[7]. The valley has been less solitary since the village of Herakleia was founded near the ruined temple of Nemean Zeus.
XXII. The Pass of the Tretus.—At the southern end of the valley of Cleonae there rises like a wall of rock the mountain of Tretus, which forms the watershed between the Corinthian and the Argolic gulfs. A straight toilsome path led from Cleonae in antiquity, and still leads past the village of Hagios Vasilios, over the mountain, descending into the Argolic plain at the ruins of Mycenae. But the more convenient way from the valley of Cleonae to the plain of Argos bends round to the west, where the mountain is not so high, and runs up a gradually ascending gully. This was the pass of the Tretus, the chief line of communication between Corinth and the south. In antiquity it was, as Pausanias tells us, a driving road, and the ruts worn by the chariot-wheels can still be seen in many places. The defile, though long and narrow, shut in by high mountains on either hand, is nowhere steep, and the rise is not considerable. The road runs by a deeply worn watercourse, at the bottom of which a clear and shallow stream finds its way amid luxuriant thickets of oleander, myrtle, and arbutus. The lower slopes of the mountains are also green with shrubs, but their upper slopes are grey and rocky.
The pass is easily defended. On both sides, towards Cleonae and towards the plain of Argos, may be seen traces of ancient works built to defend the defile. Near the highest point of the pass, where the road begins to descend towards Argos, there are low Turkish watch-towers called Derweni on both sides, and rough stone walls such as the Greeks threw up in many passes during the War of Independence. In 1822 the Turkish army under Dramali Pasha, retreating from the plain of Argos, was caught by the Greeks in the pass of the Tretus and nearly annihilated; for years afterwards the defile was strewed with skeletons and skulls of men and horses.
“Every part of the Argolic plain,” says Leake, “is considered unhealthy in summer, and the heat is excessive; that of the ravine of the Tretus, in the mid-day hours, is said to be something beyond bearing, which I can easily conceive, having passed through it in August, at an hour in the morning when the heat was comparatively moderate. Not long since a Tartar, after having drunk plentifully of wine and raki at Corinth, was found to be dead when the suriji held his stirrup to dismount at the khan of Kharvati (Mycenae), just beyond the exit of the Tretus.”
The name Tretus (‘perforated’) was supposed by the ancients to be derived from a great cave in the mountain where the Nemean lion had his lair. As to the ancient name of the pass, and the supposed wheel-marks in it, W. G. Clark says: “This is the road known by the name of Tretos, or ‘the perforated’; not, I conceive, in consequence of the caverns in the neighbouring rocks, which are not more numerous hereabouts than elsewhere, but because the glen is, as it were, drilled through the rock. And drilled it has been by the stream which flows at the bottom. We saw, or fancied we saw, frequent wheel-marks in the rocks, and we know that this was the direction of a carriage road. But from my subsequent observations I learned to distrust these marks. The ordinary mode of carrying wood in Greece is to tie the heavier ends of the poles on each side to the back of the horse or donkey, and suffer the other ends to trail along the ground, thus making two parallel ruts which in course of time may attain the depth of and be mistaken for wheel-tracks. When a depression is once made, it becomes a channel for the winter rains, and so is smoothed and deepened.”
The modern name of the defile is Dervenaki. The railway from Corinth to Argos runs through it. Towards the northern end of the pass the khan of Dervenaki stands in a little glade overshadowed by tall poplars, cypresses, and mulberry-trees, beside a murmuring spring. At the southern outlet of the pass the whole plain of Argos, with the mountains on either hand and the sea in the distance, bursts suddenly on the view. On the left, nestling at the foot of the hills, are Mycenae and Tiryns, with Nauplia and its towering acropolis rising from the sea and bounding the plain on this side. On the right is Argos with its mountain citadel, and beyond it the Lernaean lake glimmers faintly in the distance. In the centre of the picture, beyond the long foreground of level plain, stretches the blue line of the Argolic Gulf.
XXIII. Mycenae.—Passing southwards through the pass of the Tretus, we see the spacious plain of Argolis stretched out before us. Mycenae lies to our left at the roots of the mountains which bound the eastern side of the plain, not far from the point where the pass of the Tretus opens out on it. The Argolic plain may be roughly described as a great triangle, the base of which, on the south, is formed by the Argolic Gulf, while the eastern and western sides are enclosed by the ranges of mountains which converge northwards till they meet in Mount Tretus. The length of the plain from north to south is about twelve miles, the greatest breadth from east to west perhaps not much less. The mountains which shut it in are barren and rocky, the highest being those on the west which form the boundary between Argolis and Arcadia. The whole expanse appears to have been once a bay of the sea, which has been gradually filled up by the deposits brought down from the surrounding mountains. The Gulf of Argolis, a broad and beautiful sheet of water winding between mountains, must originally, before its upper waters were expelled by the alluvial deposit, have resembled still more closely, what it still recalls, a fine Scotch sea-loch or a Norwegian fiord.
This alluvial plain, situated at the head of a deep and sheltered frith or arm of the sea, which opening on the Aegean gave ready access to the islands of the Archipelago and the coasts of Asia, was naturally fitted to become one of the earliest seats of civilisation in Greece. And in point of fact legend and archaeology combine to show that in prehistoric times Greek civilisation reached a very high pitch in the plain of Argolis. It contained at least three fortified towns of great importance, of which remains exist to this day, Tiryns, Argos, and Mycenae (to mention them in the order in which they lie from south to north). Tiryns and Mycenae stand on the eastern, Argos on the western side of the plain. Of the three Tiryns is nearest to the sea, from which it is distant not much more than a mile. It, or rather its citadel, occupies a low rocky mound, not a hundred feet above the level of the sea, and rising in perfect isolation from the flat. Farther inland Argos lies at the foot of the last spur which projects into the western side of the plain from the range of Artemisius. Its citadel, the Larisa, is a fine bold peak nearly a thousand feet high.
Farther inland, nine miles from the nearest point of the sea, stands Mycenae, near the northern extremity of the plain, but on its eastern side. Its citadel, in respect of elevation and natural strength, occupies an intermediate position between the low citadel of Tiryns and the high mountainous one of Argos. It lies at the mouth of a wild and narrow glen, which here opens on the eastern side of the Argolic plain, between two lofty, steep, and rocky mountains. From the mouth of this glen two deep ravines diverge, one running due west, the other running south-west, and the triangular tableland which they enclose between them is the citadel of Mycenae. The whole scene, viewed from the citadel, is one of desolate grandeur. The ravines yawning to a great depth at our feet, the rugged utterly barren mountains towering immediately across them, the bleak highland glen winding away into the depth of these gloomy and forbidding hills, make up a stern impressive picture, the effect of which is heightened if one sees it, as the present writer chanced to do, on a rainy day. Then with a lowering sky overhead and the mist clinging to the slopes of the mountains, no sound heard but the patter of the rain and the tinkling of sheep-bells from the glen, the whole landscape seems to frown and assumes an aspect more in keeping with the mist-wrapt stronghold of some old robber chief in Skye or Lochaber, than with the conception which the traveller had formed of Agamemnon’s “golden city.”