human figures drawn in geometrical forms, lines, and triangles,
was quite unlike that of the Achaean age in many ways, for
example, in mode of burial and in the use of iron for weapons. Mr.
H. R. Hall, in his learned book, _The Oldest Civilisation of
Greece_ (1901), supposes the culture described in the Homeric
poems to be contemporary in Asia with that of this Dipylon period
in Greece. [Footnote: Op. cit., pp. 49, 222.] He says, "The
Homeric culture is evidently the culture of the poet's own days;
there is no attempt to archaise here...." They do not archaise as
to the details of life, but "the Homeric poets consciously and
consistently archaised, in regard to the political conditions of
continental Greece," in the Achaean times. They give "in all
probability a pretty accurate description" of the loose feudalism
of Mycenaean Greece. [Footnote: Op. cit., pp. 223, 225.]

We shall later show that this Homeric picture of a past political
and social condition of Greece is of vivid and delicate accuracy,
that it is drawn from the life, not constructed out of historical
materials. Mr. Hall explains the fact by "the conscious and
consistent" archaeological precision of the Asiatic poets of the
ninth century. Now to any one who knows early national poetry,
early uncritical art of any kind, this theory seems not easily
tenable. The difficulty of the theory is increased, if we suppose
that the Achaeans were the recent conquerors of the Mycenaeans.
Whether we regard the Achaeans as "Celts," with Mr. Ridgeway,
victors over an Aryan people, the Pelasgic Mycenaeans; or whether,
with Mr. Hall, we think that the Achaeans were the Aryan
conquerors of a non-Aryan people, the makers of the Mycenaean
civilisation; in the stress of a conquest, followed at no long
interval by an expulsion at the hands of Dorian invaders, there