[12] Napier, _Life of Dundee_, vol. iii. p. 724. Notices in the Stuart MSS., Windsor Castle. [13] _Iliad_, xviii. 34, xxiii. 30 (butchers' tools); _Odyssey_, ix. 391 ("great axes" and adzes); _Iliad_, xxiii. 850 (axes). The axes through which Odysseus shot the arrow (nine times in the _Odyssey_). Battle-axe; this is of bronze (_Iliad_, xiii. 611, ἀξίνη), axes as tools are πελέκεις. "Iron" as a synonym for wheelwrights' tools (_Iliad_, iv. 485). Iron butchers' axes (_Iliad_, xvii. 520; _Odyssey_, iii. 442-449). [14] _Scripta Minoa_, vol. i. p. 61, note 1. [15] _Evans, Prehistoric Tombs of Cnossos_, p. 107. [16] _Odyssey_, xvi. 294, xix. 13. [17] _Homerische Epos_, p. 331. [18] _Early Age of Greece_, vol. i. pp. 295, 296. Mr. Ridgeway does not notice the many objections to the whole passage. [19] Hesiod, _Works and Days_, 150, 151. [20] Leaf, _Iliad_, vol. i. p. 524. [21] _Odyssey_, xix. 13. [22] Mr. Murray, _R. G. E_. p. 154, note 1, writes that when I regard the proverb that "iron of itself draws a man on" as an interpolation, "this seems like giving up most of the case." But it is no part of my case that not a single interpolation exists in either the _Iliad_ or _Odyssey_. There is scarcely a critic, whatever his views, who does not suspect the passages which we have been discussing. If Mr. Murray does not see evidence of un-Homeric confusion in the passages, his view is peculiar; and if I am biassed, when I see those signs, by my ideas about iron, he may be also unconsciously biassed by his opposite ideas. If a critic desires to prove that iron was in common use for weapons during the evolution of the _Odyssey_, will he aver that--were no iron in question--he would see nothing suspicious in the passages? CHAPTER XI BURIAL AND THE FUTURE LIFE The most perplexing questions in Homer's picture of life are connected with the disposal of the dead. It is just here, where archaeology as a rule gives the surest evidence from the examination of graves, that archaeology so far seems to fail us. Yet Homer speaks with no uncertain voice. From the fifty-second line of the first book of the _Iliad_ to the funeral of Hector in the twenty-fourth book, Homer always tells of cremation, "and ever the pyres of the dead burned in multitude." There may be slight variations in practice, as regards burning his armour with the dead warrior; and the funeral of Patroclus, in which the love and the rage of Achilles expended themselves, has features not usually recorded by Homer,--the circumstances being peculiar,--but there is always cremation, always the urn-burial of the bones, always the cairn piled above them with its pillar on the summit; yet no such Homeric cairn has yet been discovered.