If I were to attempt any full description of this wonderful place I should be obliged to copy out a great part of the fifth chapter in Dr. Schliemann’s book, in which Dr. Dörpfeld has set down very modestly, but very completely, the results of his own acuteness and research. Many things which are now plain enough were perfect riddles till he found the true solution, and the acuteness with which he has utilized the smallest hints, as well as the caution of his conclusions, make this work of his a very model of scientific induction.
He says, rightly enough, that a minute description is necessary, because a very few years will cover up much of the evidence which he had plainly before him. The concrete floors, the remains of mud-brick walls, the plan of the various rooms, will be choked up with grass and weeds, unless they are kept covered and cleared. The rain, which has long since washed all traces of mortar out of the walls, will wash away far more now that the site is opened, and so the future archæologist will find that the book Tiryns will tell him much that the actual Tiryns cannot show him.
The lower platform on the rock is not yet touched, and here perhaps digging will discover to us the remains of a temple, from which one very archaic Doric capital and an antefix have found their way to the higher rock. There are traces, too, of the great [pg 491]fort being the second building on the site, over an older and not yet clearly determined palace.
Two things are plain from these discoveries, and I dwell on them with satisfaction, because they corroborate old opinions of mine, put forth long before the principal evidence was forthcoming. First, the general use of wood for pillars and architraves, so showing how naturally the stone temple imitated the older wooden buildings. Secondly, the archaic or ante-Hellenic character of all that was found at Tiryns, with the solitary exception of the architectural fragments, which certainly have no building to correspond to them where they were found. Thus my hypothesis, which holds that Tiryns, as well as Mycenæ, was destroyed at least as early as Pheidon’s time (660 B. C.), and not after the Persian wars, receives corroboration which will amount to positive proof in any mind open to evidence on the point.
CHAPTER XVI.
MEDIÆVAL GREECE.
When I first went to Greece, nearly twenty years ago, the few travellers one met in the country never thought of studying its mediæval remains. We were in search of classical art, we passed by Byzantine churches or Frankish towers with contemptuous ignorance. Mr. Finlay’s great book, indeed, was already written; but those who knew German and were bold enough to attack the eight volumes which Ersch and Gruber’s Encyclopædia devote to the article on Greece, had been taught by Hopf’s Essay on Mediæval Greece to fathom what depths dulness could attain. Whether the author, or the odious paper, and type in its double columns, contributed to this result, was of little consequence. The subject itself seemed dreary beyond description. All the various peoples who invaded, swayed, ravaged, colonized the country in the Dark Ages, seemed but undistinguishable hordes of barbarians, of whom we knew nothing, about whom we cared nothing, beyond a general hatred of them, as those who had broken up and destroyed the splendid temples and fair statues that are now the world’s desire. Even the very thorough and learned [pg 493]scholars, who produced Bædeker’s Greece, a very few years ago, never thought of putting in any information whatever, beyond their chronological table, upon the many centuries which intervened between the close of paganism and the recent regeneration of the country. The contempt for Byzantine work in the East was in our early days like the contempt of Renaissance work in the West. We were all Classical or Gothic in taste.
Now a great reaction is setting in. Instead of the dreadful Hopf, we have the fascinating Gregorovius, whose Mediæval Athens clothes even dry details with the hue of fancy; the sober Murray’s Guide includes Mt. Athos and its wonders as part of its task. Recent travellers, and the students at the Foreign Schools of Athens, tell us of curious churches and their frescoes, and now Mr. Schultz, of the British school, has undertaken to reproduce them with his pencil. Following the example of Pullen, whose pictures have secured for posterity some record of the churches of Salonica, so often threatened by fire, he will perpetuate the remnants of an architecture and an art which were rapidly perishing from neglect. When I was first at Athens men were seriously discussing the propriety of razing to the ground the most striking of all the Byzantine churches at Athens, because it stood in the thoroughfare which led from the palace to the railway station! Historians tell us the dreadful fact, that [pg 494]over seventy of these delicately quaint buildings were destroyed when the new cathedral, a vulgar and senseless compromise in style, was constructed. A few more years of Vandalism in Greece, a few more terrible fires at Salonica and at Athos, and the world had lost its best records of a very curious and distinctive civilization.