Argos is a rather large place, but decidedly unattractive save for its many little gardens. Nearly every house had them, and from our high seats in the respectable but superannuated depot carriage we were able to look into the depths of many such, to marvel at their riot of roses and greenery. As for the houses, they were little and not over-clean. The populace, however, was exceeding friendly, sitting en masse along the highway, the young women blithely saluting and the children bombarding us with nosegays in the hope of leptà. Over Argos towers a steep hill, known as a “larisa” or acropolis, from the top of which we could imagine a wonderful view over the whole kingdom of the Argives and over the mountains as well, not to mention the Gulf of Nauplia; but as time was speeding on toward the dusk and we were still far from Nauplia, we had to be content with the imagination alone, and with the news that a little monastery about halfway up the hillside had been set on fire on the Easter Sunday previous by too enthusiastic celebrants, who had been over-free with the inevitable rockets and Roman candles. Also we had to give short shrift to the vast theatre, hewn out of the solid rock at the foot of the larisa, and said to be one of the largest in Greece. It was sadly grass-grown, however, and infinitely less attractive than the smallest at Athens, not to mention the splendid playhouse at Epidaurus, which we promised ourselves for the morrow. So we were not reluctant to swing away from old Argos, with her shouting villagers and high-walled gardens, and to skirt the harbor, now close at hand along the dusty Nauplia road. Across the dancing waters lay Nauplia herself, a white patch at the foot of a prodigious cliff far around the bay. By the roadside the country seaward was marshy, while inland rolled the great plain back to the gray hills which showed the northern bounds of the old kingdom, and the lofty rock of Mycenæ from which the sons of Atreus had looked down over their broad acres.
It was not long before we were aware that “well-walled” Tiryns was at hand and that we were not to close a day already well marked by memories of Cyclopean masonry without adding thereto the most stupendous of all, the memory of the great stones piled up in prehistoric ages at this ancient palace whose size impressed even that hardened sight-seer Pausanias. Tiryns proved to be a highly interesting place; in general appearance much like Mycenæ, but in detail sufficiently different to keep us exclaiming. It lies on what is little more than an isolated hillock beside the highroad, and there is nothing imposing about its height or length. It is a long, low rock, devoid of any building save for the solid retaining walls that may go back to the days of Herakles himself.
Whoever built the fortress at Tiryns had seen fit to make the front door face the plain rather than the sea; so that it was necessary to leave the road and go around to the north side of the rock, where a gradual incline afforded an easy approach to a sort of ramp, or terrace, defended by walls of the most astonishing Cyclopean construction. It has been stated that these great and rudely squared blocks of native rock, taken from the quarries in the hills northward, were once bonded together with a rude clay mortar, which has since entirely disappeared. How such enormous blocks were quarried in those primitive days, or how they were handled, is a good deal of a mystery. But it is claimed that swelled wedges of wet wood were used to separate the stones from their native bed.
As a ruin, Tiryns is rather difficult to reconstruct in the imagination from the visible remains. The inclined ramp and the gateway, remains of which are still standing, are interesting, but chiefly from the remarkable size of the stones employed in their construction. Within, the old palace is in a state of complete and comprehensive ruin. The lines of the former palace walls may, however, be seen on the rocky floor, with here and there a trace of an ancient column which has left its mark on the foundation rock. The outer and inner courts, megaron, men’s and women’s apartments, and even the remnants of a “bathroom” are to be made out, the last-named bearing testimony to the fact that even in the remote Mycenæan age the disposition of waste water was carefully looked to—perhaps more carefully than was the case with the later Greeks. The Tirynthian feature which eclipses everything else for interest, however, is the arrangement of covered galleries of stone on two sides of the palace, from which at intervals radiate side chambers supposed to have been used for storage. To-day they recall rather more the casements of our own old-fashioned forts. In these galleries the rude foreshadowings of the arch principle are even more clearly to be seen than in the underground conduit at Mycenæ which leads to the sunken reservoir. The sides of the corridor are vertical for only a short distance, and speedily begin to slope inward, meeting in an acute angle overhead. The side chambers are of a similar construction. Nowhere does it appear that the “Cyclopes,” if we may call them such, recognized the principle of the keystone, although they seem to have come very close to it by accident here and there, and notably so in the case of the little postern gate which is to be seen on the side of the citadel toward the modern highroad. As for the galleries, at the present day they are polished to a glassy smoothness within by the rubbing of sheltering flocks of sheep and goats. And they are interesting, not only because of the massive stones used in building them, but because the similarity of these corridors and storage chambers to the arrangements found near old Carthage and other Phœnician sites may well argue a common paternity of architecture, and thus give color to the tale that the ancient kings of Argos secured artisans of marvelous skill and strength from abroad. The immense size of the roughly hewn rocks easily enough begot the tradition that these alien builders were men of gigantic stature, called “Cyclopes” from the name of their king, Cyclops, and supposed to be a race of Thracian giants; quite distinct, of course, from the other mythological Cyclopes who served Hephaistos, or the Sicilian ones who made life a burden for Odysseus on his wanderings. It seems to be a plausible opinion now widely held that the foreign masons who erected the Cyclopean walls in the Argolid were not from Thrace, but from the southern shores of the Ægean—perhaps from Lycia. And it is interesting to know that there are examples of the same sort of stone work, bearing a similar name, to be found as far away as Peru.
