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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}<f). This outer
wall might or might not coincide with the
inner line at certain points, but between
the two walls at the outer entrance, and
thus near the entrance to the inner court,
also, was a wide space, an outer court,1 like
the outer bailey of a Norman castle.
The material of the wall is not clearly
stated in Homer, except in the case of
1 Joseph, Palciste, pp. 8-10.

---^fJ^C

.,2. and 5
f>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<g,.

THE HOMERIC PALACE. 5!)
from the acropolis and the palace Ave wish
to survey. The draAvings, figures X and
XI, shoAv what Ave shall see from such an
aerial standpoint. In X Ave are looking
north, but in XI northeast, and thus, in the
latter case, diagonally across the long axis
of the castle.
At the top of the limestone hill, in fig
ure X, Avhere the grey stone crops out
through the greensward which appears
above the trees around the base of the em
inence, Ave see the footings of the mighty,
roughly jointed Avail, its broad surfaces,
and its croAvn of parapet and battlement.
At our right we see the approach, a loug
slope keeping close to the escarpment of
the cliff, Avhich is crowned by the rampart
wall, or herkos. Where this slope enters
the castle it makes a short turn, and goes
through the Avail by means of a gate
flanked by two large toAvers. Beyond this
outer gate, Avhich was purely and simply
for defence, we see the lower or outer court
with surrounding stables, storehouses, ser-

60 THE HOMERIC PALACE.
vants' quarters, etc., and the stately pro-
pylaeum which leads to the upper or inner
court, the aule.
Within the circuit of the inner Avail,
Avhich is pierced by this propylaeum, we
descry this court of honor, with the Mega
ron in front of us and the shady, echoing
aithousai at the sides.
Bevond the Megaron are the roofs of
the women's rooms, of the thalamoi, the
treasury, the armory, and of whatever
other apartments there may have been.
Beyond these might lie the garden, such
a garden as Homer has described for the
palace of Alcinous : " Without the court
(aule), near the doors, was a great garden,
four acres in extent, and round it on every
side was driven a fence (herkos). And in
it grew tall flourishing trees, pear, and
pomegranate and apple trees with gleam
ing fruit, and SAveet fig and flourishing
olive trees."1

1 Od. VII, 112. See Blomfleld, The Formal Harden in England,
p. 229.

THE HOMERIC PALACE. 61
As Ave lift our eyes from the palace there
opens before us the valley in which it lies,
or the island Avhich it wholly or partly
dominates. Forests rise on the hills to the
right and to the left, interspersed with
tilled ground, and with pastures for sheep
and goats, Avith waving corn, and with
greensward broAvsed upon by black cattle.
The huts, or the more pretentious dwel
lings of the lesser folk, crowd around the
base of the acropolis.
On the other hills gleam the walls of
other castles, each Avith its little ring of
tilled ground and smaller houses, while
between the strongholds we find stone-
paved roads. Beyond the hills rise the
mountains, blue and distant. Behind us
is the haven with its sAvift ships, never
many, seldom stationary, and its traffic
which again other paved ways bring to
the castles and to their toAvns which the
fear of pirates, the ever present pests of
the uneasy sea-trade of the time, has kept
back from the beach. There, too, is the

62 THE HOMERIC PALACE.
sea, the Avine-colored sea, thalatta, the
beloved of eA^ery Greek of old or of the
classic time, the sea which, if it would,
could tell us all we long so eagerly to know
of Crete, Mycenae, Ithaca, and Ilios, but
whose voice, alas, is only the unending
beat of its waves upon those ancient shores.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

Die Palaste des homerischen Epos, unit Riick-
sicht auf die Ausgrabungen Heinrioh Schlie-
nianns. Dr. phil. D. Joseph. Zweite verbes-
serte und veruiehrte Auflage. Berlin. Verlag
von Georg Siemens, 1895.
Schliemann's Excavations. Carl Scbueh-
hardt, translated by Eugene Sellers. Macmil
lan, 1891.
Troja, 1893. Bericht liber die im Jahre 1893
in Troja A'eranstalteten Ausgrabungen. Dr.
YV". Dorpfeld. Leipzig, 1894.
Die Ausgrabungen in Troja, 1894. Dr. W.
Dorpfeld. Mittheilungen des kaiserlich deuts-
chen archaeologischen Instituts, athenische
Abtheilung. Band XIX (1894), s. 380.
Arne, von Ferdinand Noack. Mittheilungen,
as above, XIX, 405.
The Mycenaean Age. Dr. Chrestos Tsountas
and J. Irving Manatt. Boston and New York,
Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1897.
Tiryns (The Prehistoric Palace of the Kings
of Tiryns). Dr. Henry Schliemann, with chap-

64 BIBLIOGRAPHY.
ters by Dr. Dorpfeld, New York, Charles Scrib-
ner's Sons, 1885.
A Suggested Restoration of the Great Hall in
the Palace at Tiryns. Prof. J. H. Middleton,
Journal of Hellenic Studies, VII (1886).
The Homeric House in Relation to the Re
mains at Tiryns. R. C. Jebb, Journal of Hel
lenic Studies, VII (1886).
Art in Primitive Greece. Georges Perrot and
Charles Chipiez.
A complete bibliography of the subject is
given in Dr. Joseph's work.

History of the State of Rhode Island
and Providence Plantations,
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