Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 2.djvu/142

 Fortified Towns and their General Characteristics. 109 The reader must beware of taking for towers certain appear- ances in our views ofTiryns and Mycenae (Pis. VIII., IX., X.), for he must remember that the military architecture of that period is as yet unacquainted with towers strictly so called. These are works which, though hollow and quite independent, have a more or less marked salience on the external and sometimes internal face of the circuit- wall, with which they are connected at the sides. The like peculiarities are absent here. The enclosure presents salient resaults ; but oftener than not they appear to be due to the contour of the cliff, which in places juts out into a species of promontories. Such saliences are of unequal length and irregularly spaced ; whilst their mass is solid, like the remainder of the curtain. This was not the spot chosen by the builder for contriving chambers in the thickness of the wall. At most, we find stores or cisterns in the foundations of a rect- angular work, standing out about eight metres from the wall, towards the south-west angle of the castle (PI. II. a a.). This structure is the nearest approach, along the entire perimeter of the enclosure, to what we call towers. Nor should the name be applied to an enormous round bastion westward, with a postern, against which leant the steps that led to the palace (PI. II. t). The gates belonging to the first period of the burnt city at Troy jut far out in front of the enclosure. The arrangement was intentional, and served to diminish the slope of the covered passage, flanked by thick walls, and topped by a broad platform which led up to the castle, having a salience on plan, and perhaps also in elevation, beyond the curtain, whence the approaches to the gate could be watched and kept clear (PI. I. FL, fn). Thus, Homer shows us Priam and the Trojan elders seated on the Scaean Gates, looking on at what is doing in the plain, and Helen, who presently joins them, is said to be '* walking towards the tower." ^ We cannot, however, without a strange abuse of the meaning the words convey, apply the term of tower to a structure, no matter its amplitude, which is but a fortified gate, a shell, in the middle of which a passage has been pierced. Whereas the rectangular masses which project beyond the south-eastern front of the rampart of the burnt city may be recognized as the first outline of towers (PL I. ba, bc, bd), and used doubtless by the defence to keep the enemy at 1 Iliad.