mycenae: whether they be princes or simple oarsmen, they are cremated. Usually a stele or pillar crowns the edifice. This method is almost uniform, and, as far as cremation and the cairn go, is universal in the Iliad and Odyssey whenever a burial is described.
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.
As far as archaeological excavations and discoveries enlighten us, these relative uses of bronze and iron did not exist in the ages of Mycenaean culture which are represented in the tholos of Vaphio and the graves, earlier and later, of Mycenae. A small knife with a carved handle had left traces of an iron blade.
That age must have been brief, indeed, for, before it arrives, the period of tholos graves, as at Vaphio, must expire, on one hand, while the blending of cremation with inhumation, in the Dipylon age, must have been evolved after the cremation age passed, on the other. That brief intervening age, however, was the age of the ILIAD and Odyssey.
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