Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

Still with all this, Argos is a great name. A continuous being, a continuous history, from the Homeric Catalogue to the War of Independence, is something which Megalopolis and even Sparta cannot boast of. Sparta--_Lakedaimonia_ in later phrase--gave way to Misthra; modern Sparta is a new and artificial creation. But Argos, the Argos that we now see, with its queer-looking streets and shops and open spaces, is, by unbroken succession, the city of Diomêdês, the city of Kleobis and Bitôn. We look in vain for the temple which witnessed the filial piety of Kleobis and Bitôn, but the Larissa of Diomêdês, the _Aspis_--the shield of Argos--which was stormed by the last Kleomenês, is there still. The huge hill with the ruined buildings at the base, with the castle containing remains of almost every age on its crest, with the signs of human occupation covering almost every step of its steep sides, all are now utterly desolate, but they bear witness to the lesson that the modern town over which they soar is the unbroken successor of the dwelling-place of man in præ-historic times. The Larissa of Argos is an akropolis indeed, utterly dwarfing, as far as the works of nature go, the far lowlier height of primæval Athens. No Parthenôn, no Propylaia, crowned the hill of Argos. The nature of the site could hardly have allowed them to stand there, and, if it could, they would have seemed out of place on that mountain-top. The fortress however is there, shattered and forsaken as it is; the walls of the mediæval castle are propped on the walls of unrecorded days with their vast Kyklopean masonry. Other parts rest on masonry of later date, but still masonry of early Hellenic times, stones which were there before Argos thought it her interest in the greatest national peril of Greece, to find out that her hero Perseus was the forefather of the invading barbarian. We look down from the height on the modern city, on the plain, on the gulf which parts the Argolic _Aktê_ from the main mass of Peloponnêsos; we mark the coast stretching away towards the hostile Lakonian land; we gaze on the mountain heights of the central land of the peninsula, fencing in the home of that old Arkadian race which boasted that alone among Greeks it had never changed its dwelling. There rises Artemision, there rises the hoary peak of Kronion, its snow-capped crest seeming no unfit dwelling-place of the aged god who reigned before Zeus and his children. At the foot of the hill lie a number of buildings, all forsaken and shattered, witnessing to the many changes which Argos has seen, to the many masters who have ruled over her. There is one piece of mighty ancient walling strangely brought together with sculpture of Roman times. There is the theatre with its ranges of seats cut deep in the hill-side, a theatre looking out on the wide expanse of city, plain, sea, and mountains. Almost at its foot stands a ruin of the days when Argos formed part of the subject lands of the city by the Tiber, a ruin which bespeaks its kindred with the baths of Antoninus, and shows us in all its boldness the great constructive invention after which men strove at Tiryns, but which Greece, in all other things the mother of arts, had to learn from her Roman masters. We look at the broken brick vault of the Roman building, but if our eye turns a little to the right, we soon see how it was the lands east of the Hadriatic which first learned how to give the great constructive invention of Italy its noblest form and to apply it to its highest use. At no great distance from the Roman ruin stands a church of Byzantine days, which fitly finishes the series. The forms to which men were feeling their way in the sally-port of Tiryns and in the treasure-house of Mykênê reached their perfection when the architects of the East taught the cupola, soaring or spreading as it might be, to rise on its supporting columns over the centre of the churches of Eastern Christendom. Primæval Greece strove after the arch; historic Greece, if she knew its constructive use, confined it to a few purposes of constructive usefulness. Primæval Italy strove, and strove with more success, in the same path, and made the form which Greece used so timidly the life of her national architecture. On Roman ground the arch grew into the cupola, but it was on the ground that was Greek and Roman alike, on the ground of the Eastern peninsula, that the cupola took its noblest form. On the Larissa of Argos a few traces have been found of galleries like those of Tiryns. Pausanias bears witness that Argos once had her subterranean chamber like those of Mykênê, and doubtless following the same construction. At Tiryns and Mykênê the series goes no further; the destroying hand of Argos decreed that it should go no further. The long life of Argos allowed every form to stand there side by side, from the gallery and the treasury to the Roman bath and the Byzantine church. Yet it is not in Argos itself that the series can be really studied. In the life of cities nothing preserves like early overthrow, nothing destroys like continuous life. Of the members of the Argive series the latest alone is perfect. The vault of the Roman bath is broken down; the gallery can scarcely be traced; for the existence of the treasury we have only the witness of a traveller seventeen hundred years back. It is among the victims of Argos that early overthrow has preserved to us the works of the earliest times. In forsaken Tiryns and Mykênê we learn more of the earliest days of Greece than we can learn in the city which has survived them by three-and-twenty centuries. We have mused over the walls, the guarded gate, the sally-port of Tiryns; we must go on to muse on the walls, the mightier gate, the treasuries, the rifled tombs, of Mykênê, Imperial city of Hellas in her earliest day.

The Akropolis of Mykênê.

