YALE UNIVERSITY ART LIBRARY This book was digitized by Microsoft Corporation in cooperation with Yale University Library, 2008. You may not reproduce this digitized copy ofthe book for any purpose other than for scholarship, research, educational, or, in limited quantity, personal use. You may not distribute or provide access to this digitized copy (or modified or partial versions of it) for commercial purposes. T 11 E HOMERIC PALACE NOEMAN MOBRfSON ISHAM, A. M. ARCHITECT. PROVIDENCE : THE PRESTON AND ROUNDS COMPANY, Copyright, 1898 BY HOWARD W. PRESTON ^a*L 53 PRESS OF I.. FREEMAN .t s, PROVIDENCE, jc. I, CONTENTS. PAGE. Introduction, 1 I. The Location, . 6 II. The Defences, 10 III. The Outer Gate, 16 IV. The Outer Court, . . . 19 V. The Inner Gateway, . . 23 VI. The Inner Court, ... 26 VII. The Megaron, . . . . .32 The Aithousa, . 35 The Prodomos, . 39 The Great Hall or Megaron Proper, 40 VIII. The Women's Apartments, ... 49 IX. The Bath Eoom, 52 X. The Second Story, 53 XI. The Passage and the Postern, . 55 XII. The Armory, the Treasury, and the Tholos, 57 XIII. The Appearance op the Palace, . 58 Bibliography, 63 l/Z&A^Qj LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. I- .... . . . Mycenae. If. ... . . Tiryns. HI. . . .... Troja. IV. . . Arne, with comparative plans. "N .... Ramparts. VI. ... ... Gates. VII. . . . . . . Terraces. VIII. . . Later Gates for Comparison. IX. The Great South Gate at Arne. X. Pour Stages in Palace-building. XI. Bird's-eye View of the Palace at Tiryns. PREFACE. This book is an attempt to gather together the main facts about the palace of the Homeric time, and to explain them by illustrations. The facts have been collected from various sources, which are indicated in the bibliography and the foot notes, so that those who wish to make a minute investigation can supplement the general survey here given. The plates, many of them, have been redrawn from sources which are given upon them. I take this opportunity of thanking Professor Manatt, for permission to use some of his illustrations. The drawings are grouped in such a way as to facilitate and invite comparison, not only be tween the different examples of the Mycensean time, but between those examples and the forms in use in other periods, later Greek, Roman, and even Mediaeval. This will be found a fas cinating, as well as a valuable study. Vlll PREFACE. The time-honored and much copied plan of Tiryns, by Dr. Dorpfeld, appears in a new light. I have put it into perspective, as it would ap pear if seen from a great height, and have left one half as a plan, and shown the other as a section and an elevation combined. I have made a similar use of one of the great gates at Arne. While the standpoint from which the book is written is that of an architect, it is also the standpoint of a lover of Homer, and I hope that the work will be of use to all students of the great poems, as well as to those who like to fol low the progress of domestic architecture and the history of fortification. - Norman M. Isham. Providence, R I., Oct. 13, 1898. THE HOMERIC PALACE. INTRODUCTION. The Homeric king was a man of flocks and herds, of the many-clodded field, and of the swift black ship. These aspects of his life denote at once the sources of his wealth and of his clanger. As he lived in a state of society quite well organized, that wealth was never entirely patriarchal. The number of his acres and the herds that fed on them may indeed have formed the basis of his riches, but his black ship brought him booty as well as the products of other lands ; and the trading people, half merchants, half kidnappers and pirates, gave him in exchange, perhaps for cattle, wool or slaves, the works of cunning men, of Hittites, Phenicians and Egyptians. | THE HOMERIC PALACE. But whatever may have been the original source of it, the splendor which that wealth enabled the greater chiefs to dis play, was as Homer records it, something marvelous, so marvelous that only the discoveries of the last twenty years have relieved the poet from the suspicion which Thucyclides once cast upon him, that he embellished matters by his poetic art. This wealth not, only attracted from without such itinerants as were willing to sell what themselves or others had made, but it fostered schools of artists and crafts men at home, so that the riches of the Homeric princes were not of crude gold or silver but of all articles of luxury, rich stuffs, amber and metals wrought in ways which, as the poet describes them, men till lately did not believe possible. With this treasure, then, greater or less, according to his station, whether he were wide-ruling; Agamemnon or the much-en- during lord of rocky Ithaca, the king THE HOMERIC PALACE. 3 stood in no little danger. He needed some protection from those neighbors who, as fond of fighting as he was himself, had none of his nice notions as to the rights of others, or, at least, had none that were nicer than his. We find, therefore, that during the Mycenaean period, the life of which no one seriously doubts that the Homeric poems reflect, though they are at a greater or less distance from it, each chieftain or each king has his own particular stronghold. He seats himself on some prominent crag and gathers around him his immediate family and dependents. In the valley below, and on the slopes of the hill, dwell the different clans of the great sept which the king rules. Each clan cultivates the land which is held in common. In a sudden attack they take refuge within their lord's citadel, or hill fortress. In time they grow too numerous for the ramparts to contain, and then they wall in a space at the foot of the hill and make this their defence. 4 THE HOMERIC PALACE. This last enclosure can hardly be called a city. The epithet " wide-wayed " applied to Mycenae means nothing in our sense of the words. Tsountas and Manatt apply it, simply to the wide streets between the villages of the different clans. The lesser chief's, or those who lived in either the quieter or the more inaccessible districts, may have had no gatherings around the / bases of their eyries, but Agamemnon and Priam looked forth on such a wide-wayed \city at their feet. Let us attempt to gain a clear idea of these strongholds — palaces we call them, though castle would be a better term — to reconstruct for ourselves, from such sources as are open to us, a typical royal dwell ing of the Homeric time, its situation, approaches and defences, its internal ar rangements, construction and decoration, and, finally, its external appearance. There are two ways of doing this. One is to study the remains of the palaces or strongholds which have come down to THE HOMERIC PALACE. us, at Troy, Myeena?, Tiryns, and at Gha or Arne in Lake Copais. The other is| to compile the typical palace from the descriptions handed down to us in the1 Homeric poems. It is clear that neither of these methods will be satisfactory if used alone. We must combine the two. It will not be enough laboriously to work out a plan from the poems and then to compare it with the existing remains. We must check our work at each step in the planning, and this is really the important test. The final assemblage of the parts is, except in a general