afforded an obvious warrant to Diodorus for his date of the destruction of Mycenæ. But I am convinced that his authority, and that of Pausanias, who follows him, must be deliberately rejected. On the other hand, the origin of Mycenæ, and its greatness as a royal residence, must be thrown back into a far deeper antiquity than any one had yet imagined. If Agamemnon and his house represent Hellenic princes, of the type of Homer’s knowledge and acquaintance, they must have arisen after some older, and apparently different dynasties had ruled and had buried their dead at Mycenæ.(184) But it is also possible that the Homeric bards, describing professedly the acts of a past age, imposed their new manners, and their own culture, upon the Pelopids, whom they only knew by vague tradition, and that thus their drawing is false; while the chiefs they glorify were the ancient pre-Hellenic rulers of the country. This latter supposition is so shocking a heresy against “Homer” that I will not venture to expand it, and will leave the reader to add any conjectures he chooses to those which I have already hazarded in too great number. When the splendid findings of Dr. Schliemann are taken out of their bandboxes in the Bank of Athens, and arranged in the National Museum;(185) when the diligence of Greek archæologists investigates thoroughly the remainder of the site at Mycenæ, which is not nearly exhausted; when new accidents (such as the discoveries at Sparta and Vaphio) and new researches enlarge these treasures perhaps a thousand-fold, there will be formed at Athens a museum of pre-historic art which will not have its equal in the world (except at Cairo), and which will introduce us to an epoch of culture which we hardly yet suspected, when writing and coinage were unknown, when the Greeks had not reached unto their name, or possibly their language, but when, nevertheless, considerable commerce existed, when wonderful skill had already been attained in arts and manufactures, and when men had even accumulated considerable wealth and splendor in well-established centres of power.