Of all the cities of Hellas, it is the now established centres of Mycenæan culture which the poet knows best and characterises with the surest hand. Mycenæ “rich in gold” is Agamemnon’s seat, and Agamemnon is lord of all Argos and many isles, and leader of the host at Troy. In Laconia, in the immediate neighbourhood of the tomb which has given us the famous Vaphio cups, is the royal seat of Menelaus, which is likened to the court of Olympian Zeus. Bœotian Orchomenos, whose wealth still speaks for itself in the Treasury of Minyas, is taken by the poet as a twin type of affluence with Egyptian Thebes, “where the treasure-houses are stored fullest.” Assuredly, no one can regard all this and many another true touch as mere coincidence. The poet knows whereof he affirms. He has exact knowledge of the greatness and bloom of certain peoples and cities at an epoch long anterior to his own, with which the poems have to do. And there is not one hint in either poem that these races and heroes were not of the poet’s own kin.
It might be assumed that there had once ruled in those cities an alien people, and that the monuments of Mycenæan culture were their legacy to us, but that the Achæans who came after them have entered into the inheritance of their fame. Such usurpations there have been in history; but the hypothesis is out of the question here. At Mycenæ, where exploration has been unusually thorough, the genuine Mycenæan Age is seen to have come to a sharp and sudden end—a catastrophe so overwhelming that we cannot conceive of any lingering bloom. Had the place passed to a people worthy to succeed to the glory of the race who reared its mighty walls and vaulted tombs, then we should look for remains of a different but not a contemptible civilisation. But, in fact, we find built directly on the ruins of the Mycenæan palace mean and shabby huts which tell us how the once golden city was succeeded by a paltry village. Centuries were to pass before the Doric temple rose on the accumulated ruins of palace and hovels, and generations more before the brave little remnant returned with the laurels of Platæa and enough of the spoil (we may conjecture) to put the walls of the Atreidæ in repair.
If the structures peculiar to the Mycenæan age are the work of foreigners, what have we left for Agamemnon and his Achæans? Simply the hovels. Of the Dipylon pottery, with which it is proposed to endow them, there is none worth mentioning at Mycenæ, very little at Tiryns, hardly a trace at Amyclæ, or Orchomenos. In the Mycenæan acropolis, particularly, very few fragments of this pottery have been found, and that mainly in the huts already mentioned. Can these be the sole traces of the power and pride of the Atreidæ?
For us at least the larger problem of nationality is solved; but there is a further question. Can we determine the race or races among the Greeks known to history to whom the achievements of Mycenæan civilisation are to be ascribed? In this inquiry we may set aside the Dorians, although many scholars (especially among the Germans) still claim for them the marvellous remains of the Argolid. The Homeric poems, they say, describe a state of things subsequent to the Dorian migration into the Peloponnesus and consequent upon the revolution thereby effected. As the Dorians themselves hold sway at Mycenæ and Sparta, they must be the subjects of the poet’s song—the stately fabric of Mycenæan culture must be the work of their hands.
On the other hand, Beloch,[i] while accepting the Dorian theory of this civilisation, dismisses the traditional Dorian migration as a myth, and maintains that Dorian settlement in the Peloponnesus was as immemorial as the Arcadian. Just as the original advent of the Arcadians in the district which bears their name had faded out of memory and left no trace of a tradition, so the actual migration of the Dorians belonged to an immemorial past.
The first of these views which attributes the Mycenæan culture to the Dorians of the traditional migration, cannot stand the test of chronology. For tradition refers that migration to the end of the twelfth century B.C., whereas the Mycenæan people were established in the Argolid before the sixteenth, probably even before the twentieth century. While Beloch’s hypothesis is not beset with this chronological difficulty, it is otherwise quite untenable. For, as the excavations at Tiryns and Mycenæ abundantly prove, the Mycenæan civilisation perished in a great catastrophe. The palaces of both were destroyed by fire after being so thoroughly pillaged that scarcely a single bit of metal was left in the ruins. Further, they were never rebuilt; and the sumptuous halls of Mycenæ were succeeded by the shabby hovels of which we have spoken. The larger domes at Mycenæ, whose sites were known, were likewise plundered—in all probability by the same hands that fired the palace. This is evidenced by the pottery found in the hovels and before the doorways of two of the beehive tombs. A similar catastrophe appears to have cut short the career of this civilisation in the other centres where it had flourished.
How are we to account for this sudden and final overthrow otherwise than by assuming a great historic crisis, which left these mighty cities with their magnificent palaces only heaps of smoking ruins? And what other crisis can this have been than the irruption of the Dorians? And their descent into the Peloponnesus is traditionally dated at the very time which other considerations have led us to fix as the lower limit of the Mycenæan Age. Had that migration never been recorded by the ancients nor attested by the state of the Peloponnesus in historic times, we should still be led to infer it from the facts now put in evidence by the archæologist’s spade.
Setting aside the Dorian claim as preposterous, we have nothing to do but follow the epic tradition. The Homeric poems consistently assume that prior to any Dorian occupation Argolis was inhabited by other peoples, and notably by Achæans whose position is so commanding that the whole body of Greeks before Troy usually go by their name. Their capital is Mycenæ, and their monarch Agamemnon, King of Men; although we find them also in Laconia under the rule of Menelaus. But the poet has other names, hardly less famous, applied now to the people of Argolis and now to the Greeks at large. One of these names (Ἀργεῖοι) is purely geographical, whether it be restricted to the narrow Argolid district or extended to the wider Argos, and has no special ethnological significance. But the other (Δαναοί) belonged to a people distinct from and, according to uniform tradition, more ancient than the Achæans. We find, then, two races in Argolis before the Dorian migration, each famous in song and story, and each so powerful that its name may stand for all the inhabitants of Greece. The Achæans occupy Mycenæ, that is to say, the northern mountain region of the district, while legend represents the Danaans as inseparably connected with Argos and the sea-board, and ascribes to them certain works of irrigation.
Gallery in the Wall around the Citadel of Tiryns