Of the heroic or so-called Cyclopean architecture, that
"treasury," [206] a building so imposing that Pausanias thought it
worthy to rank with the Pyramids, is a sufficient illustration.
Treasury, or tomb, or both (the selfish dead, perhaps, being supposed
still to find enjoyment in the costly armour, goblets, and mirrors
laid up there), this dome-shaped building, formed of concentric rings
of stones gradually diminishing to a coping-stone at the top, may
stand as the representative of some similar buildings in other parts
of Greece, and of many others in a similar kind of architecture
elsewhere, constructed of large many-sided blocks of stone, fitted
carefully together without the aid of cement, and remaining in their
places by reciprocal resistance. Characteristic of it is the general
tendency to use vast blocks of stone for the jambs and lintels of
doors, for instance, and in the construction of gable-shaped
passages; two rows of such stones being made to rest against each
other at an acute angle, within the thickness of the walls.
So vast and rude, fretted by the action of nearly three thousand
years, the fragments of this architecture may often seem, at first
sight, like works of nature.
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