The interesting fact is that no barrow burial precisely of the Homeric kind has ever been discovered in Greek sites. The old Mycenaeans buried either in shaft graves or in a stately _tholos_; and in rock chambers, later, in the town cemetery: they did not burn the bodies. The people of the Dipylon period sometimes cremated, sometimes inhumed, but they built no barrow over the dead. [Footnote: _Annal. de l'Inst.,_ 1872, pp. 135, 147, 167. Plausen, _ut supra_.] The Dipylon was a period of early iron swords, made on the lines of not the best type of bronze sword. Now, in Mr. Leaf's opinion, our Homeric accounts of burial "are all late; the oldest parts of the poems tell us nothing." [Footnote: _Iliad_, vol. ii. p. 619. Note 2. While Mr. Leaf says that "the oldest parts of the poems tell us nothing" of burial, he accepts XXII. 342, 343 as of the oldest part. These lines describe cremation, and Mr. Leaf does not think them borrowed from the "later" VII. 79, 80, but that VII. 79, 80 are "perhaps borrowed" from XXII. 342, 343. It follows that "the oldest parts of the poems" do tell us of cremation.] We shall show, however, that Mr. Leaf's "kernel" alludes to cremation. What is "late"? In this case it is not the Dipylon period, say 900-750 B.C. It is not any later period; one or two late barrow burials do not answer to the Homeric descriptions. The "late" parts of the poems, therefore, dealing with burials, in Books VI., VII., XIX., XXIII., XXIV., and the Odyssey, are of an age not in "the Mycenaean prime," not in the Dipylon period, not in any later period, say the seventh or sixth centuries B.C., and, necessarily, not of any subsequent period. Yet nobody dreams of saying that the poets describe a purely fanciful form of interment. They speak of what they know in daily life. If it be argued that the late poets preserve, by sheer force of epic tradition, a form of burial unknown in their own age, we ask, "Why did epic tradition not preserve the burial methods of the Mycenaean prime, the shaft grave, or the _tholos_, without cremation?"