should be. The shield
of Achilles, with its gorgeous representations of various scenes
of peace and war, seems almost to transcend the possibilities of
actual metal work at such a period; yet we may believe that the
poet was not merely drawing upon his imagination, but giving a
heightened picture of what he had himself witnessed in the way
of the armourer's art. Chiefly to be noticed with regard to it
is the way in which he describes the method used by Hephaestos in
producing his effects--the inlaying of various metals to get the
colours desired, for instance, in the vineyard scene with its dangling
clusters of purple grapes, its poles, and ditch, and fence. Would
any poet have imagined this had he been entirely unacquainted with
similar products of the armourer's art? As we shall see, it is
precisely this use of the inlaying of metal with metal, to represent
the different colours of the various figures involved, which is
characteristic of the skilled armourer's work in the Mycenaean period.

Such, then, are a few of the outstanding features of the state
of society described for us in the Homeric poems. We are brought
by them face to face with a civilization which has very distinct
and pronounced characteristics of its own. It is certainly not the
civilization of the earliest historic period of Greece; political
organization, the relative importance of states and cities, social
life, art and warfare--all are different from anything we find in
the Hellas of history; in many respects this world of the poems
is at a higher stage of development than that which succeeded it;
but certainly it is different. Now, the question of importance for
us is--Had this poetic world of the Iliad and Odyssey any basis
in fact, or was it merely the creation of the poet or poets who
were responsible for the tales of Ilium and of Odysseus? Were they
describing things which they had seen, or of which the tradition
at least had been handed down to them by those who had seen them,
or were they telling of things which never had any existence save
in their own minds?

This question, of course, is plainly quite distinct from that of
whether the tales they tell are history or romance. The stories of
the flight of Helen, of the siege of Troy, the anger of Achilles,
the valour of Hector, and the love of Andromache, of the wanderings
of much-enduring Odysseus, and the trials of his faithful wife,
Penelope, may be fact, or they may be fiction, or, m