way, never the same in any two cases, and it would be as foolish to think that the plan was wrong because, after we had accounted for every room or court Avhich Homer mentions, it did not exactly resemble that of the Tirynthian palace, as it would be to condemn a restoration of the Chateau Gaillard which did not present the same plan as the Tower of London. We will begin, then, with the site of the 6 THE HOMERIC PALACE. stronghold. We will terrace its summit, and plan its approaches. So far we will be following the ruins. We will then, following the works of Dorpfeld, Joseph, of Tsountas and Manatt, and of Noack1 cull from the poems the character, and as far as possible, the environment of each part of the palace proper. As we go through this process we will compare each added part with the corresponding part of the palace or palaces which now exist. At the end of our work we shall have a typical plan which, while it will not be exactly like that of any ruin now known, will yet show a strong family resemblance to them all. I. THE LOCATION. On the rugged soil of Greece, whether of Hellas proper, of the Asiatic coast or of the western islands, little search was neces sary to find a strong position. The Anax, 1 See bibliography. THE HOMERIC PALACE. i or lord, seized upon a hill of moderate height, generally no such crag as the Rhine castles are perched upon, but a single eminence either rising like an island ou of the plain or swelling up from the roll ing country around it to a height which varied from 200 to 800 feet. The Aero- corinthus, and the Acropolis at Athens are conspicuous instances. Others selected spurs of mountains or higher hills as at Mycenae, where the flanks of the posi tion are further strengthened by stream- traversed ravines. In still other cases we find the Homeric stronghold on a post like that of Troy itself, an outtying spur of a raDge of hills, connected with the low ridges to the immediate north-east of it by a narrow isthmus of land, while the Scamander washes the foot of the hill — such a position, with lower hills and a smaller stream, as that of the Chateau Gaillard which Richard the Lion Hearted built on the chalky cliffs frowning upon the Seine above Les Andelys. In some 8 THE HOMERIC PALACE. instances, as in the fortress of Tiryns, figure II, the chieftain chose a rather low hill, higher at one end than at the other, and protected by the morass which sur rounded it. The site of Arne, figure IAT, on an island in the recently drained Lake Copais, would at first lead us to consider it as belonging to the class of Tiryns, as, in fact, in one sense, it did. It seems however to have been a city with a palace in one corner, and to have been or to have grown out of a fort to protect the huge Mycenaean drainage works which existed in the marshy lake.1 " Let us assume for this study a hill of the second or Mycenae class, about 250 feet high ; a hill the sides of which are smooth and green for two-thirds of its height. Above this point the verdure gives way to the grey limestone which forms the 1 Tsountas and Manatt. The Myetmean Age, Appendix B, where a plan of the palace is Riven, Noack in Mittheilungen, Vol. 19, p 405 <±t seq. MYCEAiAEl (-T-JH J. (rtJ M THE HOMERIC PALACE. tl brow and the roughly level summit of the eminence, a summit broken by rising ground toward its northern end. Let us place the long axis of the hill north and south (figure X), assuming a steep descent on the north to a stream which, coming from the high mountains beyond, tumbles out of a ravine on the west, and receives the brook on the eastern side of our stronghold. The top of our hill slopes downward and south ward, narrowing as it falls, until a slight depression marks the distinction between it and the yoke which binds it to the ridge of which it is the northern spur. The walls, courts and buildings we have to place upon this summit we may divide into three classes : I. The Palace itself. II. The Dependencies such as stables, storehouses and the like, and, III. the Approaches and Defences. We will begin t in the order in which the castle would naturally be built, that is, with the de fences. 10 THE HOMERIC PALACE. II. THE DEFENCES. These consisted primarily, in all cases, of a strong outer wall around the whole extent of the citadel, with the more or less fortified gates and approaches. The wall, the herkion (fpKiov), of the poems, followed very closely the outline of the eminence on which the castle was built. Within the space surrounded by it there was — in the palace of Odysseus — a second line of en closure, the wall of the inner court, of the " court " par excellence. This was the herkion aules, ('epKtov av\r}lanS ataatue Scale OTjAf^L FTgvna. III. .S The- My"eeir\a-M n -Ciiy: THE HOMERIC PALACE. 11 Eumaios' abode, which was surrounded by a low wall oX rough-stones on each side of which was a row of palisades, while along the top ran. a hedge of thorn1. The smaller castles had walls very likely of Cyclopean character, while those humbler dwellings of the people, which were also fortified, were like that of the faithful swineherd. Many a wall, even among the more pre tentious, was no doubt built of jjalisades. When we turn to the Mycenaean remains, figures I to IV, we find some variety both in the materials and in the mode of con struction. In the earliest times of the, Mycenaean epoch the outer wall up to the level of the hill-top was built of rough j stones against the face of the cliff like a retaining wall, with considerable batter, or inward inclination, of its outer face. Above this level the ramparts properi were of sun-dried brick. In the rampart of the second stratum of the fortress at Troy, 1 Homer, Odyssey, XIV, 5-15, 12 THE HOMERIC PALACE. 1 in figure V, now known as the prehistoric or Burnt city, which Schliemann at first took for Homer's Troy, we have this construc tion. In the real Troy, however, the sixth stratum, 2 in figure V, we find walls which, while they still batter and still show the same retaining wall foundation, are much less sloping than those of the prehistoric strongholds. They are built too, of much better stone, and in a much better manner, and the upper rampart is here of stone also. Indeed the masonry in the Trojan wall is j the best of the Mycenaean epoch. This is due in a large measure to the character of the stone, the easily worked ftoros, which allowed the fine faces and level beds of the Trojan wall ; while the harder limestone of which Tiryns and Mycenae were built gave to them only a rough regularity, the result, that is, of an attempt to build with level courses, an attempt always frustrated by the irregular fracture of the stones the workmen were quarrying. A very inter esting peculiarity of these walls, as we find THE HOMERIC PALACE. 13 them in the ruins at Troy, Tiryns, and especially at Arne, is the zigzag appearance, almost, of the plan. It is as if the walls, as is shown in 4 and 7 of figure V, were built in blocks which did not exactly align, but missed doing so by only a few inches. This fashion of Avail building it is very difficult to explain. Noack1 refers to some later Greek walls at Abai and Samikon, 5 and 6 of figure V, where it is exaggerated into a flanking system, but as it occurs in a palace wall inside the ramparts in the Homeric Troy,2 VI F in 7 of figure V, he agrees with Dorpfeld3 in thinking it an artistic device, a means of breaking up the monotony of the wall surface ; though it may, he thinks, have originated in some older way of flanking the curtain wall.4 At Hagia Marina, near Arne, Herr Noack gives a plan of sections of the wall which 1 Xoack, MltthtUungtn, Vol. 19, p. 428-9. a Ibid, 430. 