To the left the principal church of the modern town of Argos. Behind the town rises the splendid mass of Larissa, the Acropolis of the ancient city, with mediæval fortifications on its summit. Half-way up lies the romantically situated convent of the Panagia.
Argos played an ignoble part at the time of the Persian invasion. It refused to make common cause with Sparta, unless a thirty years’ truce were concluded between the two states, and the honour of commanding the allied forces were shared equally between them—a demand to which Sparta could not accede, though willing to admit the king of Argos to an equality with her own two kings. In spite of the abstention of Argos the two neighbouring cities of Mycenæ and Tiryns each sent a contingent to Thermopylæ and Platæa, and it was partly in revenge for this that Argos in 468 B.C. took possession of these cities and deprived them of their liberties. The comparative insignificance of Mycenæ from this time forward accounts for Argos being so often substituted for it by the friendly dramatists of Athens, as the scene of the great tragedies in the family of Agamemnon. With all its pride in its mythical glory, Argos never produced any great man after Pheidon—unless we give it credit for its remote connection with Alexander the Great, who claimed to be descended from an Argive exile who settled in Macedonia. Argos had the opportunity more than once of becoming the head of a league against Sparta, and at one time it had a strong military force in its “Thousand,” a highly trained and well-equipped regiment composed of young men belonging to its best families; but it was weakened by internal dissensions between the oligarchic and democratic parties, and never enjoyed more than a very brief ascendency. At one time its citizens made an attempt, with the help of Alcibiades and the Athenians, to connect the city with the sea by means of long walls like those of Athens, but the Spartans interfered and soon put a stop to the work.
In its wars with Sparta Argos sought more than once to take advantage of the religious scruples of the enemy. This happened especially in connection with the festival of Carnean Apollo (a deity worshipped by them both), the date of which the Argives varied to suit their own convenience, alleging the celebration of it as a reason why military operations should be suspended. To guard against such strategy, Agesipolis, the Spartan king, on one occasion obtained authority from the oracles of Delphi and Olympia to disregard such a fictitious claim. Having crossed the border he was challenged by two heralds wearing the insignia of their office, on the ground that it was a time of holy truce; to which Agesipolis replied that he had the warrant of the gods to disobey their commands. The same evening there was a shock of earthquake, whereupon the Spartans sang the pæan to Apollo and expected an order to retreat; but the king declared that as the earthquake had not happened till after he had crossed the frontier he regarded it as a favourable omen. He proceeded to ravage the country, and had reached the gates of Argos when a flash of lightning killed several of his men, whereupon he at once beat a retreat.
In the previous century a great outrage upon religion had been committed by a Spartan king, Cleomenes, who afterwards went mad and committed suicide. Having driven 6000 Argive troops into the sacred grove of Apollo, close to the city, he set fire to the grove and put the 6000 men to death, inducing many of them to quit their place of refuge on the understanding that their lives would be spared. He then went with a thousand men to the temple of Hera, a few miles distant, and insisted on sacrificing to the goddess in spite of the rule of the sanctuary, by which it was forbidden to strangers; and when admission was refused he caused the priest to be dragged from the altar and scourged. To the great displeasure of his countrymen, however, he carried the war against Argos no farther, alleging as his reason that the light on the altar had flashed upon him from the bosom of the statue of the goddess, not from her head.
Although the chief Dorian temple in the district was that on the summit of Larissa in honour of Apollo, the Heræum, just referred to, was a much more ancient sanctuary, and was probably the original seat of the worship of Hera in Greece. Of this we have a token in the discovery among its ruins of an Egyptian scarab with cartouche, supposed to be of Thothmes III. (fifteenth century B.C.). Thucydides reckoned the date of the Peloponnesian war by the priestly registers in this temple, which seem to have been even older than the Olympian lists. The earliest priestess is said to have been Io, identified with the moon, whom Zeus transformed into a cow, and whose wanderings, imposed upon her by the jealous goddess, extended to the crossing of the Thracian straits, thence called Bosporus (Ox-ford or Cow-ford).
During the priesthood of Chryso, about a thousand years later (423 B.C.), the temple was destroyed by fire owing to the upsetting of a lamp by the aged priestess while she was asleep. A splendid new temple was soon erected on an adjacent site, but only the foundations of it can now be traced, with some remains also of the older building at a still lower level. Another priestess was Cydippe, whose two sons, Cleobis and Beiton, in the absence of oxen, drew her in a cart all the way from Argos to the Heræum, a distance of seven miles. In the joy and pride of her heart the mother prayed the goddess to give her sons the best gift that could fall to the lot of man. The consequence was that the young men, having fallen asleep in the sanctuary after sacrificing and feasting, awoke no more, the goddess thus signifying that death was better than life. Pausanias tells us that the temple contained a wooden image of Hera, which had been removed from the conquered city of Tiryns, and also an image of the goddess in gold and ivory, the work of Polycleitus. A good many fragments of the ancient sculpture have been brought to light, and not a few of them are built into Christian churches and other edifices in the neighbourhood, especially a church dedicated to the Virgin, which is worth a visit on this account.
The Heræum will always have a charm for the classical scholar as the spot where Agamemnon was solemnly acknowledged as their leader by the assembled Greeks before setting out for Troy. It is significant that Hera is represented as devoted to the Greeks all
