Never goat-pasture more lonely, thou’rt merely
Something they point at, while driving a-fold.
Said an old herd to me: ‘Here stood the city
Built by Cyclōpes, the city of gold.’”
Alpheus of Mitylene, Greek Anthology.
In the Argolid it seems reasonable to turn aside from history, in its narrower definition, to recall the tales of heroes and the “grandeur of the dooms imagined for the mighty dead.” The turbulent and uneven course of events in which Argolis of historic times appears now as an ally, now as an enemy of other powerful states, is of less moment than the legends handed down and crystallized in great literature. Even if the sagas which may have formed the nucleus of the Iliad sprang from the older Thessalian “Argos,” the Homeric poems, as known to the classic Greeks and to us, concern themselves with the mighty fortresses of the Argolid. The Attic drama reënforced the epic tradition, and the interchanging use in Homer of Achæans, Danai, and Argives to designate the Greeks, suggests the elements which gave the later poets opportunity for varied interpretation.
Argolis was the outpost of the Peloponnesus, and even of the whole Greek mainland, for the prehistoric invaders and traders from Crete, the southern Ægean or Phœnicia. The rugged eastern peninsula of Laconia, indeed, extends southward nearly a whole degree of latitude further than Argolis, but the dangerous promontory, Malea, did not so often entice mariners to double it as it served for a beacon to direct their course northward into the deep shelter of the beautiful Gulf of Argos. It is easy to understand how naturally the early captains of commerce or conquest would be guided up the long coast until they beached their boats under the impregnable rock of Nauplia and the low hill of Tiryns levelled, as it seemed, by the footprint of some god at whose bidding the “Cyclopes” reared its prehistoric and superhuman walls.
A GALLERY OF THE ACROPOLIS OF TIRYNS
But the southward-facing gulf was not the only approach to Argolis. The earth’s crust, pushed up into a ridged peninsula between the Saronic and Argolic gulfs, falls away also at the north to the Corinthian Gulf and the Isthmus. From this direction migrating bands of Achæans came overland to mingle with the more numerous “Pelasgians” and to dominate them by their intellectual power and by their rich and conquering Greek speech. When, after the lapse of long years, Achæan imagination, combined with the highly developed “Pelasgian” skill in building, had reared or developed a fortress on the acropolis of Mycenæ, robber barons could control the mountain gateway. And with the probably earlier Larisa, the acropolis of Argos, and with the fortresses of Tiryns and of Midea, they could take their toll of all who would enter the Argive plain from the north or the south. The masters of these palace castles, as their wealth and their wants increased, could afford to be hospitable to Cretan art or to the contributions from the Ægean or Asia. They may, perhaps, as time went on, have visualized the spoken word in the new characters of the alphabet, whatever its provenance, whether brought over seas to Nauplia by some Palamedes, who might pose as its inventor, or by the Phœnician traders, middlemen between the Greeks and the men of Crete and the Ægean who, centuries before, had developed writing from their picture script.