3 Ibid, 430, 384, 4 Ibid, 427. ¦2 14 THE HOMERIC PALACE. are convex curves on the outside and are battered. The straight walls seem to have no batter.1 Though the great wall at Arne, which is indeed the wall of a city and not of a mere citadel, shows this system so strongly, we find that the real herkion of the palace recently discovered there, the wall sur rounding the royal dwelling, and what Herr Noack calls the Agora, is entirely without it. This is a straight wall, enclosing an almost rectangular space. The masonry of the great fortress walls of the crowning period of the style was excellent. There are two great classes into which the work may be divided. The first is that in which the stones are laid in level courses, with good faces, as at Troy, and in some parts of the walls of Mycenae. The second is the Cyclopean work, so- called, that is, work in which, as at Tiryns, the courses are as nearly level as the rough, 1 Ibid, 446-8. ::f//il&Y]\ ' TTryaO 7 Tray Ff-sy-e. V. .5°/^ ^c^ws amd Plans 4,5; 4 fr.» l\loKt,/nw, M DA J. Cereal" fra* Dorptuo, wiHi-su^geaH^o M>1 To uniFortwicafe.1 L»l tfoll.wiH> fhomicK. THE HOMERIC PALACE. 15 quarry-faced blocks of the material used will permit. Polygonal masonry is not Mycenaean. It is always a sign of later Greek work. Although the architects of that old time knew the use of lime, and even of concrete, these mighty walls seem always to have N been laid in mortar consisting of clay alone, or of clay with chopped straw.1 The only use of the mortar in these cases was to give a better bed for the somewhat rough stone. It had no cohesive duty, and as the joints in the masonry grew better it was gradually abandoned, until, when the technique reached the perfection wTe see in the Parthenon, no mortar was thought of. We have now built our wall of exterior defense, around the hill on which our pal ace is to stand. We have next to consider the approaches. 1 Sometimes at Troy there is no mortar. DBrpfeld, MUtlitlliingen, 19, p. 392. 16 THE HOMERIC PALACE. HI. THE OUTER GATE. This generally stood at the most easily accessible point of the whole hill, in our case at the southern end, figure X, at the east of the extreme point. Homer gives us little information as to the outer gate, which can be read independently of the ruins, except that iu the city of Priam there was a tower at the Scaean gate, and that the doors at the gate in the castle of Odys seus were double. According to the exca vations, there were, apparently, several ways of arranging the outer gate so as to protect this important part of the defences. Almost all of these are given iu figure VI, and a little attentive study of these draw ings will show the reader that there- is really only one form for all these gate ways. That form, stated in the simplest manner, is a rectangle, at the outer end of which is a wide open portal, and at the in ner a gate closed by heavy wooden doors. The space between, often quite large, was THE HOMERIC PALACE. 17 generally, if not always, open to the sky, and, hence, since it was unprotected from the stones, arrows, or javelins of the de fenders on the side walls of the rectangle already spoken of, it .formed a skillful trap into which the enemy must walk in order ' to assail the wooden door of the inner or J actual gate. At the prehistoric citadel of Troy, the trap seems to be a double one. The portal at A, 1 and 2 in figure VI, was no doubt open ; those at B and C very likely had wooden doors. The masses of wall outside were probably enlargements of the side walls of the '' trap." At Arne we find them enlarged into huge flanking towers, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 in figure VI. The same is true of one gate at Mycenaean Troy, 5 in figure VI. At Tiryns, 9 in figure VI, the entrance to the " trap " is at right angles to the length of the passage. At Troy, Arne, and Mycenae is seen a very skillful disposition, which probably Avas the general one where the shape of the 18 THE HOMERIC PALACE. hill allowed its adoption. It consists in (setting back one surface of the curtain wall, and building the gate in the re-en- itrant angle thus formed. A glance at the Lions' gate, the great gate at Arne, and the others, 6, 7, and 10 in figure VI, will make this clear. This double gate, with a space between, was used in Etruria in some instances, and survived into the Middle Age. There the town or castle gate had a flanking tower on each side of it on the outside of the wall, 1 in figure VIII, and what amounted to a pair of towers on the inside of the wall. The "trap" between was covered, but the upper floor had holes in it so that lead, hot water, darts, and other pleasant ries of Mediaeval warfare could be con veniently dropped upon the besiegers. The trap also occurs at Messene, in Greek work, and at Pompeii, iu Roman, 2 and 3 in figure VIII. The shape of the great shields which the Homeric heroes carried, a sort of 7>°Y -ReWjfc* TVitLionsI Gate. 14 ARNC Pouble.Gdfe.in5o.jll. THE HOMERIC PALACE. 19 leather semi-cylinder held in front, reach ing from head to heel, and from side to side, explains the lack of precaution for making the enemy turn his unshielded side to the flanking towers, as the complete panoply of the Middle Age explains such a lack at that period. A restoration of the great south gate at Arne is given in figure IX. IV. THE OUTER COURT. One of the simpler or one of the more elaborate of the entrances in figure VI, whichever it is that allows us to pass through the outer wall of our castle — and we have chosen a gate of perhaps more than average size, brings us out upon the lower end of the hill, 2 in figure X, which the wall eucloses. We would naturally expect the dwellings to occupy the higher ground toward the northern end of the summit. We might expect, also, another line of defense -between the lower ground on which we now stand and the vital 20 THE HOMERIC PALACE. point of the whole fortification. Accord ingly we will level off the higher ground at the north and proceed, by surrounding it with a wall, to separate it from what now becomes the outer court, the enclosure which Homer sometimes calls the herkos1 (ep/cos) the Basse-cour of the French chateau, the Outer Bailey of the English castle. Of this terracing Homer gives no hint unless perhaps a passage in the Odyssey,2 " buildings are joined to buildings" or "follow buildings," (literally, out of other things there are other things), may point toward that effect of one building rising behind another which terracing would produce. But the exca vations have revealed quite elaborate terraces of this kind. At Troy there was a complete second enceinte, A in 2 of figure VII, enclosing a higher court where were placed the dwellings which formed. the palace proper. At Tiryns, figure II, 'Joseph, pp. 8-13. = Horn. Od. XVII, 264-68. 