Mr. Myres's idea of the Homeric house, or, at least, of the house of Odysseus, is that the women had a _meguron,_ or common hall, apart from that of the men, with other chambers. These did not lie to the direct rear of the men's hall, nor were they entered by a door that opened in the back wall of the men's hall. Penelope has a chamber, in which she sleeps and does woman's work, upstairs; her connubial chamber, unoccupied during her lord's absence, is certainly on the ground floor. The women's rooms are severed from the men's hall by a courtyard; in the courtyard are chambers. Telemachus has his [Greek: Thalamos], or chamber, in the men's courtyard. All this appears plain from the poet's words; and Mr. Myres corroborates, by the ground plans of the palaces of Tiryns and Mycenae, a point on which Mr. Monro had doubts, as regards Tiryns, while he accepted it for Mycenae. [Footnote: Monro, Odyssey, ii. 497; _Journal of Hellenic Studies_, xx. 136.] Noack [Footnote: Noack, p. 39.] does not, however, agree. There appears to be no doubt that in the centre of the great halls of Tiryns and of Mycenae, as of the houses in Homer, was the hearth, with two tall pillars on each side, supporting a _louvre_ higher than the rest of the roof, and permitting some, at least, of the smoke of the fire to escape. Beside the fire were the seats of the master and mistress of the house, of the minstrel, and of honoured guests. The place of honour was not on a dais at the inmost end of the hall, like the high table in college halls. Mr. Myres holds that in the Homeric house the [Greek: prodomos], or "forehouse," was a chamber, and was not identical with the [Greek: aethousa], or portico, though he admits that the two words "are used indifferently to describe the sleeping place of a guest." [Footnote: _Journal of Hellenic Studies_, xx. 144, 155.] This was the case at Tiryns; and in the house of the father of Phoenix, in the _Iliad_, the _prodomos_, or forehouse, and the _aethousa_, or portico, are certainly separate things (Iliad, IX. 473). Noack does not accept the Tiryns evidence for the Homeric house. On Mr. Myres's showing, the women in the house of Odysseus had distinct and separate quarters into which no man goes uninvited. Odysseus when at home has, with his wife, a separate bedroom; and in his absence Penelope sleeps upstairs, where there are several chambers for various purposes. Granting that all this is so, how do the pictures of the house given in the final part of the _Odyssey_ compare with those in the [Blank space] and with the accounts of the dwellings of Menelaus and Alcinous in the Odyssey? Noack argues that the house of Odysseus is unlike the other Homeric houses, because in these, he reasons, the women have no separate quarters, and the lord and lady of the house sleep in the great hall, and have no other bedroom, while there are no upper chambers in the houses of the _Iliad_, except in two passages dismissed as "late."