The golden beaker now, after three millenniums of sepulture, exhibited in the Polytechnicon at Athens,[376] has two, instead of two pairs of dove-surmounted handles; but the support of each by a separate prop riveted on to the base, corresponds strictly to the construction with ‘two feet below’ (πυθμένες), as described in the Iliad. The real and imagined objects unmistakably belong to the same class and epoch, and their agreement is in itself strong evidence of coherence between Homeric and Mycenæan civilisation. The ‘studs of gold’ embossing the Nestorean drinking-cup were doubtless the ornamental heads of the nails used as rivets. The art of soldering, in the proper sense, was a later discovery;[377] but the Mycenæan goldsmith sometimes had recourse to a cement of borax for fastening pieces of gold together. In general, however, decorative adjuncts were separately cast, and afterwards attached with rivets to the objects they were intended to embellish. In this way, probably, the purely ornamental use of metallic knobs and bosses grew up. The Homeric epithets ‘silver-studded’ and ‘bossy,’ applied to sword-sheaths, chairs, and shields, have been copiously illustrated by the discovery at Mycenæ of innumerable gold, or rather gilt, discs and buttons, which had evidently once formed the adornment of the sheaths and shields lying alongside.[378] At Olympia, too, bronze sheathings have been found set with rows of solid silver nails,[379] by means of which they may have been fastened to chairs of the exact type of those described in the Iliad. Footnote 376: Schliemann, _Mycenæ_, p. 236; Helbig, _Das Homerische Epos aus den Denkmälern erläutert_, p. 371; Schuchhardt and Sellers _Schliemann’s Excavations_, p. 241. Footnote 377: Riedenauer, _Handwerk und Handwerker in den Homerischen Zeiten_, p. 122. Footnote 378: Schuchhardt and Sellers, _op. cit._ p. 237, &c. Footnote 379: Furtwängler, _Bronzefünde aus Olympia_, p. 102.