Euripides was perhaps after all not so far wrong as he seemed to the mocking genius of comedy, when he raised the question whether life and death were not in truth things which had exchanged their names:

t?? ??de? e? t? ??? p?? ?st? ?at?a?e??, t? ?at?a?e?? d? ???;

It is at least very often so in the case of cities; it is emphatically so in the case of the great cities of the Argolic land. Argos, as we have seen, if it has not altogether died, has at least been brought down to a kind of life which, judged by its ancient standard, might pass for little better than death. Its continued being has destroyed well nigh every trace of its ancient state within the circuit which still remains inhabited. Argos is thus dead because it has lived. MykÊnÊ, on the other hand, has remained alive because it died. Had MykÊnÊ remained a ruling city, or even a dwelling-place of men in any shape, during all the ages which have passed since the fifth century before Christ, we should not see, as we now see, what the imperial city of the Pelopid house really was. Thanks to its happy destruction, no work of Turk, or Venetian, or Roman has ever arisen to jar on the associations of the primÆval city. Even the works of those whom at MykÊnÊ we must call the later Greeks, the men who dwelled there from the Dorian invasion to the days of PeriklÊs, have passed away as though they had never been. No columns rise, as at Nemea, over the forsaken spot; we meet no tomb by the wayside, no legend graven on the rock, such as we light on as we tread the holy way from Athens to Eleusis. House and wall, temple and tower, were either utterly swept away by Argive wrath, or else they have crumbled away into nothingness since the scourge of Argos passed over the devoted city. Where once stood the wide streets of MykÊnÊ, we meet only the shepherd with his crook to guide his flock, or the peasant woman, with Paionian industry, plying her distaff as she gathers her sheep or her goats to watering. For the hum of assembled citizens in the agorÊ, for the tramp of gathering warriors on the akropolis, we hear only the pipe of the shepherd himself and the bark of the shepherd’s dog. The shepherds who wander over the site of MykÊnÊ may not wholly answer to the pictures of Theokritos or Virgil, but the crook, the pipe, the distaff, are here no figures of speech. They may be seen and heard daily as the sun rises over the deep gorge which fences in the MykÊnaian akropolis, or when he “reigns” at eve over the heights of Artemis and Kronos. But even those few shepherds do not, like the few inhabitants of modern Corinth, dwell on the old site of MykÊnÊ, nor do they profess to carry on the MykÊnaian name. At the foot of the lower hill, the hill of the city as distinguished from the hill of the akropolis, a small church and a few houses, seeming almost to grow out of the rocky soil, form the small village, not of MykÊnÊ but of Chorbati. Yet in one sense Chorbati has become MykÊnÊ. Gathered there in a small museum are the less splendid and precious of the relics which modern discovery has brought to light on MykÊnaian soil. And there too is one relic, torn from a rifled tomb on the akropolis, which to the eye of faith must be more precious even than the treasury and the lion-gate. There lies the nearly perfect skeleton which those who have trodden doubts and difficulties under their feet believe to be the very bones of AgamemnÔn. The more cautious Greek antiquary is less rash in committing himself. Mr. StamatÂkÊs, the learned and zealous guardian of the MykÊnaian treasury, points to it with a wise qualification. The rest of his explanation is given in the tongue which is alike his own and Homer’s. But, to express his doubts, the Hellenic lips have learned to form a Teutonic genitive. He does not commit himself to the belief that they are the bones of “AgamemnÔn,” pure and simple; they are the bones of “Schliemann’s AgamemnÔn.” Yet primÆval Hellas, primÆval MykÊnÊ, has a history which may well live through alike unreasonable doubts and undiscerning faith. Call him what we will—AgamemnÔn or anything else—the name matters little. It is a marked moment in one’s life when one looks on the bones of one who, we need not doubt, was, in days long before Hekataios wrote or even before Homer sang, a lord of many islands and of all Argos.

