Rambles and Studies in Greece Part 14

The whole of this country has an aspect far more southern and subtropical than any part of Laconia.

The monks treated us with great kindness, even pressing us to sit down to dinner before any ablutions had been thought of, and while we were still covered with the dust of a very hot and stormy journey along high roads.

The plan of the building, which is not old, having been moved down from the summit in the last century, is that of a court closed with a gateway, with covered corridors above looking into the court, and a very tawdry chapel occupying its centre. It seemed a large and well-to-do establishment, a sort of Greek Monte Ca.s.sino in appearance; and with the same stir of country people and pa.s.sing visitors about it. Far above us, on the summit of Mount Ithome-the site of human sacrifices to Zeus Ithomates in days of trouble-we saw a chapel on the highest top, 2500 feet over the sea. Here they told us that a solitary anchorite spent his life, praying and doing service at his altar, far above the sounds of human life. We made inquiry concerning the history of this saint, who was once a wealthy Athenian citizen, with a wife and family. His wife was dead, and his sons settled in the world, so he resolved to devote the rest of his years to the service of G.o.d apart from the ways of men. Once a fortnight only he descended to the convent, and brought up the necessary food. On his lonely watch he had no company but timid hares, travelling quail, and an occasional eagle, that came and sat by him without fear, perhaps in wonder at this curious and silent friend. The monks below had often urged him to catch these creatures for their benefit, but he refused to profane their lofty asylum. So he sits, looking out from his watch upon sunshine and rain, upon hot calm and wild storm, with the whole Peloponnesus extended beneath his eyes. He sees from afar the works and ways of men, and the world that he has left for ever. Is it not strange that still upon the same height men offer to their G.o.d these human sacrifices, changed indeed in appearance, but in real substance the same?

The main excursion from the monastery is over the saddle of the mountain westward, and through the "Laconian gate" down into the valley beneath, to see the remains of Epaminondas's great foundation, the new Messene. There are still faint traces of a small theatre and some other buildings, but of the walls and gates enough to tell us pretty clearly how men built fortifications in those days. The circuit of the walls included the fort on the summit, and enclosed a large tract of country, so much that it would be impossible for any garrison to defend it, and accordingly we hear of the city being taken by sudden a.s.sault more than once. The plan is very splendid, but seems to us rather ostentatious than serious for a new foundation liable to attacks from Sparta. The walls were, however, beautifully built, with towers at intervals, and gates for sallies. The best extant gate is called the Arcadian, and consisted of an outer and inner pair of folding-doors, enclosing a large round chamber for the watch. The size of the doorposts and lintels is gigantic, and shows that there was neither time nor labor spared to make Messene a stately settlement. There was almost enough land enclosed within the walls to feed the inhabitants of the houses, for their number never became very great.

If Megalopolis, a far more successful foundation, was far too large for its population, how much more must this have been the case with Messene?

In military architecture, however, we have no other specimen of old h.e.l.lenic work equal to it, except perhaps Eleutherae, which resembles it in style strongly, though the enclosure is quite small in comparison.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Arcadian Gateway, Messene]

We could have gone up from Messene by a very long day's ride to Ba.s.sae, and so to Olympia, but we had had enough of riding and preferred to make a short day to the sea at Kyparissia, and thence by steamer to Katakolo, from which rail and road to Olympia are quite easy. So we left the convent in the morning and descended into the valley, to turn north and then north-east, along the river courses which mark the mule-tracks through the wild country. We crossed a strange bridge over the junction of two rivers made of three arches meeting in the centre, and of which the substructure were certainly old Greek building. We then pa.s.sed through bleak tracts of uncultivated land, perhaps the most signal case of insufficient population we had seen in Greece. All these waste fields were covered with great ma.s.ses of asphodel, through which rare herds of swine were feeding, and the sight of these fields suggested to me that by the "meadow of asphodel"

in Homer is not meant a pleasant garden, or desirable country, but merely a dull waste in which there is nothing done, and no sign of human labor or human happiness. Had there been night or gloom over this stony tract, with its tall straggling plants and pale flowers, one could easily imagine it the place which the dead hero inhabited when he told his friend that the vilest menial on earth was happier than he.