A somewhat lower hillock just west of the main acropolis—if it deserves that name—is shown as once being the servants’ quarters. And we descended, as is the common practice, from the main ruin to the road, by a rude stone stairway at what was formerly the back of the castle, to the narrow postern, the stones of which form an almost perfect, but doubtless quite accidental, archway; and thence to our carriage, which speedily whirled us away to Nauplia. The road thither lay around a placid bay, sweeping in a broad curve through a landscape which was happily marked by some very creditable trees. Nauplia herself made a pleasant picture to the approaching eye, lying on her well-protected harbor at the base of an imposing cliff, on the top of which the frowning battlements of an old Venetian fortress proclaimed the presence of the modern state prison of Greece. The evening sun brought out the whiteness of the city against the forbidding rock behind, while far away westward across the land-locked bay the evening light touched with a rosy glow the snowy summit of Cyllene, and brought out the rugged skyline of the less lofty Peloponnesian mountains. And it was these that lay before us as our carriage rattled out of a narrow street and upon the broad esplanade of the quay at the doors of our hotel.
CHAPTER X. NAUPLIA AND
EPIDAURUS
We were awakened in the morning by an unaccustomed sound,—a subdued, rapid, rhythmic cadence coming up from the esplanade below, accompanied by the monotonous undertone of a voice saying something in time with the shuffle of marching feet, the whole punctuated now and then by a word of command and less frequently by the unmistakable clang of arms. The soldiers from the fortress were having their morning drill. The words of command sounded strangely natural, although presumably in Greek, doubtless because military men the world over fall into the habit of uttering “commands of execution” in a sort of unintelligible grunt. The counting of “fours” sounded natural, too, despite the more marked Hellenism of the numbers. So far from being a disturbance, the muffled tread of the troops was rather soporific, which is fortunate, because I have been in Nauplia on several occasions, and this early drill appears to be the regular thing under the windows of the Hôtel des Étrangers.
The fine open space along the water front makes a tempting parade-ground, and at other hours an attractive place for general assemblage, especially at evening, when the people of Nauplia are to be seen lounging along the wharves or drinking their coffee in the shade under the white line of buildings. The quay curves for a long distance around the bay, and alongside it are moored many of those curious hollow schooners that do the coastwise carrying in Greece. Nauplia appears still to be something of a port, although infinitely smaller and less busy than either the Piræus or Patras. Her name, of course, is redolent of the sea. The beauty of her situation has often reminded visitors of Naples, but it is only a faint resemblance to the Italian city. In size she is little indeed. Scenically, however, her prospects are magnificent, with their inclusion of a panorama of distant and imposing peaks towering far away across the inner bay, so admirably sheltered from the outer seas by the massive promontory, on the inner shelf of which the city stands. The town is forced to be narrow because of the little space between the water and the great cliff rising precipitously behind. There is room for little more than three parallel streets, and in consequence Nauplia is forced to make up in length what she lacks in breadth, and strings along eastward in a dwindling line of buildings to the point where the marshy shore curves around toward Tiryns, or loses herself in the barren country that lies in the gray valleys that lead inland to Epidaurus.