1. MrCCNAL. 5«fc,, loofanj^ovH, firfurfc. VI CASTIX. TtRRACEb 2 |R°Y Secllan iVlowina Te-Ttlc«-,,«»d*J=l^.n of Bu-ht" hMyc-ftrtan City. OATH For (PMPARt3°N it"!^ i Porte. cfeLdcm, COUCYC fw M-Me-duc 2«'3 fc»n.Oe&c:l,ts_ Revue Gen. del ke^rr y. 3/ J POMPMI THE HOMERIC PALACE. 21 there were three stages, the lower court on the north, occupied no doubt by the houses of the lower retainers, the middle citadel, and the palace itself, on the upper citadel or highest part of the acropolis. At Mycenae, figures I and VII, the palace stands on the highest point of the citadel and is approached by a ramp from the lower part of the hill-top where were, as in Tiryns, the houses of the inferior members of the royal court. In all these cases we see that there is the outer courtyard, the space, that is to say, between the great outside wall and the inner wall which surrounded the smaller court lying immediately in front of the great hall of the palace. Homer does not describe this outer court very closely. Indeed, except at Tiryns and perhaps at Arne, where what Xoack called the agora may have been the outer bailey of the castle, there was little to describe except an irregular space which contained stables, storehouses and other buildings. 22 THE HOMERIC PALACE. But the poet does describe certain scenes and actions as taking place in the outer court. Here, too, he places the dung hill whereon the ancient Argus breathed his last, and here, too, was the tholos, no doubt the latrine, about which there has arisen a goodly controversy. A study of the plans of the various ac tual palaces of the time, and a little atten tion to figure XI, which is a restoration of the palace with the outer court and its ap proaches at Tiryns, will do more than many words to make clear to the reader the scheme of this outer court. It will be very instructive also to compare with Tir yns the plan of the Chateau Gaillard given in figure II, where the corresponding parts bear the same lettering. This will show how international the court scheme was and how persistently it had been handed down. At any rate the fortified dwelling of the Middle Ag;e seems to have its roots far back in the Aryan past. Let us now, on the top of our imaginary THE HOMERIC PALACE. 23 or typical hill, figure X, assume such a fore court, and a second line of defence around the higher part of the hill where we in tend to set the palace. V. THE INNER GATEWAY. The Prothuron, Upodvpov, the Propykeum of the Second Court. For some covered gateway leading into the aiile (ovXij) or inner court, we have full Homeric authority, though, unfortunately it is difficult to arrive, from the mere data of the poems, at an absolute restoration. The prothuron exists because the charac ters traverse it iu their " exits and their entrances ; " that it is covered, aud proba bly has columns to support its roof, we judge from the way in which in the palace of Menelaus, the word ipCSoinros — the re sounding or echoing is combined with it.1 We infer also that it was of considerable 1 Oa. XV, 146 quoted by Joseph, p. 13. 24 THE HOMERIC PALACE. size, for the servant of Meuelaus, when he had led the horses of Telemachus to their stalls, no doubt in the outer court, leaned the chariot against the shining walls un der the protection of its portico. Homer speaks also of its doors, and of the bar which secured them, and of the threshold of the court, ovSos avXaos, whereon they must have swung.1 All these somewhat vague conditions are met and the whole subject made clear by the discoveries at Troy and at Tiryns — we might also add by the Propylaea of the Athenian Acropolis. For the form ofjdie Greek gateway underwent no essential changes from the time of prehistoric Troy, the time which we may call the early period of Mycenaean architecture, to that of historic Athens; from 2500 B. C, that is, to Mnesicles B. C. 430. Two parallel walls intersect the main wall at right angles, one at each side of the door. 1 Joseph, pp. 12-15 ; 34-7. THE HOMERIC PALACE. 2.") They project beyond the outside of the wall to some considerable distance, and form a porch without columns, or a portico in an- tis with two columns ; the same arrange ment in either case they repeat on the in side. The first of these plans is found in prehistoric Troy, 1 and 2 in figure VI, in the outer wall ; the second in the entrance to both outer and inner court at Tiryns, figure XI. A comparison of these plans with that of the famous entrance to the Athenian Acropolis, will show how stead fast the essential idea of the Greek monu mental gateway has remained, and how old it is. This comparison also brings us for the first time face to face with a question which we shall meet again — did the older gateways have a flat roof, or did they have the pitched roof of the great Periclean ex ample 'i In the restorations in figures X and XI, we have used the pitched roof. Through such a gateway, then, we have to pass from the outer court to the grand 26 THE HOMERIC PALACE. court, the inner bailey, the Cour d' hon- neur of the castle. We have several feet to ascend, by means of an inclined plane, in gaining the higher ground of this second enclosure. At Mycenae there is a fine flight of steps leading from a little vesti bule, or guardroom, up to the inner court, and the drawings show traces of a propy- laeum.1 At Arne all traces of a courtyard in front, of the L shaped palace seem to have disappeared. No doubt some of the rooms in the palace are really inner courts.2 VI. THE INNER COURT. AvXtj. Nothing about Homer's description of the castle of the hero is more certain than the aule. Odysseus, looking with Eumaios at his ancestral dwelling, says : " These indeed, Eumaios, are the beautiful halls of 1 Tsountas and Manatt, plate IX. 2 Ibid, p. 876. THE HOMERIC PALACE. 27 Odysseus. Easily are they to be recog nized and known among many. Building rises beyond building (or is added to build ing) with Avail and with cornice, and double are the doors. No man could easily storm it."1 Probably the aule was a part of every house in the Homeric time. The abode of Eumaios possessed one, which he had built "for the swine of his absent lord," on high ground, lofty, great, and apart from other buildings.2 He seems to have had no outer court. That there sometimes was grass in the court we know from the sacrifice which Peleus offered standing on the grass of his courtyard.3 That there was also an arti ficial floor we know from the expression " well-wrought," which the poet applied to the pavement of the courtyard in the house of Odysseus. It was of concrete, a mixture of lime and pebbles, which must have con- 1 Od. XVII, 264 ff, quoted by Joseph, p. 5. 2 Od. XIV, 5-15. 3 II. XI, 772-7. 