After some hours the mountains began to approach on either side, and we reached a country wonderful in its contrast. Great green slopes reached up from us far away into the hills, studded with great single forest trees, and among them huge shrubs of arbutus and mastich, trimmed and rounded as if for ornament. It was like a splendid park, kept by an English magnate.

The regularity of shape in the shrubs arises, no doubt, from the constant cropping of the young shoots all round by herds of goats, which we met here and there in this beautiful solitude. The river bank where we rode was clothed with oleander, p.r.i.c.kly pear, and other flowering shrubs which I could not name.

At last woods of ancient olives, with great gnarled stems, told us that we were nearing some important settlement, and the pleasant town of Kyparissia came in view-now, alas! a heap of ruins since the recent earthquake. Here we took leave of our ponies, mules, and human followers; but the pathos of parting with these intimate companions of many days was somewhat marred by the divergence of their notions and ours as to their pay. Yet these differences, when settled, did not prevent them from giving us an affectionate farewell.

CHAPTER XV.

MYCENae AND TIRYNS.

I have set apart a chapter for Mycenae and Tiryns, because the discoveries of Dr. Schliemann there have raised so many new problems, and have so largely increased public curiosity about them, that a book of travels in Greece cannot venture to avoid the subject; even long before Dr.

Schliemann's day, the learned and deliberate travellers who visited the Morea, and wrote their great books, found ample scope for description, and large room for erudite discussion. It is a curious thing to add, but strictly true, that all the new facts brought out by the late excavations have, as yet, contributed but little to our knowledge about the actual history of the country, and that almost every word of what was summed up from all existing sources twenty years ago, by Ernst Curtius, can still be read with far more profit than the rash speculations which appear almost weekly in the periodical press.

It is impossible to approach Mycenae from any side without being struck with the picturesqueness of the site. If you come down over the mountains from Corinth, as soon as you reach the head of the valley of the Inachus, which is the plain of Argos, you turn aside to the left, or east, into a secluded corner-"a recess of the horse-feeding Argos," as Homer calls it, and then you find on the edge of the valley, and where the hills begin to rise one behind the other, the village of Charvati. When you ascend from this place, you find that the lofty Mount Elias is separated from the plain by two nearly parallel waves of land, which are indeed joined at the northern end by a curving saddle, but elsewhere are divided by deep gorges. The loftier and shorter wave forms the rocky citadel of Mycenae-the Argion, as it was once called. The lower and longer was part of the outer city, which occupied both this hill and the gorge under the Argion. As you walk along the lower hill, you find the Treasure-house of Atreus, as it is called, built into the side which faces the Acropolis. But there are other ruined treasuries on the outer slope, and the newly-opened one is just at the joining saddle, where the way winds round to lead you up the greater hill to the giant gate with the Lion portal. If we represent the high levels under the image of a fishing-hook, with the shank placed downward (south), and the point lying to the right (east), then the Great Treasury is at that spot in the shank which is exactly opposite the point, and faces it. The point and barb are the Acropolis. The New Treasury is just at the turn of the hook, facing inward (to the south). This will give a rough idea of the site. It is not necessary to enter into details, when so many maps and plans are now in circulation. But I would especially refer to the admirable ill.u.s.trations in Schliemann's _Mycenae_, where all these matters are made perfectly plain and easy.

When we first visited the place it was in the afternoon of a splendid summer's day; the fields were yellow and white with stubbles or with dust, and the deep gray shadow of a pa.s.sing cloud was the only variety in the color of the upper plain. For here there are now no trees, the corn had been reaped, and the land a.s.serted its character as _very thirsty_ Argos.

But as we ascended to higher ground, the groves and plantations of the lower plain came in sight, the splendid blue of the bay began to frame the picture, and the setting sun cast deeper shadow and richer color over all the view. Down at the river-bed great oleanders were spreading their sheets of bloom, like the rhododendrons in our climate, but they were too distant to form a feature in the prospect.