Euripides was perhaps after all not so far wrong as he seemed to the mocking genius of comedy, when he raised the question whether life and death were not in truth things which had exchanged their names:

τίς οἶδεν εἰ τὸ ζῆν πέν ἐστι κατθανεῖν, τὸ κατθανεῖν δέ ζῆν;

It is at least very often so in the case of cities; it is emphatically so in the case of the great cities of the Argolic land. Argos, as we have seen, if it has not altogether died, has at least been brought down to a kind of life which, judged by its ancient standard, might pass for little better than death. Its continued being has destroyed well nigh every trace of its ancient state within the circuit which still remains inhabited. Argos is thus dead because it has lived. Mykênê, on the other hand, has remained alive because it died. Had Mykênê remained a ruling city, or even a dwelling-place of men in any shape, during all the ages which have passed since the fifth century before Christ, we should not see, as we now see, what the imperial city of the Pelopid house really was. Thanks to its happy destruction, no work of Turk, or Venetian, or Roman has ever arisen to jar on the associations of the primæval city. Even the works of those whom at Mykênê we must call the later Greeks, the men who dwelled there from the Dorian invasion to the days of Periklês, have passed away as though they had never been. No columns rise, as at Nemea, over the forsaken spot; we meet no tomb by the wayside, no legend graven on the rock, such as we light on as we tread the holy way from Athens to Eleusis. House and wall, temple and tower, were either utterly swept away by Argive wrath, or else they have crumbled away into nothingness since the scourge of Argos passed over the devoted city. Where once stood the wide streets of Mykênê, we meet only the shepherd with his crook to guide his flock, or the peasant woman, with Paionian industry, plying her distaff as she gathers her sheep or her goats to watering. For the hum of assembled citizens in the _agorê_, for the tramp of gathering warriors on the akropolis, we hear only the pipe of the shepherd himself and the bark of the shepherd’s dog. The shepherds who wander over the site of Mykênê may not wholly answer to the pictures of Theokritos or Virgil, but the crook, the pipe, the distaff, are here no figures of speech. They may be seen and heard daily as the sun rises over the deep gorge which fences in the Mykênaian akropolis, or when he “reigns” at eve over the heights of Artemis and Kronos. But even those few shepherds do not, like the few inhabitants of modern Corinth, dwell on the old site of Mykênê, nor do they profess to carry on the Mykênaian name. At the foot of the lower hill, the hill of the city as distinguished from the hill of the akropolis, a small church and a few houses, seeming almost to grow out of the rocky soil, form the small village, not of Mykênê but of Chorbati. Yet in one sense Chorbati has become Mykênê. Gathered there in a small museum are the less splendid and precious of the relics which modern discovery has brought to light on Mykênaian soil. And there too is one relic, torn from a rifled tomb on the akropolis, which to the eye of faith must be more precious even than the treasury and the lion-gate. There lies the nearly perfect skeleton which those who have trodden doubts and difficulties under their feet believe to be the very bones of Agamemnôn. The more cautious Greek antiquary is less rash in committing himself. Mr. Stamatâkês, the learned and zealous guardian of the Mykênaian treasury, points to it with a wise qualification. The rest of his explanation is given in the tongue which is alike his own and Homer’s. But, to express his doubts, the Hellenic lips have learned to form a Teutonic genitive. He does not commit himself to the belief that they are the bones of “Agamemnôn,” pure and simple; they are the bones of “Schliemann’s Agamemnôn.” Yet primæval Hellas, primæval Mykênê, has a history which may well live through alike unreasonable doubts and undiscerning faith. Call him what we will--Agamemnôn or anything else--the name matters little. It is a marked moment in one’s life when one looks on the bones of one who, we need not doubt, was, in days long before Hekataios wrote or even before Homer sang, a lord of many islands and of all Argos.