28 THE HOMERIC PALACE. tained clay, or pounded pottery, otherwise it could never have stood the wash of the rain, or the effect of freezing snows. At 1 Tiryns the floor was of this concrete, and 'was pitched to drain off the water, which ran to a catch-basin covered with a per forated stone on the south side of the court, and reached the outside of the rampart through a walled drain.1 The walls of ancient cities of Etruria are pierced by many just such drains. The draining of the outer court could easily be managed by pitching the water directly to an opening in the outer curtain. The outer court conformed to the shape of the hill-top, which, of course, gave the direction of the ramparts on its brow. The inner court, no doubt, did so in many cases, but from its very position it was apt to be further withdrawn from the main walls, and thus freer to follow the more con venient rectangular disposition. This is 1 DBrpfeld in Tiryns, p. 203. THE HOMERIC PALACE. 2!» only partly the case at Tiryns. As a rule, around three sides of the court — part of the fourth side, that toward the entrance, Avas taken up by the inner porch of the Propylaeuin — Avere open porticoes, the aithousai, (cuflovcrai) of the poems. On the side opposite the entrance the guest who entered the court beheld the porch or vesti bule of the Megaron, the great hall, the principal building of the palace. At one side of the entrance, so that it did not interfere Avith the passage to and I fro betAveen the gate and the hall, stood' the altar of Zeus Herkeios (Bw/xo9 Ato?J ipneiov1), Zeus of the Court, which Ave know existed iu the court of Odysseus. At Tiryns this took the form of a sacrificial pit. Under the aithousai opened the doors and windows Avhich gave light and access to the chambers of the higher retainers or of the sons of the family. It was probably here that Telemachus found his chamber, and its situation iu this place, on the same 1 Joseph, p. 23. 30 THE HOMERIC PALACE. level as the Megaron, avouIcI justify the poet's statement that it Avas iu a " lofty place." The porticoes, too, which were in them selves a decoration as well as a shelter, were carried on carved and painted columns of avoocI. That this was the case at Tiryns was proved by the stone bases of those columns, Avhich Avere found in place, though the columns had disappeared. This use of stone bases, Avhile a very old contrivance, for it occurs at Kahun 1500 before Christ, is also a very modern one, as all architects know, and occurs, furthermore, in the ruins of at least one Roman villa in England. The entab latures Avhich spanned the spaces be tween these columns Avere also of Avood painted or sheathed in alabaster picked out with blue. The principal decoration, of course, was lavished upon the vestibule of the Megaron. Next in splendor would come the vestibule of the Propylaeum, or prothuron, and then the aithousai. THE HOMERIC PALACE. 31 Fancy yourself, then, on the charmed pavement of the court, of much enduring Odysseus. Above you is the blue Greek sky, cut off in front by the mass of the Megaron, with its red tiles, or reddish clay roof, its sparkling frieze, its painted columns and its walls of stone or of col ored stucco. On either side the same red tile roof cuts a sharp line across the blue ; and frieze, and column, and painted wall, the latter in a lovely purple shadoAV, succeed each other as the eye comes down again to seek the more sober coloring of the floor. In such a court as this was the daytime gathering-place of the retainers ; here the sports Avent forward, here, as in the Mediaeval castle, the young men were taught the use of their Aveapons. Here we find the shameless wooers assembling to watch the rough play and the AArrestling and to feast on the substance of the absent lord of Ithaca. 32 THE HOMERIC PALACE. VII. THE MEGARON. Meyapop. Megaron andron, Pomos, Poma, The Grand Hall. Meyapov avhpwv, Oikos, Aopos, Aiopa, Adtpara. What the hall was to the castle or to the manor of the Middle Age, the Megaron Avas to the Mycenaean palace. In fact it Avas the "great room," the principal apart ment of any dAvelling, of the tent of Achilles, of the abode of the swineherd Eumaios. It Avas descended from a very ancient type which Ave see in prehistoric Troy, and. Avhich Ave meet again in a modified form in the Atrium of the Etrusco-Roman house. One analogy in the square keep type of the Norman castle fails us, though it is carried out more nearly in the shell keep type and in the French examples. Iu no instance thatwe knoAv, un- THE HOMERIC PALACE. 33 less, perhaps, at Arne, is the Megaron forti- \ fied. The hall of the square keep strong- * hold of the Normans Avas in the Donjon or Keep itself, the last refuge of the garrison, isolated from the other defences and build ings, defending them, as Avell as defended by them. The French castles have a hall beside the keep. Here Ave have a palace in a fortified enclosure as in the shell keep type of Norman castle, Avhere the hall and its dependencies are surrounded by an inner Avail. Only at Arne do Ave find anything like defensive precautions after we pass the entrance of the palace. The outer barriers, Avith the position of the Avhole, were held to be enough. In mak ing the Avails so ponderous as to excite our wonder, so strong as to defy any effort of besiegers or any artillery of that time, they satisfied themselves. In these mighty walls they confided, and the loug sieges whereof the traditions have come down, and the stratagems necessary to take holds which could not be reduced, shoAV that the confidence was not misplaced. 3-t THE HOMERIC PALACE. The Megaron, as Ave have already said, faced the inner court on the side opposite the entrance. At Tiryns it looks toward the south, as it no doubt did in all cases Avhere it Avas possible, and it is not probable that, a site where it had to face the north Avould be selected. A similar arrangement lingered into classic times, for Vitruvius says that, there were no porticoes on the north of a Greek courtyard. In plan the Megaron Avas a long rectangle which Homer divides into three parts, the aithousa domatos (afflovcra Scoparos), the prodomos (irpohopo';, zrpoOvpov Sw/xaros), and the megaron proper. In this division the ruins in general agree almost exactly, the remains at Troy — both prehistoric and Mycenaean — alone dissenting. In these niegara there is but one vestibule. The Women's Megaron at Tiryns is smaller than the men's, and, as having a courtyard of its own, has in like manner a single portico. THE HOMERIC PALACE. 3.") The A ithousa. — Ai0ovcra. The outermost of these rooms, which exists in all the examples, Avas open to the court, and consisted merely of a portico in antis Avith two columns. This arrange ment, the prototype of the temple porch, gave the architect then, as in later times, ample opportunity for decoration. Its con struction Avas quite simple and determined the ornament. The ends of the tAvo side Avails Avhich, by their projection, formed the sides of the vestibule, Avere sometimes, like the Avhole Avail of the Megarou, of mud brick. In that case they were covered and protected from being knocked to pieces by upright strips of avooc! which rested on stone sockets, and which, in the ruins, ha\~e left the imprint of their size and shape in the material of the Avail. At Troy, Avhich probably represented the earlier part of the great period in the architecture of the Mycenaean civilization, the AAralls are of finely worked stone, and thus needed no 3fi THE HOMERIC PALACE. Avooden protection, nor do they have, as in the later temples, the antae of stone, recall ing the primitive Avooden strips, Avhich acted something like our wooden corner- beads in plaster work. As the span between the antae was con siderable for single beams, the two columns Avere set between them to support the Avooden architrave, for wooden it must have been, as no stone beams could easily have spanned the intervals. This is made more certain by the fact that the columns appear in most cases to haAre been of avoocI, Avith stone bases to keep the feet of them from rotting by contact with the damp ground. I say in most cases, for in Troy there Avere found in the space between the antae neither columns nor stone bases, and that in a very Avicle space. Here the columns may have been of stone, as the rest of the building Avas, for while no one Avoulcl care for a stone base, a column could be used again iu another place, and hence — to judge from experience in later THE HOMERIC PALACE. 