The position of the akropolis at MykÊnÊ differs widely from that of either of the neighbouring akropoleis of Tiryns and Argos. The hill of Tiryns is a mere mound in the plain. The loftier hill of Argos, though far outtopped by the mountains behind it, still stands out as a marked object. But the akropolis of MykÊnÊ, though we find it to be in a manner isolated, when we come to it, seems like an outpost of the far loftier hills immediately behind it. On one side the rock rises precipitously above a narrow gorge whose limestone cliffs at once, to an eye familiar with the West of England, suggest the gorges of Mendip, and, above all, the great pass of Cheddar. In the early days of fortifications, when there was no missile to be feared but darts and arrows, a fortress was not deemed to be in greater danger by reason of being thus overlooked. Indeed, to be overlooked by high and inaccessible mountains was in itself a kind of shelter. The MykÊnaian akropolis thus stands upon the rocks and among the hills in a way in which its fellows at Tiryns and Argos do not. For that same reason it does not stand out in the same way as an object in the distant view. Its true form and position grow gradually upon us as we rise from the modern village along the paths—paths only of the shepherd and his flock—which are now all that represent the wide streets of the city beloved of HÊrÊ. More than one path may be chosen, and each will lead by one or more of the wonderful remains of the city itself, the so-called treasuries, as distinguished from the remains of the akropolis. But the path to be taken by choice, as it is the path to which the traveller’s instinct will most likely lead him, is that most to the right, that which skirts the brook which runs down from the limestone gorge, and which will lead his steps by the greatest monuments of all, the first and the second treasuries. But let the treasuries wait for a moment; they are works, though of unrecorded days, yet still of days far later than the defences of the akropolis itself. We will gaze first at the very centre of all, the centre, we may say, of prÆ-historic Hellas. And, as we draw near, we cannot help having our wrath slightly kindled against the last discoverer of MykÊnÊ. Dr. Schliemann has done well in what he has brought to light; we cannot think that he has done well in what he has hidden. As we draw near, the height and outline of a great part of the outer wall of the akropolis are utterly hidden, the general view is spoiled, the proportion of the whole work is sadly damaged, because Dr. Schliemann chose to throw the rubbish which he dug out of the tombs anywhere where it might light. He has for the most part thrown it in vast heaps over the wall, by which a really large part of the course of the wall is hidden, and the whole view blurred and confused. A little trouble might have avoided this at first; a little more trouble might get rid of the rubbish now. In the last diggings at Athens much more care has been taken. The rubbish has been all carried away, and is piled in heaps where it does no harm. If in times to come those heaps should grow into hills like the “mons testaceus” at Rome, no harm will have been done, and an odd little piece of history will have been made. But Dr. Schliemann’s heaps of rubbish do seriously mar the general effect of the MykÊnaian akropolis. They make it hard to understand the real line of the walls until we come quite close to them. Among the rocks and the walls, the walls growing out of the rocks, we see something which is neither rock nor wall, but which confuses the outline of both; as we come nearer, we find it to be the former contents of the royal tombs and of the other works which have been brought to light within the walls. As at Tiryns, there is a higher and a lower, an inner and an outer fortress within the akropolis itself. But the greater height of the MykÊnaian hill makes this arrangement far more prominent, far more effective than it is at Tiryns. Only at MykÊnÊ the lower enclosure has more of the air of an excrescence or an appendage than the lower enclosure of Tiryns. But it is this lower enclosure, the enclosure immediately entered by the famous lion-gate, which, whether an addition or not to the fortress above, has become the great centre of the associations of the place. There lie the empty tombs, thence came the wondrous treasures, which have carried us back into the depths of what we may fairly call prÆ-historic history, which have made us stand face to face, if not with the personal heroes of Homer, at least with the men of that age of Hellenic culture which the songs of Homer set before us.