The position of the akropolis at Mykênê differs widely from that of either of the neighbouring akropoleis of Tiryns and Argos. The hill of Tiryns is a mere mound in the plain. The loftier hill of Argos, though far outtopped by the mountains behind it, still stands out as a marked object. But the akropolis of Mykênê, though we find it to be in a manner isolated, when we come to it, seems like an outpost of the far loftier hills immediately behind it. On one side the rock rises precipitously above a narrow gorge whose limestone cliffs at once, to an eye familiar with the West of England, suggest the gorges of Mendip, and, above all, the great pass of Cheddar. In the early days of fortifications, when there was no missile to be feared but darts and arrows, a fortress was not deemed to be in greater danger by reason of being thus overlooked. Indeed, to be overlooked by high and inaccessible mountains was in itself a kind of shelter. The Mykênaian akropolis thus stands upon the rocks and among the hills in a way in which its fellows at Tiryns and Argos do not. For that same reason it does not stand out in the same way as an object in the distant view. Its true form and position grow gradually upon us as we rise from the modern village along the paths--paths only of the shepherd and his flock--which are now all that represent the wide streets of the city beloved of Hêrê. More than one path may be chosen, and each will lead by one or more of the wonderful remains of the city itself, the so-called treasuries, as distinguished from the remains of the akropolis. But the path to be taken by choice, as it is the path to which the traveller’s instinct will most likely lead him, is that most to the right, that which skirts the brook which runs down from the limestone gorge, and which will lead his steps by the greatest monuments of all, the first and the second treasuries. But let the treasuries wait for a moment; they are works, though of unrecorded days, yet still of days far later than the defences of the akropolis itself. We will gaze first at the very centre of all, the centre, we may say, of præ-historic Hellas. And, as we draw near, we cannot help having our wrath slightly kindled against the last discoverer of Mykênê. Dr. Schliemann has done well in what he has brought to light; we cannot think that he has done well in what he has hidden. As we draw near, the height and outline of a great part of the outer wall of the akropolis are utterly hidden, the general view is spoiled, the proportion of the whole work is sadly damaged, because Dr. Schliemann chose to throw the rubbish which he dug out of the tombs anywhere where it might light. He has for the most part thrown it in vast heaps over the wall, by which a really large part of the course of the wall is hidden, and the whole view blurred and confused. A little trouble might have avoided this at first; a little more trouble might get rid of the rubbish now. In the last diggings at Athens much more care has been taken. The rubbish has been all carried away, and is piled in heaps where it does no harm. If in times to come those heaps should grow into hills like the “mons testaceus” at Rome, no harm will have been done, and an odd little piece of history will have been made. But Dr. Schliemann’s heaps of rubbish do seriously mar the general effect of the Mykênaian akropolis. They make it hard to understand the real line of the walls until we come quite close to them. Among the rocks and the walls, the walls growing out of the rocks, we see something which is neither rock nor wall, but which confuses the outline of both; as we come nearer, we find it to be the former contents of the royal tombs and of the other works which have been brought to light within the walls. As at Tiryns, there is a higher and a lower, an inner and an outer fortress within the akropolis itself. But the greater height of the Mykênaian hill makes this arrangement far more prominent, far more effective than it is at Tiryns. Only at Mykênê the lower enclosure has more of the air of an excrescence or an appendage than the lower enclosure of Tiryns. But it is this lower enclosure, the enclosure immediately entered by the famous lion-gate, which, whether an addition or not to the fortress above, has become the great centre of the associations of the place. There lie the empty tombs, thence came the wondrous treasures, which have carried us back into the depths of what we may fairly call præ-historic history, which have made us stand face to face, if not with the personal heroes of Homer, at least with the men of that age of Hellenic culture which the songs of Homer set before us.

The buildings of Mykênê have been described over and over again till their general effect must be almost as familiar to those who have not seen them as to those who have. But here, as everywhere else, it is the merely artistic character which can be thus taken at a distance. To feel Mykênê, as to feel any other place, we must see it. And even some of the artistic points can, as usual, be thoroughly made out only on the spot. One must see the place thoroughly to take in the wide difference between the masonry and artistic finish of the lion-gate and of the two chief treasuries. The lion-gate--we mean the gate itself, as distinguished from the lions--is a mere piling together of stones. The work is done doubtless with great mechanical skill, and it has the wonderful effect which all such primitive buildings have; still it is altogether without any claims on the score of art. But in the gateways of the treasuries, instead of the vast erect jambs of the lion-gate, we find well-wrought courses of stone in two orders, with something that may almost be called a moulding. These gateways had columns too. Unluckily nearly all are gone, even the precious fragment which was seen and drawn by the earlier travellers. This last, be it remembered, was of a kind which would not have looked out of place in any Romanesque building in England or Normandy. This is a most instructive fact, as the likeness must have been purely accidental; and this may serve to remind us that there are such things as accidental likenesses, and to warn us against leaping to conclusions when such likenesses are found in times and places far distant from one another. In the second treasury, the one lately brought to light by Dr. Schliemann, there is a fragment of another column, no longer in its place, which looks like the first rude attempt at the later Doric. Now over both these gateways, and also over the lion-gate, are openings of the same triangular form, though of course wrought far more carefully in the treasuries than in the lion-gate. In the treasuries these openings are openings; they are at present filled up with nothing. That over the lion-gate is filled, as all the world knows, with a basaltic stone which would seem more natural at Bamburgh than at Mykênê, carved with the famous lions, if lions they be, which guard a column that would not seem out of place in the _duomo_ of Fiesole, in the apse of La Couture at Le Mans, or even in the slype at Worcester. Can we believe that the lion-gate and the lions, that the lion-gate and the gates of the treasuries, are all of the same date? And in point of work the lions at once connect themselves with the gateways of the treasuries, not with the gateway over which they stand. Surely we have in these gateways signs of an abiding type which lived on through several stages of advancing art. Over the square-headed gate there was to be, for whatever reason, a triangular hole, doubtless meant to be filled with a stone of its own shape. In the treasuries either this stone was never put in or it is gone. In the lion-gate it was put in, as it seems to us, when art had passed the stage represented by the lion-gate itself, and had reached the stage which is represented by the gateways of the treasuries.

