If one were entering Argolis neither by the modern railway nor in company with one of these instalments of prehistoric Achæans that descended from the north, but were faring along the good highroad from Corinth in the days of Mycenæ’s glory, he would follow up the Longopotamo River, which flows down west of Acrocorinth into the Corinthian Gulf. Before crossing the watershed that slopes to the Argolic plain he would have come to Homer’s “well-built” Cleonæ in a semi-circle of wooded mountains. Here the ancient roads part, one going east of Mount Treton more directly to Mycenæ, the other making a detour to the west to the Argive plain and then to Mycenæ, stationed like a huge spider at the centre of its web. When Lucian’s Charon, off on a day’s furlough from the Ferry, asks Hermes to point out the famous cities of antiquity, the latter shows him Babylon and then adds: “But Mycenæ and Cleonæ I am ashamed to point out to you, and Ilium above all. For when you go down home again you’ll certainly be throttling Homer for his big boasts. Long ago, to be sure, they were prosperous, but now they are dead and gone. For cities, Ferryman, die out just like people, and, queerest of all, whole rivers. For instance, there’s not so much as a ditch left of the Inachus in Argos now-a-days.” Lucian forgets his quasi sixth century perspective in this pessimistic outlook and descends to things as they were in his own time, when his contemporary Pausanias explained the “summer-dried” condition of the Inachus as due to Poseidon’s anger because Hera had been given the preference to himself in the Argive land. But not even the Lynceus vision, temporarily put at the disposal of Charon by an Homeric incantation, could have been expected to reveal, beneath the oblivious Argive soil of the second century of our era, the rich treasures of Mycenæ, to which the X-rays of the archæologists have now penetrated.
Before descending along the bed of the northern tributary of the Inachus into the plain we turn aside to the precinct of Nemea. This lies in a valley of its own between those of Phlius and Cleonæ and, like them, on a stream, the Nemea, which also flows down to the Corinthian Gulf. The deep grass, fed by the overflowing waters, gave the name Nemea, “pasture-land.” The biennial Nemean games, celebrated on the high watershed at this entrance to the peninsula, were especially pan-Peloponnesian. They were instituted, according to a charming story, by Adrastus and the rest of the “Seven” on their way to Thebes, as an atonement for the death of the child Opheltes, carelessly left by his nurse on a bed of wild parsley (or celery) and slain by a dragon while she fetched water for the warriors. The solemn funereal origin of the games was kept before the mind by the dun-colored raiment worn by the umpires and emphasized by the cypress grove which in antiquity surrounded the temple. Pindar seems to reflect this feeling when he refers to the “solemn plains” in connection with Adrastus. Elsewhere he speaks of the “lovely contests of Nemea.” Where the little Opheltes died on his bed of wild parsley and the Argive champions passed by to Thebes are the lonely ruins of the Temple of Zeus. Three slender columns still stand to watch over their fallen companions, stretched upon the ground by the Earthshaker whose envy has shaken down so many temples of rivals while, by the cunning of Athena in sharing with him her precinct, he has left the great rock in Athens unmoved. Zeus, the virile god of the Achæans, is lord and master at Nemea, while Hera presides in the Argive plain as she did originally at Olympia.
The cave of the Nemean lion slain by Heracles at the bidding of Eurystheus, king of Mycenæ or Tiryns, cannot be identified with certainty. Indeed, the king of beasts himself, so far as Argolis is concerned, has been now confined by the excavators within the narrow limits of a Phrygian gem. Heracles, in his search for rare fauna, flora, and other exhibits, completed six of his twelve labours in the Peloponnesus, two of them within the borders of Argolis, before he was compelled to go abroad for the fruit of the Hesperides or the three-headed hound of Hades. He had already killed a lion on Mount Cithæron and assumed its skin as his conventional uniform, and when the spoils of the Nemean lion were delivered at Mycenæ the king might well, it may be thought, have deemed it suitable to commemorate by a “totem” on the Gate of the Acropolis the subjugation of this original autochthon of Mount Treton, which dominated the two highways leading to the fortress.
In the Homeric poems it is Mycenæ, “rich in gold,” and “well-walled” Tiryns that are predominant in Argolis. The legendary kingdom of the Atreidæ extended over a large part of the Peloponnesus, and it was pleasing to Argive pride to reserve Mycenæ as headquarters for Agamemnon, king of men, and to parcel off Lacedæmon to Menelaus when he was not represented as also living in Argolis. Mycenæ commanded the mountain roads to the Corinthian Gulf and the Isthmus, and a prehistoric network of roadbeds that focus at Mycenæ lifts out of the realm of mere legend the controlling influence of the mighty fortress over the territory to the northward. To the south of the mountains it was connected with Tiryns and Argos in a varying sequence of leagues and rivalries.
Mycenæ is now as familiar to the modern world as the Acropolis of Athens. Its resurrection within our own times has called forth manifold accounts and pictures of the “beehive tombs,” the Cyclopean walls, the Gate of the Lions (never, indeed, wholly buried), the circle of shaft graves on the acropolis and the treasure found within them.
The three great dramatists all dealt with scenes from the family history of the Atreidæ or Pelopidæ, the illustrious but blood-stained dynasty that for a few generations only (if we allow the Heracleidæ their pedigree) broke in upon the continuity of the Perseid line, descended through Danaus from Inachus. When Eurystheus was slain, as Thucydides records, by the Heracleidæ in Attica, the kingdom passed to his mother’s half-brother Atreus, the son of Pelops. Agamemnon, his son, or his grandson, is described by the historian as “the greatest naval potentate of his time,” and he cites the Iliad which speaks of him as “lording it over many ships and over all Argos,” that is, over all the Argolid.
Although Æschylus, by reason of a contemporary rapprochement between the Athenians and the Argives, explicitly lays the scene of his “Agamemnon” at Argos, the traditional association with Mycenæ, handed down from Homer, has usually prevailed. Sophocles returned to it, and in his “Electra” assumes Mycenæ as the home of the royal pair, while Euripides, in his “Electra,” loosely refers to both cities, although in other plays Mycenæ is uppermost in his mind. Thus Iphigeneia at Aulis, about to be sacrificed, exclaims:—
“O mother mine, Pelasgian land,
O virgin’s home, Mycenæ!”
And amongst the Taurians, overjoyed at her reunion with her brother, her thoughts likewise revert to Mycenæ:—