3.7 times — the column would vanish, Avhile a simple base might remain. These column bases stand on a step, upon the top step where there are two, Avhich raises the floor of the Megaron above that of the court. Upon them stood the columns of Avood, the shape Avhereof Ave can only conjecture. The analogy of the Lions' Gate and of the Tholos of Atreus at Mycenae, Avould make us restore the shafts as tapering doAvmvard and crowned with flat, proto-doric capitals.' These columns, however, Avhich show strong Hittite influence, are not of necessity the only ones AA'hich prevailed in all Mycenaean architecture. It needs no stretch of im agination to restore, at least in the humbler dwellings, the simple cylinder, the square, or eA*en the tapered column as we are accustomed to think of it. It is difficult to believe that in sober construction — for the columns in the Lions' Gate and the Tomb of Atreus are mere decorations — the early 1 For a column with reversed taper in Egypt see Lepsius, Denk- maler, I, pi. 31. 4 3S THE HOMERIC PALACE. Greeks Avould have used a form Avhich, except in votive stelae, a use akin to that in the tomb, was so foreign to the archi tecture the later Iouians developed. The free column, when it appears, Avill very likely astound the antiquaries by repro ducing either the form seen at Beni-Hassan, Deir el Bahari, and old Karnac, or of some lotus cap, a proto-Ionic shaft and capital with the upward diminution. The floor of the aithousa domatos was of different materials, according to the wealth of the lord of the palace and the position of his home. The floor of the whole Megaron of Odysseus was of beateu clay, and so was, no doubt, that of the porch. At Tiryns the floor is of a concrete of lime and pebbles — the lime perhaps con tained some clay. At Mycenae it is paved with stone. This floor at Tiryns was marked off into squares of red, separated by narrow strips of blue, which in their turn are set off from the red by incised THE HOMERIC PALACE. 3!) lines. The dourudoke (SovpoSoK-q), the "spear-rest" was in the aithousa of the Megaron. The Prodomos. HpoSopos. BetAveen the aithousa and the Megaron proper there probably Avas, in the smaller palaces, only a door of tAvo leaves Avith its polished threshold, the xestos lithos (fecrros Xt^os), Avhich Homer seems never to weary of praising. This arrangement is to be seen at Troy. In the palace of Amyntor,1 however, Homer speaks also of a prodo mos, or vestibule, as distinct from the portico, and this plan we find sustained, as Ave have already said, by the excava tions at Mycenae and Tiryns. The oldest houses at Troy are of the simple type. In describing the Megaron of Odysseus the poet mentions only a prodomos, and seems to use the word as interchangeable with aithousa, and thus as meaning the portico. 1 II. IX, 472. 40 THE HOMERIC PALACE. At Tiryns three double doors with wooden stathmoi (aradpoi,) or jambs, give access to the prodomos from the aithousa. From the prodomos to the Megaron proper, opens a single large door like that which, in the humbler castles, formed the passage between aithousa and Megaron. Here it is closed by a curtain. The floor in both men's and women's Megaron at Tiryns was of concrete ; at Mycenae it was of concrete with a border of wide stones. Perhaps, in the smaller castles, it was simply of beaten clay, like that of the Megaron of Odysseus. The Greed Hall or Megaron Proper. Meyapov. We are now within the Megaron proper, the great hall of the palace, the principal apartment of the whole group. It is a good sized room, longer than it is wide, and probably quite high. Its floor, at least in the palace of Odysseus, is of THE HOMERIC PALACE. 41 beaten clay. Its walls, like those of the whole palace inside the fortifications, were sometimes of stone, as at Mycemean Troy and at Arne, sometimes, as in prehistoric Troy and in parts of the walls at Tiryns, of a soi't of half -timber work, a com bination of mud-brick and wooden beams, in ay Inch the beams run, not vertically, as in Mediaeval Avork, but horizontally. The whole Avail then had a footing of stone, Avhich, at Tiryns, Avas carried to a con siderable height. Inside and out, these Avails were stuccoed and painted, a practice in Avhich Ave have the origin of the polychromy of later Greek architecture. On the inside the walls were sometimes lined, Avholly or in part, with plates or rosettes of bronze, and adorned with friezes of alabaster decorated with blue. Such was the decoration in the palace of Alcinous. This splendor was probably less common than the stucco painted in bands Avhich we find in the ruins, and which was probably carried into all the 42 THE HOMERIC PALACE. important rooms of the palace. Hangings, 'both to close openings and to adorn walls, were no doubt in common use. It is curious that Ave find here a feeling in regard to the house so different from that of the later Greeks. Until long after the Persian wars, the house, in Greece proper, was little adorned. The Athenian citizen spent his time in trade, in the Agora or upon the hill of Mars. To him the house was only a place for eating and sleeping. Until after the Periclean age, indeed, probably, up to the time of Alexander, he saw adornment lavished only upon public buildings. The Achaian prince saAv cause to live in his house. He left it often, indeed, for hunting and for war, but, unless armed and surrounded by his re tainers, he could tarry nowhere else. He was fond of his dwelling, and he made it express his power, wealth and taste so successfully that Ave look upon the remains of it with Avonder. While we find Pericles, then, living in a modest house and direct- THE HOMERIC PALACE. 13 ing a state expenditure of millions upon the Propylaea, and upon the temple of Athene, Agamemnon spends untold treas ure upon the adornment of his palace and of his tomb, and we can not find a temple in his dominions. In the center of the great room stood the eschare (eo-^aprj) or hearth. Arete, queen of Alcinous, sat between it and the column.1 It may have been of clay, like the floor above Avhich it Avas raised a step or eA^en two steps, as at Mycenae. Here, it is circular, eleven feet in diameter, of clay covered with five coats of stucco, each painted as if each had been put on as the one below it Avore out. In the women's Megaron at Tiryns the hearth is square. The heating of the room, then, is plain. The lighting of it, however, is only to be conjectured, though it is generally con ceded that the daylight found entrance through the roof, or just under the roof. 1 Od. VI, 305-7. 