Another thought suggests itself. At Mykênê, as less clearly at Tiryns, the lion-gate, with its skilfully guarded approach, does not lead at once into the higher enclosure of the akropolis, but into the outer and lower one. Does this go at all to show that this outer enclosure, at Mykênê at least, was an addition to the primitive fortress of all, fencing in the upper part of the hill? The fact that the tombs were found in the lower enclosure also looks this way. There must have been a time when this ground was looked upon as being outside the city, or it would hardly have been used for purposes of burial. The argument does not quite reach demonstration; burial within the walls was not absolutely unknown even in historical Greece, and it may not be safe to argue from historical to primæval Greece. Still the two arguments so far fall together as at least to suggest the idea that we have in the inner enclosure something yet more ancient and venerable than all--something which may have been ancient and venerable, not only in the days of Homer, but in the days of those whose tale Homer has told.

For the present we keep within the akropolis, within the old hill fort which forms the inner circle of the Ekbatana of the imperial lords of præ-historic Hellas. We stand here within the walls which struck the minds of so many of the poets of Greece in the days when their desolation was a thing of yesterday--walls which seemed too mighty to be the work of mortal men, and which, like their fellows elsewhere, were deemed to have been wrought by the same hands which forged the thunderbolts of Zeus. Here we may in truth

Φάσκειν Μυκήνας τὰς πολυχρύσους ὁρᾷν, πολύφθορόν τε δῶμα Πελοπιδῶν
τόδε--

and we may deem that the house of the Pelopids was something which grew up as a new thing beneath the shadow of the Cyclopean walls. That inner fortress may well be to the Mykênaian empire of Homeric times what Roma Quadrata on the Capitol was to the Rome which bore rule over all Italy. But not a word is there in the Homeric tale to make us think that that empire was a dominion of foreign princes, or that the patriarch of the Pelopids was other than a son of the peninsula to which the race gave its name. From the akropolis one may look down on the enclosure which holds the rifled tombs, on the space beyond--the site of the wide streets of Mykênê--which holds the treasuries, and so on to destroying Argos and to Tiryns, the fellow-sufferer in overthrow. There is no other spot where we are carried so deep into unrecorded ages, and where unrecorded ages tell their tale so clearly. But the tale of the akropolis, even the tale of the inner fortress, is enough for one while. The tombs of the lower enclosure, the treasuries, if treasuries they be, of the outer city, may supply their own materials for separate thought.

The Treasuries and Treasures of Mykênê.

The Treasuries of Mykênê we have heard of all our days; the Treasures have become famous only since the diggings of Dr. Schliemann brought them to light. The names are perhaps unlucky; as, to those who have not seen the spot, they may suggest a connexion between the treasuries and the treasures which does not exist in fact. The treasures were not found in the treasuries, nor even in the same part of the city as the treasuries. The treasures come from the tombs, and all the tombs that have been opened lie in the outer and lower enclosures of the akropolis. The treasuries, one of which has long been famous, lie altogether outside the akropolis, in what must have been the outer city, among the wide streets of Mykênê. The word “treasures” again may suggest a false idea. Objects thrown into tombs as part of the honour done to deceased persons are hardly “treasures” in any ordinary sense of the word. A treasure is something which may be drawn upon for use; objects which are thrown into tombs are, in the nature of the case, never meant to be used again. But, by whatever name they are to be called, there they are; remains of a great age, of an age which, though beyond the reach of chronology, we can hardly call unrecorded. Though the great works of Mykênê are manifestly of various dates, yet all may in a general way be said to belong to one period--the period, whatever its length, whatever its distance from ourselves, when Mykênê was the head of Hellas. To some stage of that period the objects found in the tombs must belong. It is enough to say that they are work of the period which Homer had before his eyes when he sang of the transfer of the sceptre through the successive generations of the house of Pelops, no stranger house in his song. To attempt to assign the tombs, the skeletons, the ornaments, to particular persons is rash. And, on the other hand, the time is hardly come for those who take a general view of history to commit themselves to any decided judgment as to the place which these objects have in the history of art, or as to their relation to objects found in other lands. It is well that the specialists should for a little time longer have that branch of the subject in their keeping. Some new light will doubtless be thrown on the matter by the find which has just been made in Attica. When all these points have been thoroughly sifted, the historian will be glad to accept the results. As it is, it is enough for him that here are the tombs of the Mykênaian lords of Hellas, that here are the objects which the creed of their days deemed becoming offerings of reverence for the dead.