I saw the valley of Argos again in spring, in our "roaring moon of daffodil and crocus;" it was the time of growing corn, of scarlet anemone and purple cistus, but there too of high winds and glancing shadows. Then all the plain was either brilliant green with growing wheat, or ruddy brown with recent tillage; there were clouds about the mountains, and changing colors in the sky, and a feeling of freshness and life very different from the golden haze and dreamy calmness of a southern June.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The Argive Plain]

I can hardly say which of these seasons was the more beautiful, but I shall always a.s.sociate the summer scene with the charm of a first visit to this famous spot, and still more with the venerable and undisturbed aspect of the ruins before they had been profaned by modern research. It is, I suppose, ungrateful to complain of these things, and we must admit that great discoveries outbalance the aesthetic damage done to an ancient ruin by digging unsightly holes and piling mounds of earth about it; but who can contemplate without sorrow the covering of the finest piece of the Cyclopean wall at Mycenae with the rubbish taken away from over the tombs?

Who will not regret the fig-tree which spread its shade over the portal of the House of Atreus? This fig-tree is still to be seen in the older photographs, and is in the woodcut of the entrance given in Dr.

Schliemann's book, but the visitor of to-day will look for it in vain. On the other hand, the opening at the top, which had been there since the beginning of this century, but which was closed when I first visited the chamber, had been again uncovered, and so it was much easier to examine the inner arrangement of the building.

I am not sure that this wonderful structure was visited or described by any traveller from the days of Pausanias till after the year 1800. At least I can find no description from any former traveller quoted in the many accurate accounts which the present century has produced. Chandler, in 1776, intended to visit Mycenae, but accidentally missed the spot on his way from Argos to Corinth-a thing more likely to happen then, when there was a good deal of wooding in the upper part of the plain. But Clarke, Dodwell, and Gell all visited and described the place between 1800 and 1806, and the latter two published accurate drawings of both the portal and the inner view, which was possible owing to the aperture made at the summit.

About the same time Lord Elgin had turned his attention to the Treasury, and had made excavations about the place, finding several fragments of very old engraved basalt and limestone, which had been employed to ornament the entrance. Some of these fragments are now in the British Museum. But, though both Clarke and Leake allude to "Lord Elgin's excavators," they do not specify what was performed, or in what condition the place had been before their researches. There is no published account of this interesting point, which is probably to be solved by the still unpublished journals said to be in the possession of the present Earl.(174) This much is, however, certain, that the chamber was not first entered at this time; for Dr. Clarke speaks of its appearance as that of a place open for centuries. We know that systematic rifling of ancient tombs took place at the close of the cla.s.sical epoch;(175) we can imagine it repeated in every age of disorder or barbarism; and the accounts we hear of the Genoese plundering the great mounds of the Crimea show that even these civilized and artistic Italians thought it no desecration to obtain gold and jewels from unnamed, long-forgotten sepulchres. It seems, therefore, impossible to say at what epoch-probably even before Pausanias-this chamber was opened. The story in Dr. Schliemann's book,(176) which he quotes from a Greek newspaper, and which attributes the plundering of it to Veli Pasha, in 1810, is positively groundless, and in direct contradiction to the irrefragable evidence I have above adduced.

The Pasha may have probed the now ruined chambers on the outer side of the hill; but the account of what he found is so mythical that the whole story may be rejected as undeserving of credit.

I need not attempt a fresh description of the Great Treasury, in the face of such ample and accurate reports as those I have indicated. It is in no sense a rude building, or one of a helpless and barbarous age, but, on the contrary, the product of enormous appliances, and of a perfect knowledge of all the mechanical requirements for any building, if we except the application of the arch. The stones are hewn square, or curved to form the circular dome within with admirable exactness. Above the enormous lintel-stone, nearly twenty-seven feet long, and which is doubly grooved, by way of ornament, all along its edge over the doorway, there is now a triangular window or aperture, which was certainly filled with some artistic carving like the a.n.a.logous s.p.a.ce over the lintel in the gate of the Acropolis. Shortly after Lord Elgin had cleared the entrance, Gell and Dodwell found various pieces of green and red marble carved with geometrical patterns, some of which are reproduced in Dodwell's book. Gell also found some fragments in a neighboring chapel, and others are said to be built into a wall at Nauplia. There are supposed to have been short columns standing on each side in front of the gate, with some ornament surmounting them; but this seems to me to rest on doubtful evidence, and on theoretical reconstruction. Dr. Schliemann, however, a.s.serts them to have been found at the entrance of the second treasury which Mrs.

