Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 2.djvu/185

 144 Primitive Greece: Mycenian Art. lately, long after our plan had been made (Fig. ii6), fresh researches in the north wall of the first vestibule have brought to light a door which established a more direct communication between the men's quarter and the gynecaeum.^ It would be idle to deny that, in this respect at least, the two plans are different. But are we right to assume that in Homer's day, houses of the better class were all precisely alike, from one end of the Greek world to the other, built on one and the same plan ? Why should there not have been, from Asiatic Hellas to European Hellas, from the abode of a wealthy lord to the house of a chief holding sway over a rocky islet, or a poor forgotten moun- tain district, notable differences in the arrangement of certain divisions of the habitation ? Some of these differences may have been due to the configuration of the ground, others to the fact that the princes who built them these residences were not all equally influential, or equally opulent. The length of time during which the Epic poems were elaborated should also enter into our reckon- ing, as likely to have wrought modifications in the style of building. Thus, the Epos would advert to two distinct types of habitation, which it is held succeeded each other in the course of some centuries, the trail of which appears in the collective work which now is only represented by the Iliad and Odyssey, The oldest and also the simplest of the twin types, notwithstanding its having occasionally assumed considerable superficial develop- ment, would be the one which the excavations at Mycenae and Tiryns have brought to our knowledge. With unimportant exceptions, they were all one-storeyed houses ; the apartments, at any rate the principal ones, occupied but one face of the vast courts, the other sides being taken up by colonnades. Accord- ing to the same hypothesis, the Greek and Roman abode of the classic age, the Pompeian house, would represent the later type. In it the apartments are distributed around the four sides of the court, and nearly all have an upper storey. The second type began to appear towards the end of the period which witnessed the final recension of the Epos. We get glimpses and indications of this second form in those lines which apparently belong to the latest portions of the poem.- ^ TSOUNDAS, MuAT^i/ae. 2 Puchstein would identify this type with that of the palace of Priam, with its fifty chambers of polished stone for the sons of the king, and twelve more for his