Bk. III. Ch. I. PELASGIC ART. 239 almost as much certainty as if he saw them in a menagerie. Nor is it difficult to see why the remnants are so few. When Homer describes the imaginary dwelling of Alcinous — which he meant to be typical of a perfect palace in his day — he does not speak of its construction or solidity, nor tell us how symmetrically it was arranged ; but he is lavish of his praise of its brazen walls, its golden doors with their silver posts and lintels —just as the writers of the Books of Kings and Chronicles praise the contemporary temple or palace of Solomon for similar metallic splendor. The palace of Menelaus is described by the same author as full of brass and gold, silver and ivory. It was resplendent as the sun and moon, and appeared to the eye of Telemachus like the mansion of Jupiter himself. No temples are mentioned by Homer, nor by any early writer ; but the funereal rites celebrated in honor of Patroclus, as described in the XXin. Book of the Iliad, and the mounds still existing on the Plains of Troy, testify to the character of the people whose manners and customs he was describing, and would alone be sufficient to convince us that, except in their tombs, we should find little to commemorate their previous existence. The subject is interesting, and deserves far more attention than has hitherto been bestowed upon it, and more space than can be devoted to it here. Not only is this art the art of people who warred before Troy, but our knowledge of it reveals to us a secret which otherwise might for ever have remained a mystery. The religion of the Homeric poems is essentially Anthropic and Ancestral — in other words, of Turanian origin, with hardly a trace of Aryan feeling runnino; through it. When we know that the same was the case with the arts of those days, we feel that it could not well be otherwise ; but what most excites our wonder is the power of the poet, whose song, describing the manners and feelings of an extinct race, was so beautiful as to cause its adoption as a gospel by a people of another race, tincturing their religion to the latest hour of theii existence. We have very little means of knowing how long this style of art lasted in Greece. The treasury built by Myron king of Sicyon at Olympia about 650 b.c. seems to have been of this style, in so far as we can judge of it by the description of Pausanias.^ It consisted of two chambers, one ornamented in the Doric, one in the Ionic stj'le, not apparently with pillars, but Avith that kind of decoration which appears at that period to have been recognized as peculiar to each. But the entire decorations seem to have been of brass, the weight of metal em- ployed being recorded in an inscription on the building. The earliest Pausanias, vi. 19.