Schliemann excavated, though his account is somewhat vague (_Mycenae_, p.

140). There is the strongest architectural reason for the triangular aperture over the door, as it diminishes the enormous weight to be borne by the lintel; and here, no doubt, some ornament very like the lions on the citadel gate may have been applied.

The extreme darkness of the chamber during our first visit prevented me from discovering, even with the aid of torches, the nail-marks which all the earlier travellers found there, and which are now again easily to be seen. So also the outer lintel-stone is not by any means the largest, but is far exceeded by the inner, which lies next to it, and which reaches on each side of the entrance a long way round the chamber, its inner surface being curved to suit the form of the wall. Along this curve it is twenty-nine feet long; it is, moreover, seventeen feet broad, and nearly four feet thick, weighing about one hundred and twenty-four tons!

When we first entered by the light of torches, we found ourselves in the great cone-shaped chamber, which, strange to say, reminded me of the Pantheon at Rome more than any other building I know, and is, nevertheless, built on a very different principle. The stones are not, indeed, pushed forward one above the other, as in ruder stone roofs through Ireland; but each of them, which is on the other surfaces cut perfectly square, has its inner face curved so that the upper end comes out several inches above the lower. So each stone carries on the conical plan, having its lower line fitting closely to the upper line of the one beneath, and the whole dome ends with a great flat stone laid on the top.(177)

Dodwell still found copper nails of some inches in length, which he supposed to have been used to fasten on thin plates of shining metal; but I was at first unable to see even the holes in the roof, which other travellers had believed to be the places where the nails were inserted.

However, without being provided with magnesium wire, it was then impossible to light the chamber sufficiently for a positive decision on this point. A comparatively small side chamber is hollowed out in the rock and earth, without any stone casing or ornament whatever, but with a similar triangular aperture over its doorway. Schliemann tells us he dug two trenches in this chamber, and that, besides finding some hewn pieces of limestone, he found in the middle a circular depression (apparently of stone), twenty-one inches deep, and about one yard in diameter, which he compares to a large wash-bowl. Any one who has visited New Grange will be struck with the likeness of this description to the large stone saucers which are still to be seen there, and of which I shall speak presently.

There has been much controversy about the use to which this building was applied, and we cannot now attempt to change the name, even if we could prove its absurdity. Pausanias, who saw Mycenae in the second century A. D., found it in much the same state as we do, and was no better informed than we, though he tells us the popular belief that this and its fellows were treasure-houses like that of the Minyae at Orchomenus, which was very much greater, and was, in his opinion, one of the most wonderful things in all Greece. But it does not seem to me that his opinion, which, indeed, is not very clear, need in the least shackle our judgments.

