“O home and hearth-stone mine,
Built by Cyclopic hand,
Mycenæ, fatherland,
Our love is thine!”
Pausanias speaks of Agamemnon and others of the family as buried within the walls of Mycenæ, and places the tombs of Clytemnestra and her paramour without. The various attempts to identify with literary tradition the beehive tombs below or the shaft graves discovered by Schliemann on the acropolis above involve varying degrees of improbability or of contradiction, and from these ingenious attempts to reconcile facts it is a relief to turn to the realities of pure fiction.
The “Agamemnon” of Æschylus, the greatest of extant Greek dramas, opens with a soldier posted on the palace roof at Argos continuing the ten years’ watch for the beacon signal[[34]] that is to flash across the Ægean the news of the capture of Troy, in order that the guilty Clytemnestra may not be taken unawares. Presently the beacon flashes out on Mount Arachneum, seen, as the watcher looks eastward across the plain, between the Heræum and Tiryns. The long chorals contain the kernel of the poet’s thought. The Argive elders enter chanting their anapæsts:—
“Now this year is the tenth since ’gainst Priam of Troy,
As antagonist great,
Menelaus the lord, Agamemnon besides
Holding power two-throned and two-sceptred from Zeus,