There are many convincing reasons for holding that section to have been a late one. One of the principal is the familiar use of iron in the poems, although none has been met with in the old shaft-tombs within the citadel of Mycenæ, and only small quantities in the less distinguished graves below. It is, to be sure, conceivable that a substance introduced as a vulgar novelty devoid of traditional or ancestral associations might have been employed for the ordinary purposes of everyday life long before it was allowed to form part of sepulchral equipments; a similar motive prescribing its virtual exclusion from the Homeric Olympus. Still, the discrepancy can hardly be explained away without the concession of some lapse of time as well. The Homeric and Mycenæan modes of burial, too, were different. Cremation is practised throughout the Epics; the Mycenæan dead were preserved intact. ‘The contrast,’ Dr. Leaf remarks,[10] ‘is a striking one; but it is easy to lay too much stress upon it. It may well be that the conditions of sepulture on a campaign were perforce different from those usual in times of peace at home. The mummifying of the body and the carrying of it to the ancestral burying-place in the royal citadel were not operations such as could be easily effected amidst the hurry of marches or the privations of a siege; least of all after the slaughter of a pitched battle. It is therefore quite conceivable that two methods of sepulture may of necessity have been in use at the same time. And for this assumption the Iliad itself gives us positive grounds. One warrior who falls is taken home to be buried; for to a dead son of Zeus means of carriage and preservation can be supplied which are not for common men. Sarpedon is cleansed by Apollo, and borne by Death and Sleep to his distant home in Lycia, not that his body may be burnt, but that his brethren and kinsfolk may _preserve_ it ‘with a tomb and gravestone, for such is the due of the dead.’ Footnote 10: Introduction to _Schliemann’s Excavations_, p. 26. He said; obedient to his father’s words, Down to the battle-field Apollo sped From Ida’s height; and from amid the spears Withdrawn, he bore Sarpedon far away, And lav’d his body in the flowing stream; Then with divine ambrosia all his limbs Anointing, cloth’d him in immortal robes; To two swift bearers gave him then in charge, To Sleep and Death, twin brothers; in their arms They bore him safe to Lycia’s widespread plains.[11] Footnote 11: _Iliad_, xvi. 676-88 (Lord Derby’s translation).