The majority of scholars incline to the theory that it is a tomb. In the first place, there are three other similar buildings quite close to it, which Pausanias mentions as the treasure-houses of the sons of Atreus, but their number makes it most unlikely that any of them could be for treasure. Surely such a house could only be owned by the reigning king, and there is no reason why his successor should make himself a new vault for this purpose. In the next place, these buildings were all underground and dark, and exactly such as would be selected for tombs. Thirdly, they are not situated within the enclosure of the citadel of Mycenae, but are outside it, and probably outside the original town altogether-a thing quite inconceivable if they were meant for treasure, but most reasonable, and according to a.n.a.logy, if they were used as tombs. This, too, would of course explain the plurality of them-different kings having built them, just like the pyramids of Chufu, Safra, and Menkerah, and many others, along the plain of Memphis in Egypt. It is even quite easy and natural to explain on this hypothesis how they came to be thought treasure-houses. It is known that the sepulchral tumuli of similar construction in other places, and possibly built by kindred people, contained much treasure, left there by way of honor to the deceased. Herodotus describes this in Scythian tombs, some of which have been opened of late, and have verified his a.s.sertions.(178) The lavish expense at Patroclus's funeral, in the Iliad, shows the prevalence of similar notions among early Greeks, who held, down to aeschylus's day, that the importance of a man among the dead was in proportion to the circ.u.mstance with which his tomb was treated by the living. It may, therefore, be a.s.sumed as certain that these strongholds of the dead, if they were such, were filled with many precious things in gold and other metals, intended as parting gifts in honor of the king who was laid to rest. Long after the devastation of Mycenae, I suppose that these tombs were opened in search of treasure, and not in vain; and so nothing was said about the skeleton tenant, while rumors went abroad of the rich treasure-trove within the giant portal. Thus, then, the tradition would spring up and grow, that the building was the treasure-house of some old legendary king.

These antiquarian considerations have led us away from the actual survey of the old vault, for ruin it cannot be called. The simplicity and ma.s.siveness of its structure have defied age and violence, and, except for the shattered ornaments and a few pieces over the inner side of the window, not a stone appears ever to have been moved from its place.

Standing at the entrance, you look out upon the scattered masonry of the walls of Mycenae, on the hillock over against you. Close beyond this is a dark and solemn chain of mountains. The view is narrow and confined, and faces the north, so that, for most of the day, the gate is dark and in shadow. We can conceive no fitter place for the burial of a king, within sight of his citadel, in the heart of a deep natural hillock, with a great solemn portal symbolizing the resistless strength of the barrier which he had pa.s.sed into an unknown land. But one more remark seems necessary. This treasure-house is by no means a h.e.l.lenic building in its features. It has the same perfection of construction which can be seen at Eleutherae, or any other Greek fort, but still the really a.n.a.logous buildings are to be found in far distant lands-in the raths of Ireland and the barrows of the Crimea.

I have had the opportunity of comparing the structure and effect of the great sepulchral monuments in the county of Meath, in Ireland. Two of these, Dowth and New Grange, are opened, and can be entered almost as easily as the treasury of Atreus. They lie close to the rich valley of the Boyne, in that part of the country which was pointed out by nature as the earliest seat of wealth and culture. Dowth is the ruder and less ornamented, and therefore not improbably the older, but is less suited for the present comparison than the greater and more ornate New Grange.

This splendid tomb is not a whit less remarkable, or less colossal in its construction, than those at Mycenae, but differs in many details. It was not hollowed out in a hillside, but was built of great upright stones, with flat slabs laid over them, and then covered with a mound of earth. An enormous circle of giant boulders stands round the foot of the mound.

Instead of pa.s.sing through a short entrance into a great vaulted chamber, there is a long narrow corridor, which leads to a much smaller, but still very lofty room, nearly twenty feet high. Three recesses in the walls of this latter each contain a large round saucer, so to speak, made of single stone, in which the remains of the dead seem to have been laid. This saucer is very shallow, and not more than four feet in diameter. The great stones with which the chamber and pa.s.sage are constructed are not hewn or shaped, and so far the building is rather comparable with that of Tiryns than that of Mycenae. But all over the faces of the stones are endless spiral and zigzag ornaments, even covering built-in surfaces, and thus invisible, so that this decoration must have been applied to the slabs prior to the building. On the outside stones, both under and above the entry, there is a well-executed carving of more finished geometrical designs.

Putting aside minor details, it may be said that while both monuments show an equal display of human strength, and an equal contempt for human toil, which were lavished upon them without stint, the Greek building shows far greater finish of design and neatness of execution, together with greater simplicity. The stones are all carefully hewn and fitted, but not carved or decorated. The triangular carved block over the lintel, and the supposed metal plates on the interior, were both foreign to the original structure. On the contrary, while the Irish tomb is a far greater feature in the landscape-a landmark in the district-the great stones within are not fitted together, or hewn into shape, and yet they are covered with patterns and designs strangely similar to the carvings found by Dodwell and Dr. Schliemann at the Argive tombs. Thus the Irish builders, with far greater rudeness, show a greater taste for ornament. They care less for design and symmetry-more for beauty of detail. The Greek essay naturally culminates in the severe symmetry of the Doric Temple-the Irish in the glorious intricacy of the illuminations of the _Book of Kells_.

