The five tombs of Mycenæ, or at least three of them, contained such enormous treasures, that they cannot but have belonged to members of the royal family. But the period of the kings of Mycenæ belongs to a very remote antiquity. Royalty ceased there at the Dorian invasion, the date of which has always been fixed at 1104 B.C. Thucydides says that it took place eighty years after the war of Troy, which has been hitherto supposed to have ended in 1184 B.C. But, in agreement with all archæologists, I hold to the conclusion that, on the evidence of the monuments of Troy, the capture and the destruction of that city, and consequently also the Dorian invasion, must have occurred at a much earlier date.
It has been objected that the five sepulchres cannot possibly contain the bodies of Agamemnon, Eurymedon, Cassandra, and their followers, for the reason that they were killed by their enemies, Ægisthus and Clytemnestra, who had usurped the power, and who would neither have buried them nor have permitted them to be buried with immense treasures. But this objection falls to the ground before the testimony of Homer, that even he who killed his enemy burned him in his full armour, with all his weapons. Thus, for example, Andromache says to Hector:[384]
... "Father I have none,
Nor honoured mother; for divine Achilles
My father slew, and sacked Cilician Thebes,
Fair-peopled city of the lofty gates.
Yet stript he not Eëtion of his arms,
Through the restraint of a religious awe,
But burning him with all his panoply,
Heaped high his tomb." I. C. WRIGHT