Besides the field which these objects open for the more direct student of art, they open also a field of almost higher interest for the historian of customs. The mode of disposing of the dead seems to have been a strange kind of compromise between burning and burying. If we rightly understand the process, the bodies were placed in the tombs; they were then half burned; lastly the masks were placed upon them, and the tombs were filled up with the vases and other objects. Here indeed is work for Mr. Tylor and any other labourers in that field. The effect of the masks is wonderful. Whether they are really likenesses or not, we accept them as such while we look on them; we feel ourselves brought more directly into the presence of the men of old than we are even by the sight of the skeleton. Physically the actual bones of the man are more truly part of himself; but we really feel brought nearer to him as we see the thin covering which has rested on his face, and which seems at least to profess to keep the stamp of his features. We will not dare to call him Agamemnôn or any other name. We look at least on what would be the likeness of one of those on whom our own Alfred so happily bestowed the name of the Cæsars that were to be, on one whose historic position is best brought home to us if we call him, in Alfred’s tongue, the Bretwalda of primæval Hellas.

The ornaments and other objects have been described and discussed over and over again by those who have a special object in their study. But there is one among them which we do not remember to have seen described in any of the published accounts, one which, if it has been already mentioned, will certainly stand being mentioned again. Of all the objects which Mr. Stamatâkês has under his care, and which he so fully and clearly explains to all who can follow him in his own tongue, there is none more curious in itself, none which speaks more directly home to us, than those pieces of thin gilding which were found in one of the tombs over the breast of one of the female bodies, and which, when put together, were found to make the complete figure of a young babe. There is nothing wonderful in this. A royal infant--a _clitunculus_, as some of our own chroniclers would have called him--may have died at Mykênê and have been buried with his mother, as well as anywhere else. But the sight of the impression of the little limbs seems to bring us more nearly into the presence of the home-life of those old kings than any other object in the whole collection. Criticism for a moment holds back; we are more inclined than usual to listen to the voice of legend, when we are told that we are looking on the masks of Kassandra and her child. Neither the Homeric nor the Æschylean story would ever put it into our heads to attribute children to Kassandra; but the local tradition in the days of Pausanias showed the tombs of the twin sons of Kassandra and Agamemnôn, slain and buried with their parents. In our fit of belief we even put aside the obvious question, Where is the mask of the other brother? The legend doubtless erred; in all cases where any tyrant seeks the destruction of a pair of twin brothers, or of young brothers of any kind, one, whether in history or in legend, escapes and lives. In our own eleventh-century history two doubly widowed mothers are left with twin children, each pair sought after by the Aigisthos of their own day. Of the original “clitunculi,” the twin babes of Eadmund and Ealdgyth, both indeed were saved, but one only lived. Of the second pair, the babes of Harold and the second Ealdgyth, one fell into the hands of the Conqueror, safe in his hands from death, though it might be to drag on life only in a dungeon; the other lived to show himself like a shadow on the fleet of Magnus. And, while we are believing, we may for a moment believe that, of a later pair of princes, one escaped, and that Perkin Warbeck was truly Richard the Fourth. The Mykênaian tradition must have erred in boasting of the tomb both of Pelops and of Têledamos. One must have been carried away along with Orestês his half-brother. The impression of the other’s form in beaten gold we will for a moment indulge ourselves in believing that our eyes have looked upon.

But, leaving dreams and analogies, leaving too the strictly scientific examination of the objects as works of art, the picture which they give us of the state of things in the age to which they belong is wonderful and interesting beyond words. We are indeed in the age of Homer, the age of gold and bronze, when, if we cannot strictly say with Hesiod that black iron was not yet, we can at least say that it had gone no way at all to displace the elder metal. We see before our eyes that abundance of gold the tradition of which clave to the Pelopid capital even in the days of the tragedians, and made Sophoklês speak of Mykênê as πολυχρύσος. It jars indeed slightly on the feelings to see the tombs themselves rifled and the more precious part of their contents borne off to distant Athens. As a mere matter of sentiment we might have said of the old King whose skeleton lies in the museum, “Let him alone, let no man move his bones.” We might be tempted to wish that the treasures themselves had remained in the state of

Aurum inrepertum, et sic melius situm
Cum terra celat.

But, without thus rifling the tombs of the dead, we should never have known that the dead and their treasures were there. When once the tombs were opened, the treasures could not be left in them; and, if they were to be borne away at all, they were best borne away to the national capital. In other cases we might plead for the capital of the district, but in this case we could not bear to give Argos another triumph. We must take the relics as they are, in their new place under the best of guardianship. But what a moment it must have been to have stood by the tombs themselves when they were first brought to light!