The second treasury lately excavated by Mrs. Schliemann has been disappointing in its results. Though it seems not to have been disturbed for ages, it had evidently been once rifled, for nothing save a few fragments of pottery were found within. Its entrance is much loftier than that of the house of Atreus, but the general building is inferior, the stones are far smaller and by no means so well fitted, and it produces altogether the impression of being either a much earlier and ruder attempt, or a poor and feeble imitation. Though Dr. Schliemann a.s.serts the former, I am disposed to suspect the latter to be the case.

A great deal of what was said about the tomb of Agamemnon, as the common people, with truer instinct, call the supposed treasure-house, may be repeated about the fortifications of Mycenae. It is the work of builders who know perfectly how to deal with their materials-who can hew and fit great blocks of stone with perfect ease; nay, who prefer, for the sake of ma.s.sive effect, to make their doorway with such enormous blocks as even modern science would find it difficult to handle. The sculpture over the gate fortunately remains almost entire. The two lions, standing up at a small pillar, were looking out fiercely at the stranger. The heads are gone, having probably, as Dr. Schliemann first observed, been made of bronze, and riveted to the stone. The rest of the sculpture is intact, and is of a strangely heraldic character. It is a piece of bluish limestone,(179) which must have been brought from a long distance, quite different from the rough breccia of the rest of the gate. The lintel-stone is not nearly so vast as that of the treasure-house: it is only fifteen feet long, but is somewhat thicker, and also much deeper, going back the full depth of the gateway. Still it must weigh a good many tons; and it puzzles us to think how it can have been put into its place with the appliances then in vogue. The joint use of square and polygonal masonry is very curious. Standing within the gate, one side is of square-hewn stones, the other of irregular, though well-fitted, blocks. On the left side, looking into the gate, there is a gap of one block in the wall, which looks very like a window,(180) as it is not probable that a single stone was taken, or fell out of its place afterward, without disturbing the rest. What makes it, perhaps, more possible that this window is intentional, is the position of the gate, which is not in the middle of the walled causeway, as you enter, but to the right side.

When you go in, and climb up the hill of the Acropolis, you find various other portions of Cyclopean walls which belonged to the old palace, in plan very similar to that of Tiryns. But the outer wall goes all round the hill where it is steepest, sometimes right along a precipice, and everywhere offering an almost insurmountable obstacle to an ancient a.s.sailant. On the east side, facing the steep mountain, which is separated from it by a deep gorge, is a postern gate, consisting merely of three stones, but these so ma.s.sive, and so beautifully hewn and fitted, as to be a structure hardly less striking than the lion gate. At about half the depth of these huge blocks there is a regular groove cut down both sides and along the top, in order to hold the door.

The whole summit of the great rock is now stony and bare, but not so bare that I could not gather scarlet anemones, which found scanty sustenance here and there in tiny patches of gra.s.s, and gladdened the gray color of the native rock and the primeval walls. The view from the summit, when first I saw it, was one of singular solitude and peace; not a stone seemed to have been disturbed for ages; not a human creature, or even a browsing goat, was visible, and the traveller might sketch or scrutinize any part of the fortress without fear of intrusion, far less of molestation. When I again reached the site, in the spring of 1877, a great change had taken place. Dr. Schliemann had attacked the ruins, and had made his world-renowned excavations inside and about the lion gate. To the gate itself this was a very great gain. All the enc.u.mbering earth and stones have been removed, so that we can now admire the full proportions of the mighty portal. He discovered a tiny porter's lodge inside it. He denied the existence of the wheel-tracks which we and others fancied we had seen there on our former visit.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Lion Gate, Mycenae]

