On the neck of one of the ducks is a red
drop of blood, probably given by alloyed gold.' Here we have the
very type of art in which the decorations of the shield of Achilles
were carried out. 'Also he set therein a vineyard teeming plenteously
with clusters, wrought fair in gold; black were the grapes, but
the vines hung throughout on silver poles. And around it he ran
a ditch of _kuanos_, and round that a fence of tin.... Also he
wrought therein a herd of kine with upright horns, and the kine
were fashioned of gold and tin.'
Such are some of the points which countenance the idea that in
the Mycenaean people we have the originals of the people of the
Homeric poems. On the other hand there are difficulties, by no
means inconsiderable, in the way of such a belief. Of these the
chief is the question of the method in which the bodies of the dead
are disposed of. The men of the Homeric poems burned their dead;
the men of the Mycenaean civilization buried theirs. Undoubtedly this
is a serious difficulty in the way of identification, presupposing,
as it does, a different view of the destiny of the soul after death.
The men who burned the bodies of their dead believed that the soul
had no further use for its body after death, but departed into
a distant, shadowy, immaterial region, so that the body, if it
had any connection with the soul, acted rather as a drag and a
defilement, from which it was well that the soul should be released.
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