From the treasures, better perhaps called the relics, let us turn to the treasuries. What were they? Tombs, treasuries, or what? In the time of Pausanias they were clearly deemed to be treasuries. His words are explicit:--Ἀτρέως καὶ τῶν παίδων ὑπόγαια οἰκοδομήματα, ἕνθα oἰ θησαυροί σφισι τῶν χρημάτων ἦσαν. He pointedly distinguishes them from the tombs of Atreus and of those who perished with Agamemnôn on his return, among them Kassandra and her babes. These tombs can hardly fail to be the tombs which have been lately brought to light, though we should hardly find out from Pausanias’s account that the tombs are in the outer circle of the akropolis, while the treasuries are in the outer city of all. The treasuries--at least the great one, that known specially as the Treasury of Atreus--have been described and engraved over and over again. Yet when we at last stand before the gateway, when we pass in and stand beneath the mighty roof, the thing is not the less wonderful because we come to it as to an old friend. The feeling of familiarity is stronger than in the case of the lion-gate. Of this last we may know every detail, but certainly none of the ordinary engravings, hardly the best and latest photographs to be found at Athens, can thoroughly set before us its peculiar effect in the position where it stands. The treasuries we know to be underground works--one is strongly tempted to say vaults or cupolas--and we have a general notion of what they must be. But our previous knowledge takes away nothing from the feeling of the approach--the part which the common views least bring out; and the fact that the building is one which we have so long known and thought of, that it is the goal of a long-hoped-for pilgrimage, brings out feelings as strong and as keen, though of quite another kind, as those which are drawn forth by the act of discovery. And, after all, the best representation cannot fully bring home to us such features as the mighty stone which covers the entrance to the great treasury. Whence came it? who raised it, and wherefore? Was it a proud display of mere mechanical skill on the part of men whose works showed that they had advanced far beyond mere mechanical skill? Our thoughts flit beyond the sea to the yet mightier stone beneath which Theodoric once lay. In both cases, in the age when constructive art was slowly feeling its way and in the age when constructive art had reached all but its highest stage, there is a display of mere power, when the same result might have been brought about by easier means. There was no absolute need to seek and to raise so vast a block as that under which we pass into the great treasury. Still less was there any need to bring that gigantic block across the sea from Istria, when Theodoric might have been as easily covered with a dome of the ordinary construction as Galla Placidia had been.

We enter. It needs some effort of faith to believe that this roof, so cunningly put together of stones which have all but reached the secret of the true cupola, was once covered with brazen plates--that we are, in fact, in what once was one of the brazen chambers of which the poets tell us. From one point of view we may be glad that they are gone, as otherwise we could not so well have studied this wonderful construction. It is as marked a moment in a course of constructive study when we stand in the treasury of Mykênê as when we stand in the peristyle of Spalato. Each marks a great step in the history of art. In one we see how nearly men could come to the arched construction without actually reaching it. In the other we see the perfect construction applied for the first time to its highest artistic use. But Spalato is the direct parent of all that came after it. Mykênê is the parent of nothing. It surely points to some great revolution, some overthrow of the more civilized people by the less civilized, that the art of primæval Greece should have stopped where it did. In all these early buildings we find the arched construction only not brought to perfection. In the artistic architecture of historical Greece the arch, or any approach to it, as an artistic feature, was utterly unknown. At the outside, it is barely used here and there, in works which did not claim to be works of art, where the merest constructive necessity called for it.

To any one who is familiar with Irish remains the treasury of Mykênê cannot fail to suggest New Grange. The essential construction of the two works is the same. But here again the ever needful warning comes in. All that the undoubted likeness really proves is that the same stage of constructive skill was reached, in times perhaps far removed from one another, in Ireland and in Peloponnêsos. It does not prove, it does not even suggest, any nearer connexion than this. Otherwise, no field could be more tempting for a mystic ethnologist. Were there not Danaoi in Argolis? And was there not in Ireland also a people with a name very like Danaoi, but which we will not attempt to spell without an Irish library at hand?

The treasuries are, as Pausanias says, underground, wrought in the hill-side. There is something very singular in a work of this kind, a work of real building as much as anything that ever was built above ground, a work which has nothing in common with rock-hewn tombs, temples, churches, or houses, hidden so that a wayfarer who was not on the look-out might pass by without notice. Was concealment or safety the object sought? Then why were they not made within the fortified akropolis, and not in the midst of the outer city? And, be they tombs, be they treasuries or anything else, why were they so many and so scattered? Five have been reckoned up in all. One, the best preserved after the great one, has been, if not actually discovered, at least brought more fully to light, during Dr. Schliemann’s researches. The roof is broken through, so that it can be looked into from above; but the entrance is as perfect as that of the great treasury. Here it is that the quasi-Doric column is found, a sign perhaps of later date again than the great one. The others are partly pushed down, partly choked up. The great stone of the gateway thus brought near to the ground has much the air of a cromlech. We need hardly say that in mechanical construction a cromlech and the Parthenôn are exactly the same.

