In the opinion of Mr. Sayce, it is clear that Homer meant in this passage to refer to the destruction of at least one of the three cities which he names, and as Argos and Sparta were _not_ destroyed, the city which _was_ destroyed could have been no other than Mycenæ. Mr. Sayce believes that it may be inferred from the word διαπέρσαι that the destruction of Mycenæ must have been complete. If it was so, nothing can better prove the great antiquity of the event than this citation from Homer. I must say that this hypothesis of Messrs. Sayce and Mahaffy, according to which Mycenæ must have been destroyed at a period of great antiquity, is but too strongly confirmed by the monuments. I recall to the reader here what I said on this subject near the end of Chapter IV.:--"On the west side the Cyclopean wall has been nearly demolished for a distance of 46 feet, and on its interior side a wall of small stones joined with earth has been built to sustain its ruins. It must remain mere guesswork when the Cyclopean wall was destroyed and the small wall built, but at all events this must have occurred long before the capture of Mycenæ by the Argives in 468 B.C., because the small wall was buried deep in the prehistoric _débris_." I also recall the fact that the following inscription [Illustration] which we know positively to belong to the sixth century B.C., is cut upon a fragment of that black Greek pottery which seems to be of at least three centuries' later date than the archaic Mycenian pottery, even the most modern, which is found at Mycenæ just at the bottom of the bed of _débris_ of the Macedonian city. Further, I call the special attention of archæologists to the immense number of idols in the form of cows or of women with cows' horns or heads, which I collected at Mycenæ (see, for example, figs. 2-11, 111-119, 212, 327-330, 531). These are beyond contradiction the most ancient types of idols which have been found in Greece. All of them are discovered down as far as the surface of beds of archaic _débris_; it is therefore very certain that they were still in use at the time of the taking of Mycenæ. But it seems to us quite impossible that here the tutelary divinity of Mycenæ should have been represented as late as the fifth century B.C., under the form of a cow or of an idol showing the characteristic features of a cow. It is evident that in the Homeric poems Hera is a woman, without any of the attributes of a cow; the only trace of them that she has preserved is in the epithet βοῶπις, consecrated to her by the usage of centuries, but certainly not signifying in Homer more than "the large-eyed" goddess. [Sidenote: DATE OF THE CAPTURE OF MYCENÆ.]