DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.1021#0407
THE MYCENAEAN WORLD AND HOMER 353
we have the testimony of two ancient writers1 that the lion
lingered in Thrace as late as the fifth and fourth centuries.
Of agriculture among the Mycenaeans we can expect to
learn but little from the monuments. The wooden imple-
ments with which they long tilled the ground
have of course perished; and the artist who
wrought mainly for princes has given us no such pictures
of ploughing, harvest, and vintage as charm us in the Ho-
meric Shield of Achilles. Nor have we any Mycenaean
dairy to match that of Polyphemus, though our Eteocretan
milkman (Fig. 143) affords us a glimpse of the business.
But, while we cannot handle their tools or witness their
tillage, we have the actual produce of their fields. The
primeval houses of Thera were still stored with barley when
they were disengaged from the lava beds which had covered
them for three or four millennia j and at Troy in 1890
Dr. Schliemann found in the Mycenaean stratum " several
sorts of grain" stored in great jars, as well as "hand-mills
of trachyte "to grind it — to say nothing of a single jar
containing 440 pounds of pease! How diversified was their
husbandry we may one day know better, when these finds
and many more have been properly analyzed. We can at
least affirm now that they had learned to win from field
and flock a provision of food and raiment fairly adequate to
their needs. In the Argive Plain we certainly have better
conditions for primitive husbandry than on volcanic Thera;
and, when Capodistria planted his agricultural school under
the walls of Tiryns, he chose a site that must have been
pastured or ploughed more than thirty centuries before.
In the foregoing chapter we have contended that the
Mycenaeans were not by origin a seafaring people; and
no doubt the great body of them must have remained sim-
1 Herodotus, vii. 125 ; Aristotle, History of Animals, 28.
we have the testimony of two ancient writers1 that the lion
lingered in Thrace as late as the fifth and fourth centuries.
Of agriculture among the Mycenaeans we can expect to
learn but little from the monuments. The wooden imple-
ments with which they long tilled the ground
have of course perished; and the artist who
wrought mainly for princes has given us no such pictures
of ploughing, harvest, and vintage as charm us in the Ho-
meric Shield of Achilles. Nor have we any Mycenaean
dairy to match that of Polyphemus, though our Eteocretan
milkman (Fig. 143) affords us a glimpse of the business.
But, while we cannot handle their tools or witness their
tillage, we have the actual produce of their fields. The
primeval houses of Thera were still stored with barley when
they were disengaged from the lava beds which had covered
them for three or four millennia j and at Troy in 1890
Dr. Schliemann found in the Mycenaean stratum " several
sorts of grain" stored in great jars, as well as "hand-mills
of trachyte "to grind it — to say nothing of a single jar
containing 440 pounds of pease! How diversified was their
husbandry we may one day know better, when these finds
and many more have been properly analyzed. We can at
least affirm now that they had learned to win from field
and flock a provision of food and raiment fairly adequate to
their needs. In the Argive Plain we certainly have better
conditions for primitive husbandry than on volcanic Thera;
and, when Capodistria planted his agricultural school under
the walls of Tiryns, he chose a site that must have been
pastured or ploughed more than thirty centuries before.
In the foregoing chapter we have contended that the
Mycenaeans were not by origin a seafaring people; and
no doubt the great body of them must have remained sim-
1 Herodotus, vii. 125 ; Aristotle, History of Animals, 28.