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.