38 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. VII., No. 153 



tion' between the two places (p. 64). Virchow, 

 however, had many other points of resemblance 

 which are wanting at Tiryns, besides this single 

 one, to bring forward, between the rude, early 

 pottery of the two sites he was comparing. 



The stages of civilization of the lake-dwellers of 

 Switzerland and of the Homeric heroes differ as 

 widely as does the dawn from high noon ; and the 

 endeavor to relegate the occupants of a palace 

 whose artistic decorations excite only wonder and 

 admiration to the status of the age of polished 

 stone, or even of the early bronze age, displays a 

 singular misapprehension of the teachings of pre- 

 historic archeology. 



That the huge, so-called Cyclopean walls of 

 Tiryns should have inspired the belief in their 

 hoar antiquity, and that around them should have 

 clustered myth and legend, is not to be wondered 

 at. The strange circumstance is, that it is in the 

 later writers principally that this crop should 

 have sprung up. It is worthy of remark that Tiryns 

 is mentioned but once in the Homeric poems, and 

 that only in the ' Catalogue of forces,' which by most 

 scholars is regarded as a late interpolation. There 

 it is characterized by an adjective which means 

 'the well-walled' (Iliad, ii. 559), and our author 

 thinks that " Homer expresses his admiration for 

 the walls by this epithet, which he bestows on 

 Thebes " (p. 17). The fact is, however, that this 

 word occurs in only one other passage in the 

 poems, some hundred lines after its first use ; and 

 there it is applied, not to Thebes, but to the an- 

 cient city of Gortys, in Crete. This is the place 

 where last year was discovered the longest and 

 most important inscription yet known in the 

 archaic Doric dialect, probably of the sixth 

 century B.C. But at Gortys there are no Cyclo- 

 pean walls, and we feel constrained to believe that 

 the epithet was employed by the poet in both in- 

 stances solely for its metrical advantages. 



Leaving, then, the Homeric poems out of the 

 case, there is no question that these huge walls 

 have stirred the wonder and admiration of all 

 modem travellers, and many have been the at- 

 tempts to account for them, and to discover who 

 were their builders. We can hardly, however, 

 look upon Dr. Schliemann's as the most happy 

 solution of the problem. He thinks that " we 

 may assume with great probability that they were 

 built by Phoenician colonists, and the same is 

 probably the rase with the great prehistoric walls 

 in many other parts of Greece " (p. 28). How is 

 it, then, we may ask, that a precisely similar style 

 of construction is to be seen in mountain fast- 

 nesses in the Apennines of central Italy, where no 

 foot of Phoenician trader ever penetrated, while 

 no such example is to be found in Phoenicia 



proper, or in her greater daughter, Carthage? 

 Much more probable seems to be Mr. Gladstone's 

 conjecture that they are "the handiwork of the 

 great constructive race or races made up of sev- 

 eral elements, who migrated into Greece, and else- 

 where on the Mediterranean, from the south and 

 east." But we doubt if the key to the mystery is 

 to be sought in peculiarities of construction ; since 

 archeologists now are of one accord that the 

 huge polygonal style of building, in all of its dif- 

 ferent varieties, to the rudest of which alone the 

 epithet 'Cyclopean' should be restricted, arose 

 from the natural cleavage of the material used for 

 building-purposes. 



Equally unsatisfactory seems to be Dr. Schlie- 

 mann's attempt to overthrow the established date 

 of the destruction of Tiryns by the Argives, 468 

 B.C., in favor of a period so much anterior to this 

 as the return of the Herakleids, which he places 

 at about 1100 B.C. In this, it is true, he is sus- 

 tained by the authority of that most hardy of the 

 investigators of ancient history, Professor Sayce, 

 while Professor Mahaffy also rejects the received 

 chronology. But it is certainly suggestive that 

 the very passage in the Iliad (iv. 52) which is 

 cited by Professor Sayce in confirmation of such a 

 theory, should have been previously brought for- 

 ward by another eminent iconoclast, Professor 

 Paley, as equally conclusive to establish the com- 

 paratively late date of the existing version of the 

 Homeric poems. 1 But the universal consensus of 

 historians, backed by the irrefragable testimony 

 of the bronze serpent, which once supported the 

 golden tripod dedicated by the Greeks at Delphi 

 in commemoration of the battle of Plataea, and 

 which is now to be seen in Constantinople, would 

 seem to outweigh our author's archeological 

 evidence in support of his new view, which would 

 appear to consist of a graffito in eleven archaic 

 letters scratched upon a bit of 'lustrous black 

 Hellenic pottery,' re-enforced by numerous rude 

 female images, which possibly may be only arch- 

 aistic, and which, at any rate, bear a striking 

 resemblance to the children's playthings found in 

 the tombs at Athens. 



But enough, perhaps too much, has been said 

 about our author's theories : let us turn to some of 

 the actual gains to knowledge acquired by his 

 liberal use of the spade at Tiryns ; only we must 

 first enter our protest against his failure to do 

 justice to his townsman, Dr. Rhaugabe. Refer- 

 ring to the appearance of the site before he com- 

 menced operations there, he says, " Many of the 

 walls were visible on the surface, and had misled 

 the best archeologists, as they were assumed to be 



1 Transactions of the Cambridge philosophical society, 

 xi. p. 383. 



