Dodwell,[138] in speaking of this treasury and the smaller ones, says:--"There is moreover complete evidence that these structures were called θησαυροί, and belong to ages prior to the origin of that architecture of which the Doric temple in Europe and the Ionic in Asia are the crowning invention. As this latter architecture advanced, temples served for treasuries, or, when buildings were erected solely for treasuries, they had the ordinary forms of that later style of architecture, as we learn from the description which Pausanias has given of the treasuries at Olympia and Delphi.[139] Nevertheless subterranean buildings, similar in construction to the treasuries of the heroic ages, continued to serve for containing oil or corn or water, and when attached to private houses might often be employed for depositing property of any kind. These are very numerous in Greece, but in no instance are they entered at the side. The largest I know of is in the Acropolis of Pharsala. But the strongest reason for designating the constructions at Mycenæ as treasuries is the evidence of Pausanias,[140] unless it be denied that he intended those buildings by the words ὑπόγαια οἰκοδομήματα, which can hardly be alleged, as the ruins agree too well with his words to render such a supposition reasonable. Seventeen hundred years ago, therefore, those buildings were believed to be the Treasuries of Atreus and his sons. Nothing had then occurred to interfere with the course of the mythology or history of Greece, as transmitted to the Greeks by their ancestors: and although on many occasions the reports received by Pausanias from the ἐξηγηταί may have been inventions of a date comparatively recent, no such suspicion can well attach to the principal traditions of Mycenæ, which accord with all that has reached us concerning that city in poetry or prose. The extant edifice was the largest of the treasuries, and bears proofs of having been a costly building, highly decorated at the entrance and lined within with metallic plates. To Atreus himself, therefore, the most opulent and powerful of the kings of the πολύχρυσος Μυκήνη, and not to either of his sons, this greatest of extant treasuries may, with a high degree of probability, be attributed. Agamemnon dissipated the wealth of Atreus in the expedition to Asia, passed the greater part of his reign abroad, and returned home poor and powerless, leaving Μυκῆναι to be, after his time, no more than a secondary town of Argolis. Nor is it likely, under these circumstances, that the sepulchre of Agamemnon was a monument of any great magnificence. Pausanias, who saw it, does not mention it as such, but gives us clearly to understand that the Treasury and the Gate of the Citadel were the most remarkable antiquities at Mycenæ."