Straightliest who should judge the right."
THE AGORA IN HOMER.
What reader can follow this vivid picture, in the light furnished by my discovery of the Agora at Mycenæ, without feeling that the poet had often witnessed such a scene, perhaps on this very spot?
Homer makes the Trojan Agora, the assembly of all the people, old and young, with the elders, meet in the citadel of Ilium, at the gates of Priam.[374]
In several passages of the Odyssey he describes the Agora of the Phæacians, which was also in the citadel, near the port. Hither the people were led by Alcinous, to hear the wonderful adventures of Ulysses, and they also "coming, seated themselves near on polished stones (or smoothed slabs); and the spaces of the Agora and the seats were quickly filled by the thronging people."[375]
To complete the parallel, this Phæacian Agora (that is, its circular enclosure) was "fitted together with stones dragged to their places and sunk in the ground," like the slabs of the Agora at Mycenæ; and it surrounded "a beautiful Posideüm," which we must naturally suppose to have been a small open sanctuary in the centre of the Agora.[376]
I may add, as a proof of the great importance of the Agora in the civic life of the Heroic age, that its absence among the Cyclopes is cited by Homer to characterize their barbarous state.[377]
I at first thought that every one of the large slabs of the circular double parallel row, which forms the enclosure of the Agora and its benches was a tombstone, and marked a grave; but this could not be the case. There are no real tombs either between the two parallel rows or on either side of them. The twelve quadrangular tomb-like recesses which form part of the enclosure of the Agora on the north side, have turned out to be nothing else than small reservoirs or cisterns. They were filled with household remains and bones of animals. At all events the Agora appears to have been erected in honour of those who were buried in the five sepulchres, but evidently at a later period, though undoubtedly centuries before the capture of Mycenæ by the Argives. I infer this from the irregular and careless architecture of the Cyclopean wall which supports the double parallel row in the lower part of the Acropolis, and from the number of slabs which it contains resembling those of that enclosure.
As a further proof, I may mention that between the stones of this wall, as well as between the two double circular rows of slabs which form the enclosure and benches of the Agora, and in the tomb-shaped cisterns, I find only fragments of the usual Mycenean pottery, and no trace of that ancient hand-made and wheel-made pottery which is found in the royal tombs. I think it therefore highly probable that the erection of the Agora coincides with the renewal of the tombstones on the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 5th tombs, and the erection of the sacrificial altar on the 4th tomb; and that this renewal was occasioned by the immense enthusiasm which the Rhapsodists, who went from house to house chanting the Homeric hymns, roused among the people for the heroes of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Very likely the glorious acts of the king of men, Agamemnon, and his companions, were frequently chanted here in the Agora on their very sepulchres. I may here observe that while the whole Acropolis is covered with remnants of Cyclopean house-walls, I found no trace whatever of any prehistoric building within the sacred precincts of the circular Agora.