Art, good and very bad, exists in many various stages in Mycenaean relics. The drawing of a god, with a typical Mycenaean shield in the form of a figure 8, on a painted sarcophagus from Milato in Crete, is more crude and savage than many productions of the Australian aboriginals, [Footnote: _Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. xvi. _p._ 174, fig. 50._ Grosse. _Les Debuts de l'Art,_ pp. 124-176.] the thing is on the level of Red Indian work. Meanwhile at Vaphio, Enkomi, Knossos, and elsewhere the art is often excellent. In one essential point the poet describes a custom without parallel among the discovered relics of the Mycenaean age--namely, the disposal of the bodies of the dead. They are neither buried with their arms, in stately _tholos_ tombs nor in shaft graves, as at Mycenae: whether they be princes or simple oarsmen, they are cremated. A pyre of wood is built; on this the warrior's body is laid, the pyre is lighted, the body is reduced to ashes, the ashes are placed in a vessel or box of gold, wrapped round with precious cloths (no arms are buried, as a general rule), and a mound, howe, barrow, or tumulus is raised over all. Usually a _stele_ or pillar crowns the edifice. This method is almost uniform, and, as far as cremation and the cairn go, is universal in the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ whenever a burial is described. Now this mode of interment must be the mode of a single age in Greek civilisation. It is confessedly not the method of the Mycenaeans of the shaft grave, or of the latter _tholos_ or stone beehive-shaped grave; again, the Mycenaeans did not burn the dead; they buried. Once more, the Homeric method is not that of the Dipylon period (say 900-750 B.C.) represented by the tombs outside the Dipylon gate of Athens. The people of that age now buried, now burned, their dead, and did not build cairns over them. Thus the Homeric custom comes between the shaft graves and the latter _tholos_ graves, on the one hand, and the Dipylon custom of burning or burying, with sunk or rock-hewn graves, on the other. The Homeric poets describe the method of their own period. They assuredly do not adhere to an older epic tradition of shaft graves or _tholos_ graves, though these must have been described in lays of the period when such methods of disposal of the dead were in vogue. The altar above the shaft-graves in Mycenae proves the cult of ancestors in Mycenae; of this cult in the _Iliad_ there is no trace, or only a dim trace of survival in the slaughter of animals at the funeral. The Homeric way of thinking about the state of the dead, weak, shadowy things beyond the river Oceanus, did not permit them to be worshipped as potent beings. Only in a passage, possibly interpolated, of the _Odyssey_, do we hear that Castor and Polydeuces, brothers of Helen, and sons of Tyndareus, through the favour of Zeus have immortality, and receive divine honours. [Footnote: Odyssey, XI. 298-304.]