Tsuntas, Chrestos: The Mycenaean age: a study of the monuments and culture of pre-homeric Greece (London, 1897)

THE PALACE 65

With all these correspondences, it cannot be denied that
there are differences as well. And if the poet is to be held
to the responsibility of the architect, the difficul-
ties are serious. It would, indeed, be a task to diBfewocas
adapt the Tirynthian palace to the action of the
domestic drama at Ithaca; but some of the impossibilities
insisted upon have already been resolved by the spade as
others may yet be. For example, there is the incident with
which the twentieth Odyssey opens. Odysseus in his
beggar's disguise has stretched himself for the „
night on a rough shakedown in the prodomos of
his own palace where he lies worrying and wake-
ful. Lying there, his ire is stirred yet more as
he sees the wanton women of his household stealing forth
from their quarters to meet the suitors. Now at Tiryns,
where there is no direct communication yet made out be-
tween the men's and women's quarters, this incident would
appear impossible. But not so at Mycenae. There we
find a door in the north wall of the vestibule leading
directly to the women's apartments. Thus in the actual
palace of Mycenae, as well as in the ideal one at Ithaca, an
Odysseus, lying wakeful with his tormenting thoughts,
would be right in the track of the guilty women.1

But there is a more serious difficulty about the women's
quarter. In the Homeric poems, as in historical The
Athens, the women usually occupy an upper weTOOn
story (uTiepihv), while at Tiryns their apartments, as well
as the men's, are on the ground-floor. At Mycenae, indeed,

For the strongest argument against the essential correspondence of the
■Tirynthian with the Homeric palace, see Jebb, Journal of Hellenic Studies, vii.
170, and Introd. to Homer, pp. 175-186. On the'other hand, Leaf (Tutrix], to
Schnchhardt-Sellers' Sckliemann's Excavations, xxxi.) holds that "the plan of
the Tirynthian palace admits of being converted into that of a Homeric house
by the simple expedient of driving a door through the back of the megaron."