44 THE HOMERIC PALACE. Homer, as we have said, speaks of columns in the Megaron of Alcinous,1 and four ex ist — or rather the bases which carried them exist — in the Megaron at Tiryns and at Mycenae. In the halls of oldest date, at Troy, none Avere found, not even the bases, though the span was greater than at either of the other buildings. The absence of them is difficult to account for except on the supposition that the bases of stone have been stolen, or that the columns were of stone, and that columns and bases alike were long ago pressed into the service of some later temple, or even of a peasant's hut. Of course, in all the smaller halls, there was no need of columns, as the heavy mesodmai (pecroSpcu), or girders, would span the whole width of the room. In either case, whether the beams did so span the room alone or were aided by col umns, there was, almost certainly, in the roof, an opening which differed from the 1 Ibid. THE HOMERIC PALACE. 45 Mediaeval " louvre" only in detail. It rose above the main roof, carried either upon the four posts and occupying the whole span between them, or upon girders Avhere there Avere no posts, and taking up a cor responding amount of room in the roof. Its office Avas to let the smoke from the hearth out, as well as to let the light in, and it must, therefore, have been so large that the former function should not too much obscure the latter. To keep out a driving storm it probably had, if not louvre-boards, at least a shelter of some sort, which could be closed on the windAvard side. It is almost certain, also, that the walls of the Megaron rose above the sur rounding roofs, and had windows near the cornices.1 The beams of which we have spoken 1 Joseph, plate I. allows for this rising of the walls, but gives no windows. According to his view the light came in through the spaces between the roof beams over the girders on the columns, and in the same way over the tops of the side walls. See Prof. Middleton's restoration of the Megaron of Tiryns, Journal of Hel lenic Studies, Vol. VII. 46 THE HOMERIC PALACE. carried the roof. Homer calls them mesod- mai. What kind of a roof they sustained is still a matter of conjecture among the authorities. Schliemann, Joseph, Dorpfeld, Perrot, claim that on the mesodmai lay smaller beams, dokoi (So/cot), which carried, on boards or reeds, a heavy flat roof of clay, such as they point to in the Troad, in Asia Minor, and in the Cyclades to-day. Tsountas and Manatt agree to this in the case of the palace, but contend for the ga ble roof in the private house. The argu ment from the fragments of clay with marks of twigs in it may possibly be un answerable, but even then the clay may have been laid at an angle as well as on a level. The absence of tiles proves noth ing. They were useful, and would be taken from those old buildings exactly as they were taken from later ones. Present practice, indeed, is generally a safe guide to the customs of antiquity in the East, but it is not always so, and, while the ex istence of the clay roof can be proved THE HOMERIC PALACE. 47 from the debris which filled the ruins at Tiryns, yet, in the face of the late Greek love of the gable, and the Lykian and old Italian analogies, it is not so easy to give up the more picturesque sloping roof. Beaten clay AArould stand a slight slope in itself — in fact would need one to throw off the Avater — and if it were covered Avith concrete it Avould endure considerably more. The men who concreted the great aule at Tiryns and expected the concrete to stand rain, for they pitched it toward one corner and provided a drain for it, could have protected their roofs. The floor of the hall at Tiryns was covered with concrete instead of the beaten clay with which Odysseus was content — unless perhaps by the words he used Homer meant a floor of this same kind — and upon the concrete a crossed line pattern, incised and painted, appears again. At Mycenae the concrete occupies the center of the room, and a strip of flagging three feet wide runs around next to the walls. 48 THE HOMERIC PALACE. Homer called the Megaron " shadowy." No doubt it was. The constant smoke of the fire as it rose through the roof would darken the Avoodwork, as it has done in old English halls, and in some of our own colonial rooms, and Avould have an effect even on the side walls. But the hall was not dark. It would very likely seem gloomy to us, Avho are accustomed to an almost out-door light in our houses, but the old Achaian did not find it so. He did not read there, and he cared little to sit there and look out of the windows on a rainy day. When not compelled to be abroad in the storm he was satisfied, if the season were summer, with the shelter of the aithousai around the court. In winter the feast in the Megaron and the rough horse-play — probably not very different from that of our Saxon ancestors, except in refinement, and Ave should hardly call the suitors refined — filled out the day. Very likely some farm work took up the atten tion of the small lords, for Homeric times THE HOMERIC PALACE. 4!t Avere singularly democratic in those matters. Weaving and even sewiug could have been done in the hall, for eyes used to a dim light such as the Medieval silk- weavers had at Lyons, Avill do Avork AA'hich is a marvel to us, who think our rooms must be flooded with day, and Avho can not read or draw in a half light. VIII. THE AVOMEN'S APARTMENTS. rwatKoivms. Weaving, sewing, and embroidery, how ever, did not need to be done in the Megaron, for there was in the typical Homeric palace a regular suite of apartments or a single room set aside for the lady of the castle and her maids. In the small strongholds this was probably a room at the back of the Megaron, from Avhich it was accessible bv a door in the axis of the hall and opposite to the main entrance. In the more lordly castles the Avomen had more important abodes, and in Tiryns we find 50 THE HOMERIC PALACE. them endowed with an Aule and a Megaron of their own, corresponding closely to those of the men. The aithousai or porticoes are on two sides only of the aule, and one of these is partly taken up by the aithousa of the women's Megaron, which lies before the large room of the hall, and which, because of its short span, has no columns between the antae at its sides. At Tiryns the women's Megaron repeats the internal arrangement of the men's hall. It has its portico or aithousa, its hearth, its cement floor, and no doubt its louvre in the roof whence the smoke of the fire found escape into the air. The cooking for the men seems, from the poems, to have been done in their hall. No doubt the women's Megaron in the same way served as their kitchen as well as their parlor and living-room. The castle of Odysseus — though in its Megaron three hundred suitors could feast and riot — seems to have been one of the humbler class, as regards the arrangement THE HOMERIC PALACE. 