Such are some of the thoughts which press upon the mind as we walk where once were the wide streets of Mykênê rich in gold. There is no other spot like it. It is something to stand among the temples of Poseidônia, standing well nigh perfect within the Hellenic walls, while the remains of Roman Pæstum have to be sought for around them. It is something to stand on the akropolis of Kymê, and to feel that its very desolation has in sort brought things back to their ancient state. But at Mykênê the temples of Poseidônia would seem modern. They would seem as much out of place as the Roman amphitheatre seems at Poseidônia. They would, like them, speak of foreign invasion and foreign conquest, of the invading Dorian instead of the invading Roman. At Mykênê, not only is there no trace of later times, Macedonian, Roman, Frankish, Turkish; the very works of the Dorian are swept away. The Pelopid city is there, and the Pelopid city only. The Argive swept away the memorials of his own kinsfolk; he left the memorials of the elder race. There is nothing to disturb, nothing to keep us back from the thoughts of primæval times, and of none other. Beside Mykênê, Kymê itself seems modern, as Poseidônia seems modern beside Kymê. The colony far away on the Italian shore, with the akropolis rising almost straight above the sea, belongs to a state of things many stages later than the akropolis nestling among the inland mountains of Hellas itself, with the sea which brought so many dangers as a mere distant object in the landscape. The works at Mykênê stand as relics neither of a recorded nor of an unknown time; they stand as relics of days before history, but of days of which they are themselves the history. Once more we may give the warning: let names and dates be eschewed. It is enough that the stones were piled, the gold was hammered, the lions were carved in their slab of basalt, the skeleton on which we gaze was buried with its strange rites, by men of the race and age whose picture lives in the oldest and noblest songs of European man. At Mykênê we have reached the hearth and cradle of all Hellas; we have reached the hearth and cradle of all Europe. There we can give thanks for those lights of modern science which teach us to feel that in that hearth and cradle we are not wholly strangers. There we can feel that we come of the same ancestral stock, that we speak a form of the same ancestral speech, that we have our share in the ancestral institutes, which the common forefathers of Greek and Teuton brought from the common home. On the wonders of Egypt and Nineveh we may gaze with simple wonder; in them and their makers we have no share. At Mykênê we may say, as we gaze on the imperial skeleton, “The man is near of kin to us.” Within those walls the lay of Agamemnôn and the lay of Beowulf seem like strophes of the same poem. We may say, with our own Traveller in our own tongue:--

Mid Creacum ic wæs,
And mid Cásere,
Se þe win-burga
Ge-weald áhte.

Nowhere else do the remains of a time at once so famous and so distant stand up with such full life before our eyes. There is in truth no spot like it on earth.

Mykênê to Corinth.

Mykênê and Tiryns have taught us a lesson in the history of those Greek cities which perished in days which we are used to look on as still ancient. Argos has given us one type of the Greek city which has lived on through all changes down to our own times. Corinth, a city hardly less famous than Argos, from some points of views even more famous, has had yet another destiny. After perishing utterly and rising again, Corinth has lived on through all later changes down to recent times, to give way, in recent times, to a new city bearing its own name. And on the way which leads us from Mykênê to Corinth we pass by a site of another kind, the site of a spot which never was a city, but which was as famous and venerable in Hellenic legend and Hellenic religion as any city not of the very foremost rank. Olympia is yet far off, but a foretaste of Olympia may well be had in the plain which was hallowed by the lesser festival, beneath the columns of Nemea, alongside of its ruined church.

But how is Nemea to be reached? It is perhaps a tribute to the ancient greatness of Mykênê that it is there that civilization in one important branch may be said to come to an end. From Nauplia the journey by Tiryns and Argos may be made in a carriage; but it cannot be said that the latter part of the road from Argos to Mykênê is made according to the principles of Macadam. Indeed, we think it would be possible to carry the drive a little further than Mykênê, or, to speak more accurately, than Chorbati. But as such a drive would not take the traveller to any point in particular, and as he certainly could not continue it to Corinth, we may say that the carriage-road ends at Mykênê. Mykênê is the last point which the traveller can examine by that mode of journeying. At Chorbati he will begin his really Greek journey. He will have to go after the fashion of the country so far as to travel, as one of a cavalcade, on one of the small and hardy horses of the country, which seem, very much like their guides or drivers, to be able to do anything and to eat nothing. Perhaps however he may not so far conform to the fashion of the country as himself to become a package on the back of his pack-horse, and to sit there with both his legs on one side. Such a manner of going, besides other things to be said against it, has this manifest disadvantage, that it compels the traveller to take a one-sided view of the land which he goes through. On a journey on which the traveller has to take everything with him, he will hardly forget to take European saddles also. But, even with a European saddle, it needs a calm head and good horsemanship to take in much of the view, or to call up many of its associations, when you are, not indeed, like General Wolfe, “scrambling up,” but, if the phrase be accurate, “scrambling down”

... Rough rugged rocks
Well nigh perpendiklar.

The scrambling up is well enough; it is with the scrambling down, that the hardship comes. It is easy to convince one’s intellect that there is really no danger, that the beast on which one is mounted, most unfairly called ἄλογον, knows thoroughly what he is about, and is far wiser than the ζωὸν λογικόν whom he carries. To give him his head, and to let him go where he pleases, is the dictate of common-sense; but there are moments when common-sense will not be heard. At such moments the traveller begins to wish that he was like Pheidippidês--most rightly named as sparing horses and not sparing his own feet--to whom the journey from Mykênê to Corinth would clearly have been no more than a pleasant morning’s walk. Or better still would it be, if the days of Pausanias could come back, as there is indeed fair hope that they soon may, and that the whole road from Nauplia to Corinth may again be passed by the help of wheels. To the young and adventurous the novelty and roughness of the mode of going seem to have their charms. The traveller more advanced in life would be better pleased even to go on his own feet, and he might think it better still if he might enjoy the Eastern luxury of going

ἐφ’ ἁρμαμαξῶν μαλθακός κατακείμενοι.

