Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/55

Rh Homeric house can be illustrated by the castle of Tiryns; the cornice of blue kyanos, a mystery before, is explained by the blue glass-like fragments found at Mycenae. The exhumed graves and the earliest parts of Homer agree in having weapons of bronze and ornaments of iron; they agree substantially in their armour and their works of art, the inlaid daggers and shields, the lion-hunts and bull-hunts by men in chariots, and in the ostensible ignorance of writing.

On the other hand, the similarity only holds good for the earliest strata of the poems, and not fully even for them. Mycenæ buried her dead; the men of the epos burnt theirs—a practice which probably arose during the Sea Migrations, when the wanderers had no safe soil to lay their friends in. Tiryns actually used stone tools to make its bronze weapons, whereas the earliest epos knows of iron tools; and in general we may accept E. Meyer's account that the bloom of the epos lies in a 'middle age' between the Mycenaean and the classical periods.

Thus the general evidence of the subject-matter conspires with that of the language, to show that the oldest strata have been worked over from an Æolic into an Ionic shape; that the later parts were originally composed in Ionia in what then passed as 'Epic'—that is, in the same dialect as then appeared in the rest of the poems, with an unconsciously stronger-tincture of Ionism; further, that the translation was gradual, and that the general development took centuries; and lastly, perhaps, that an all-important epoch in this development was formed by the great Race Migrations which are roughly dated about 1000 It seems to have been the Migrations that took the