Schliemann’s excavations in Mykenæ have proved that in this city the agora was situated just within the principal gate. Some of the stone benches encircling the agora were found in almost perfect preservation; they were constructed of slabs standing erect in concentric rows to receive the horizontal seats. They lend a new confirmation of Homer’s truthful characterization of locality, illustrating a passage which occurs in the description of the shield of Achilles, which describes the judgment scene upon the marketplace:
“On polish’d chairs, in solemn circle, sat
The rev’rend elders.”
Though the remains of these prehistoric ages show in some degree the form of an ancient Greek acropolis, with its royal dwelling of courts and halls, and the sepulchral monuments before its gates, they are yet insufficient to complete even the main outlines of the picture by giving any understanding of the temple—that structure destined to become the ideal of Hellenic architecture. While the life and customs contemporary with the Homeric poems are, in other respects, represented with incomparable truth and distinctness, the epics are entirely silent upon this subject. It appears that the temples were neither of great size nor of artistic importance; among the ruins of Tiryns and Mykenæ there are no vestiges of columns or entablatures. The symbolical images of the deities were placed upon cliffs, in caverns, among the branches of sacred trees, or in the hollows of their trunks, and simple altars were erected before them. Frequently the worship of a deity was merely connected with a grove, or with some other locality fitted by nature for this purpose, and was there performed without an image or other dead symbol. It was thus with the most primitive god of Greek mythology, Zeus of Dodona. When a building was provided at all, it was, in the heroic ages, restricted to the cella, a ceiled chapel of oblong plan, which stood in the centre of a consecrated area, the temenos. This original form—the whole of the primitive shrine—is recognizable even in the developed peripteros, as the kernel within the outstanding columns. It does not appear strange that we should be acquainted with so few of these chapels when it is considered that hardly greater traces remain of the entire architecture of the Teutonic races during the first seven Christian centuries. It is natural, in the development of civilization, that sanctuaries exemplifying different phases of advancement should seldom stand next to each other; after the destruction of the old, the new arises in its place, upon its consecrated site. Examples of such original cellas are not, however, entirely wanting. Several remains published by Dodwell and Stackelberg are to be explained as chapels. A structure upon Delos, designated by Thiersch as a tomb, is quite comparable to a columnless temple cella. There is less probability that the ruins upon Mount Ocha and near the village Stoura, upon Eubœa, were temples. They are chambers sheltered from above by slabs of stone, inclined like a gable. (Fig. 135.)
This method of roofing could not have been generally practised in early times, when simple and natural constructions utilized the materials at hand best adapted to the purpose. The builders, among the bald mountains of Eubœa, were forced to such a manner of covering their chamber by lack of wood. The south of the island produces no trees which could provide the timber for roof-beams; while, on the other hand, open quarries in the neighborhood furnished a kind of slate-stone which is easily split into large slabs like joists and boards. So clumsy a ceiling construction as that upon Mount Ocha was not natural in countries of dense forests, such as was the original home of the Dorians. In other parts of Hellas than the rocky and sterile islands of the Ægean, the chapels must have been roofed with wood. The most obvious considerations make it evident that ceiling and roof of the primitive cella were originally of wood. In the later marble architecture of Greece this assumption is confirmed by numerous reminiscences of timbered construction, sufficient even to explain the methods and form of the original carpentry.