51 of the Gunaikouitis or women's rooms. The women's apartments Avere behind the men's Megaron ; and, though there is noth ing in the Odyssey which denies the existence of a special court for the women in the rear, like the Peristyle in the classic Roman house, it seems fair to assume that there Avas only one room at the end of the men's hall, from Avhich a stair led to Peuelope's chamber, in the second story. The thalamos (Odkapos) or chamber of Odysseus, was probably beyond this room, and may have opened out of it, as the tablinum out of the Roman atrium. For the women's apartments at Tiryns and Mycenae are but the enlargement of the thalamos, which formed one of the three parts — court, vestibule, and inner room, (thalamos)1 of which the house of Paris consisted on the acropolis of Troy. This thalamos and the Roman tablinum, the chamber at the end of the Roman covered 'II. AX 316, ol ol iicacqaav ddAafiov xoCi Swp.a xal auki/V. 52 THE HOMERIC PALACE. atrium, Avere no doubt kindred descend ants of a primitive Aryan form, Avhich had another representative in the chamber opening out of the north European hall. IX. THE BATH-ROOM. Eurycleia's discovery of the identity of the old beggar whom Telemachus has re ceived would hardly have emboldened the critics to claim the existence of a separate bath-room in the palace of Ithaca. There no doubt was one, as everyone is willing to admit, since Schliemann and Dbrpfeld have unearthed that in the Tirynthian castle. The bath-room at Tiryns is west of the men's Megaron, from the prodomos or ves tibule of which it is approached, while it is also accessible from the western aithousa of the court. It is a small, almost square room, about 8'-8" by lO'-l", its floor formed of a single slab of limestone through which a hole was drilled for the escape of the water when the terra cotta bath tub — ¦ THE HOAIER1C PALACIO. 53 fragments of which were found — Avas emptied upon it. This hole carried the water into a terra cotta drain. This free use of terra cotta shows that though no roof tiles AAere found at Tiryns, the men of that time could have made them, and, indeed, may have had such roofing mate rial, Avhich, in a later age, less skilled in tile-making, may have become the booty of ambitious house builders. The drain ran under the palace, and no doubt carried aAvay the water from the two large court yards, and emptied its contents upon the scarped rock of the citadel outside the mighty rampart Avail. Such drain open ings are, as Ave have already noted, com mon in all the city Avails of Etruria X. THE SECOND STORY. Huperoon. 'Tnepaov. That this was not uncommon in Homer's time may be gathered directly from the poems. Penelope's chamber on the second 54 THE HOMERIC PALACE. floor, where she wove and ravelled the web of her destiny, Avas perhaps only an instance of what was the rule. We have been too prone to imagine that the houses of an tiquity were of one story. The many- storied tenements of Rome, the three-storied dwellings of Egypt, and the stairs which exist at Tiryns — probably two separate flights1 — and at Mycenae should dispel all such lingering popular errors. At the same time Homer's silence as to any room beside this chamber on the second floor gives us a great deal of latitude. It may be that the roofs, as Dorpfeld claims, were flat, and that these upper rooms Avere like smaller houses set upon them. It is possible, indeed probable, that, since the Megaron was very high, as became its great length and width, the two stories of the rest of the palace brought the other roofs level Avith its roof. Again, the analogy of a funerary urn in Etruria, which DOrpfeld, in Schliemann's Tiryns, p. 248-9. THE HOMERIC PALACE. 55 indicates a balcony on the second floor, and that of the drawings in Egypt, which shoAv something very much the same, may give us a clue to some similar arrangement in the palace of the well greaved Achaians. Later excavations will perhaps do some thing to settle the question of the eleva tion of the Homeric palace. Till then all will be more or less reasonable conjectural restoration. XL THE PASSAGE AND THE POSTERN. Paure. Aavpr). Orsofhure. 'Opcrodvprj. Besides the main rooms, the names of Avhich occur so repeatedly in Homer that their use is clear, several apartments meet us in the palace at Ithaca, which, even in the added light shed upon the subject by the Tirynthian excavations, it is hopelessly difficult to identify. At the side of the Megaron was a laure, or passage, which led, or at least gave some access to the treasury, and to the armory, and which 56 THE HOMERIC PALACE. figures very prominently in the dramatic slaughter of the Suitors. This has, of course, its analogue in the passage just east of the great hall at Tiryns, but the plan at that palace furnishes no clue to the ex act arrangement at Ithaca. Nor is there any reason Avhy it should, whether Homer was describing the actual abode of Odys seus, or was drawing an imaginary picture. The Chateau de Coucyancl Caerphilly castle have in common, the moat, the curtain wall, and the court-yard of the Mediaeval castle; but, if one of our authors of to-day described either of them, the antiquary who, centuries hence, Avith the text of that author's descrip tion of one of them in his hand, scrutinized the ruins of the other, would be puzzled or exasperated by the disposition of the walls and rooms. Sir Walter Scott's description of the Manor of Woodstock, or his account of Front-de-boeuf's castle, while they might be explained by the ruins of any building of their respective periods, could not be exactly restored from those ruins. Any attempt, THE HOMERIC PALAC'U. 57 then, to define the place of the postern, the orsothure, high up in the AATall, through which the treacherous servant escaped from the Megaron to bring arms to the Suitors, is as useless as it is to fix the exact position of the armory from which he took the weapons and armor which he bore to the doomed wretches huddled at the end of the hall. The reader who wishes to hear the case discussed Avill find the ar guments in the Journal of Hellenic Stud ies for 1886. XH. ARMORY, TREASURY, THOLOS. Thalamos lioplon. Sdkapo? ottXcov. The- sauros. ©rjcravpos. Tholos. ®6\o<;. As Ave have just said the precise location of the armory, from any thing Homer says, is out of the question. It seems to have been reached by a passage — the laure guarded by Eumaios — though Ave are not told that the laure traversed the whole distance thereto, and it also appears to 58 THE HOMERIC PALACE. have been somewhere at the end of the group of buildings which formed the pal ace. Very likely both armory and treasury were near or beyond the thalamos of Odysseus. That the tholos, or round building, was not the treasure chamber is certain from its peculiar position, and from the fact that near it, on a beam running from it to the wall of the court, Odysseus hanged the treacherous maid-servants, after he had slain the Suitors. Dr. Joseph's conjecture that it was the privy, is no doubt the true one.1 XIII. THE APPEARANCE OP THE PALACE. Let us now put together the details Ave have been studying, and try to form a clear picture of the Homeric stronghold as a whole. The best method of doing this will be to place ourselves about a thou sand feet in the air, and at some distance 'Joseph, p. 24-27. P*,lagh Bvildia.ples in the old country. Edition limited.