But proceeding from the gate to the lower side, where the hill slopes down rapidly, and where the great irregular Cyclopean wall trends away to the right, Dr. Schliemann found a deep acc.u.mulation of soil. This was, of course, the chief place on an otherwise bare rock where excavations promised large results. And the result was beyond the wildest antic.i.p.ations. The whole account of what he has done is long before the public in his very splendid book, of which the ill.u.s.trations are quite an epoch in the history of ornament, and in spite of their great antiquity will suggest to our modern jewellers many an exquisite pattern. The sum of what he found is this:-

He first found in this area a double circuit of thin upright slabs, joined together closely, and joined across the top with flat slabs mortised into them, the whole circuit being like a covered way, about three feet high.

Into the enclosed circle a way leads from the lion gate; and what I noted particularly was this, that the whole circle, which was over thirty yards in diameter, was separated from the higher ground by a very miserable bounding wall, which, though quite concealed before the excavations, and therefore certainly very old, looked for all the world like some Turkish piece of masonry.

As soon as this stone circle was discovered, it was suggested that old Greek _agoras_ were round, that they were often in the citadel at the king's gate, and that people were sometimes buried in them. Dr. Schliemann at once baptized the place as the agora of Mycenae. It was a circle with only one free access, and that from the gate; it had tombstones standing in the midst of it, and there were the charred remains of sacrifices about them. The number of bodies already exhumed beneath preclude their being all founders or heroes of the city. These and other indications were enough to disprove clearly that the circle was an agora, but that it was rather a place of sepulture, enclosed, as such places always were, with a fence, which seems made in imitation of a palisade of wood.

Inside this circuit of stone slabs were found-apparently at the same depth, but on this Dr. Schliemann is not explicit-very curious and very archaic carved slabs, with rude hunting scenes of warriors in very uncomfortable chariots, and varied spiral ornaments filling up the vacant s.p.a.ces. These sculptures are unlike any h.e.l.lenic work, properly so called, and point back to a very remote period, and probably to the introduction of a foreign art among the rude inhabitants of early Greece. Deeper down were found more tombstones, all manner of archaic pottery, arrow-heads, and b.u.t.tons of bone; there was also found some rude construction of hewn stones, which may have served as an altar or a tomb.

Yet further down, twenty-one feet deep, and close to the rock, were lying together a number of skeletons, which seemed to have been hastily or carelessly buried; but in the rock itself, in rudely hewn chambers, were found fifteen bodies buried with a splendor seldom equalled in the history of the world. These people were not buried like Greeks. They were not laid in rock chambers, like the Scythian kings. They were sunk in graves under the earth, which were large enough to receive them, had they not been filled up round the bottom with rudely-built walls, or pieces of stone, so as to reduce the area, but to create perhaps some ventilation for the fire which had partly burnt the bodies where they were found. Thus the splendidly-attired and jewelled corpses, some of them with masks and breastplates of gold, were, so to speak, jammed down by the earth and stones above them into a very narrow s.p.a.ce; but there appears to have been some arrangement for protecting them and their treasure from complete confusion with the soil which settled down over them. This, if the account of the excavation be accurate, seems the most peculiar feature in the burial of these great personages, but finds a parallel in the curious tombs of Hallstadt, which afford many a.n.a.logies to Mycenae.(181)

Dr. Schliemann boldly announced in the _Times_, and the public believed him, that he had found Agamemnon, and his companions, who were murdered when they returned from the siege of Troy. The burial is indeed quite different from any such ceremony described in the Homeric poems. The number of fifteen is not to be accounted for by any of the legends. There is no reason to think all the tombs have been discovered; one, or at least part of the treasure belonging to it, was since found outside the circle.

Another was afterward found by M. Stamatakes. aeschylus, our oldest and best authority, places the tomb of Agamemnon, not at Mycenae, but at Argos.

They all agree that he was buried with contempt and dishonor. The result was, that when the public came to hear the Agamemnon theory disproved, it was disposed to take another leap in the dark, and to look upon the whole discovery as suspicious, and as possibly something mediaeval.