The gorge to the right is the valley which served as a defence for the Acropolis on the south side. The piece of road to the left is within a few paces of the famous bee-hive tomb known as the Treasury of Atreus.
through the Trojan war, and even before it; and perhaps the proximity of her shrine to Mycenæ, which was only a few miles distant, may help to account for the prominence of that city and its prince in the story of the war.
After being depopulated by the Argives, Mycenæ seems to have been for a long time comparatively deserted, and even now it presents very much the same appearance as it did when seen by Pausanias nearly eighteen hundred years ago. Nowhere has the spade achieved greater triumphs than in this venerated spot. The story of Schliemann’s excavations, both here and at Troy, is one of the romances of the nineteenth century. From his childhood everything mysterious had a fascination for him, and he was possessed with a passionate admiration for the heroes of the Iliad. Though he was early thrown upon his own resources to earn a livelihood, and had a hard struggle for many years, he found time for the study of Greek and other languages, which he mastered chiefly by committing whole books to memory. Having succeeded in amassing wealth he devoted the remainder of his life to the interests of Greek archæology, cherishing his faith in the Homeric legends in spite of much ridicule, poured upon him sometimes by men of the greatest learning, until at length he was rewarded by discoveries which surpassed his fondest expectations. His conclusions may not all be sound. For example, it is the opinion of Zountas, the eminent Greek archæologist, in view of all the facts which have come to light, that the bodies found in the shaft-graves within the citadel were not, as Schliemann supposed, the remains of Agamemnon and other members of the house of Pelops, to whose graves Pausanias alludes, but those of an earlier Perseid dynasty, and that the beehive tombs found outside the citadel are those of Agamemnon and other Atreidan kings, being similar to a considerable number of other tombs found on the eastern side of Greece as far north as Thessaly. With this agrees the fact that the famous lion-gate and the adjoining part of the wall are not built in the same Cyclopean style as the rest of the wall, the latter being composed of rough blocks piled one upon another without order, and kept in position by means of small stones and clay inserted between them, while the portions above referred to are composed of carefully-hewn stones of a polygonal shape, fitting into one another.
A prodigious quantity of pottery and other productions of art in gold, bronze, stone, and other materials, has been discovered in the graves and elsewhere at Mycenæ. Such variety do the treasures now stored in the Museum at Athens display that they are supposed to represent a period of artistic development extending from about 1600 to 1100 B.C. Among other things found were an ostrich egg, articles made of ivory, and a great number of amber beads, proving a connection both with Africa and the Baltic. Some of the artistic designs, too, such as those in which the papyrus and the lotus appear, show traces of intercourse with Egypt, which might also be inferred from the discovery of Mycenæan pottery at Thebes in that country. It is at Hissarlik (Troy), however, and in certain islands in the Ægean Sea, especially Crete, that the chief evidence of a civilisation like that of Mycenæ has been discovered. It is the opinion of experts that its origin may go as far back as 2500 B.C., and that its development in Crete may have been contemporaneous with the maritime empire which was associated with the name of Minos, whose influence extended as far as Sicily on the west, and which could hardly fail to be in touch with Asia Minor, Phœnicia, and Egypt. Whether the Mycenæan civilisation was due to the Achæan race of warriors described in Homer, or to Pelasgians, or to the Phœnicians, has not yet been fully determined. In some respects it does not tally with the conditions of the heroic age, of which Homer sings. For example, very few traces of iron have been found compared with what we might have expected from the number of allusions to it in Homer. The same is the case as regards the safety-pins for fastening the seamless garments which the Achæans wore. Moreover, Homer represents burning, not burial, as the usual mode of disposing of the dead. But it is possible that these differences may have belonged to different stages in the history of the Achæan civilisation, which was probably in a state of decadence when Homer wrote. In any case the places to which he gives prominence are generally found to have been centres of the civilisation in question. With regard to Mycenæ in particular, the epithets applied to it by the poet—“abounding in gold” and a “well-built city”—are singularly appropriate. Apart from its legendary dignity as the capital city of the “king of men,” there can be no doubt that Mycenæ was a place of great wealth and importance, partly owing to its trade in pottery and other works of art, but chiefly, perhaps, to its commanding position on the highway of commerce between Nauplia and Corinth—in other words, between the Argolic Gulf on the south and the Corinthian and Saronic Gulfs on the north. The latter point is emphasised by a recent writer in the Edinburgh Review, who says: “Mycenæ is on the flank of the hills, and possesses good springs, that great treasure in the thirsty plains of Argolis. Its fine military position is guarded by rocky defiles. Its watch-towers command every vale from which a land force could attack, and every space of sea-coast that might reveal a pirate’s raid. It is the very gate of the pass that leads from the plain of Argos to the beach of Corinth, and to this day the train takes travellers past its portals from Nauplia to the north-western gulf. Such land passages as this, from one sea to another, were of the highest importance to merchant-shipping in the old days of small light vessels, and continued to be so until comparatively recent times. The riches of the barons of Mycenæ were solely due to the fact that they could levy toll on passing caravans of merchandise without fear of an overlord. It was to guard the fortune thus amassed that the ramparts were constructed, which the astonished