One thing however is certain--a land without inns is in every way better than a land with bad inns. The travelling party is self-supporting, and carries along with it all the necessaries of life, as well as some of its comforts and conveniences. It is wonderful how shortly and how thoroughly a sleeping-room and a well-furnished dinner-table can be called as it were out of nothing. It may be better not to ask too minutely what becomes of the hospitable inhabitants who so readily turn out to make way for the strangers. Certain it is, that for the native part of the travelling party, reasonable and unreasonable, any quarters for the night will do. One point, however, calls for a protest; if the man chooses to look on his fustanella and his other garments as an inseparable part of himself, that is his own look-out; but it is hard to treat the unreasonable beast as if his pack-saddle were an inseparable part of him, and to give him no rest from his burthen either by day or by night. As for the traveller himself, he certainly would not exchange the fare, he might not always be anxious to exchange the lodging, which he makes for himself in the museum at Mykênê or in the house of the single priest of fallen Corinth; for those that he could get in some lands where, as there are inns, people do not take everything with them.

The cavalcade leaves Chorbati to make its way to Corinth by way of Nemea. Pausanias gives a choice of routes; the one chosen is that which he distinguishes as the τρητὸς, which he describes as narrow, but passable for carriages. Narrow enough it is, and well it deserves its name as a passage cleft through the rocks, but the wheel tracks are there to show that carriages did once go that way. We are between Corinth and Argos, not between Thebes and Delphi; but we can well fancy the difficulties and the likelihood of quarrel if Laios and Oidipous met in such a strait as this.

We pass on, over ground which five-and-fifty years ago beheld one of the fiercest struggles of the War of Independence. Each of the passes, each of the heights, was held and stoutly contested in the August of 1822, when the men of Peloponnêsos beat back the Turkish host of Dramali in utter defeat. On our immediate path the ground rises and falls, but we are led over no special heights till, as we descend, the plain of Nemea breaks upon us. The columns rise in all the stateliness of solitude. Beyond rise the hills in which the ancients placed the cave of the Nemeian lion. This then is one of the seats of Pan-hellenic religion and Pan-hellenic festive gathering. If its glory did not reach that of Olympia or Delphi or even of the Isthmus, it is the first of the four to which our journey leads us, and we remember that Nemeian victories called forth the song of Pindar, and that Alkibiadês did not disdain either to win triumphs there, or to have those triumphs recorded in the choicest art of the sculpture of his day. There is the temple in the plain, a plain well fitted for the purposes of the games, and, cut out of one of the hills to the right as in the Larissa of Argos, we see where the theatre of Nemea once was. Though the place hardly ranks among sites of first-rate interest, though it calls up no such primæval associations as Mykênê which we have left, no such later associations as Corinth to which we are going, there is much to muse upon in the plain of Nemea. The legend of the lion comes home to us all the more strongly after seeing the sculptured forms which the world has agreed to call lions in the Mykênêan akropolis. Science and scholarship going hand in hand have given him a new interest. The lion, whose cave we cannot see, though we see the mountain side in which it is hollowed, may be mythical in his own person, but he is no mere creature of fiction. If, with Mr. Dawkins, we trace out the retreat of the lion from Europe, we see at Nemea one very important stage in his retreat. We trace him from the day when he made his lair in the caves of Mendip to the day when Herodotus so accurately marked out his geographical limits within the European continent. In his day the lion was still found in the region which stretched from the Achelôos to the Nestos; and when we look at the evidently careful nature of the notice itself, and when we go on to put that notice in its right place among other notices, we shall not be tempted for one moment to think that the lions of Herodotus were other than real lions. Some indeed have suggested that Herodotus was so poor a naturalist as to mistake lynxes or wild cats for lions. No one will be likely to think this when he has once put the whole evidence in its right order. Just as we can believe in a Mykênaian empire without pledging ourselves to a personal Agamemnôn, so we can believe in lions in Peloponnêsos without pledging ourselves to a personal Hêraklês. The constant references to the lion in the Homeric poems must come from actual knowledge or from very recent tradition. The beast has a two-fold name; he is not only λέων but λῖς, and we are tempted, though it is slightly dangerous, to carry our thoughts on a little further with regard to his name. We ourselves seem never to have called him by anything but a name borrowed from the Latin; but are not _Löwe_ and λῖς strictly cognate, signs of a time when the king of beasts had a name common to the whole Aryan family? Anyhow we may be sure that primitive legend would not have quartered the lion at Nemea, that primitive art would not have sculptured him at Mykênê, except at times when his presence in Peloponnêsos was, if a thing of the past at all, a thing of a very recent past.