The buildings of MykÊnÊ have been described over and over again till their general effect must be almost as familiar to those who have not seen them as to those who have. But here, as everywhere else, it is the merely artistic character which can be thus taken at a distance. To feel MykÊnÊ, as to feel any other place, we must see it. And even some of the artistic points can, as usual, be thoroughly made out only on the spot. One must see the place thoroughly to take in the wide difference between the masonry and artistic finish of the lion-gate and of the two chief treasuries. The lion-gate—we mean the gate itself, as distinguished from the lions—is a mere piling together of stones. The work is done doubtless with great mechanical skill, and it has the wonderful effect which all such primitive buildings have; still it is altogether without any claims on the score of art. But in the gateways of the treasuries, instead of the vast erect jambs of the lion-gate, we find well-wrought courses of stone in two orders, with something that may almost be called a moulding. These gateways had columns too. Unluckily nearly all are gone, even the precious fragment which was seen and drawn by the earlier travellers. This last, be it remembered, was of a kind which would not have looked out of place in any Romanesque building in England or Normandy. This is a most instructive fact, as the likeness must have been purely accidental; and this may serve to remind us that there are such things as accidental likenesses, and to warn us against leaping to conclusions when such likenesses are found in times and places far distant from one another. In the second treasury, the one lately brought to light by Dr. Schliemann, there is a fragment of another column, no longer in its place, which looks like the first rude attempt at the later Doric. Now over both these gateways, and also over the lion-gate, are openings of the same triangular form, though of course wrought far more carefully in the treasuries than in the lion-gate. In the treasuries these openings are openings; they are at present filled up with nothing. That over the lion-gate is filled, as all the world knows, with a basaltic stone which would seem more natural at Bamburgh than at MykÊnÊ, carved with the famous lions, if lions they be, which guard a column that would not seem out of place in the duomo of Fiesole, in the apse of La Couture at Le Mans, or even in the slype at Worcester. Can we believe that the lion-gate and the lions, that the lion-gate and the gates of the treasuries, are all of the same date? And in point of work the lions at once connect themselves with the gateways of the treasuries, not with the gateway over which they stand. Surely we have in these gateways signs of an abiding type which lived on through several stages of advancing art. Over the square-headed gate there was to be, for whatever reason, a triangular hole, doubtless meant to be filled with a stone of its own shape. In the treasuries either this stone was never put in or it is gone. In the lion-gate it was put in, as it seems to us, when art had passed the stage represented by the lion-gate itself, and had reached the stage which is represented by the gateways of the treasuries.

Another thought suggests itself. At MykÊnÊ, as less clearly at Tiryns, the lion-gate, with its skilfully guarded approach, does not lead at once into the higher enclosure of the akropolis, but into the outer and lower one. Does this go at all to show that this outer enclosure, at MykÊnÊ at least, was an addition to the primitive fortress of all, fencing in the upper part of the hill? The fact that the tombs were found in the lower enclosure also looks this way. There must have been a time when this ground was looked upon as being outside the city, or it would hardly have been used for purposes of burial. The argument does not quite reach demonstration; burial within the walls was not absolutely unknown even in historical Greece, and it may not be safe to argue from historical to primÆval Greece. Still the two arguments so far fall together as at least to suggest the idea that we have in the inner enclosure something yet more ancient and venerable than all—something which may have been ancient and venerable, not only in the days of Homer, but in the days of those whose tale Homer has told.

For the present we keep within the akropolis, within the old hill fort which forms the inner circle of the Ekbatana of the imperial lords of prÆ-historic Hellas. We stand here within the walls which struck the minds of so many of the poets of Greece in the days when their desolation was a thing of yesterday—walls which seemed too mighty to be the work of mortal men, and which, like their fellows elsewhere, were deemed to have been wrought by the same hands which forged the thunderbolts of Zeus. Here we may in truth

F?s?e?? ?????a? t?? p??????s??? ????, p???f????? te d?a ?e??p?d?? t?de—

and we may deem that the house of the Pelopids was something which grew up as a new thing beneath the shadow of the Cyclopean walls. That inner fortress may well be to the MykÊnaian empire of Homeric times what Roma Quadrata on the Capitol was to the Rome which bore rule over all Italy. But not a word is there in the Homeric tale to make us think that that empire was a dominion of foreign princes, or that the patriarch of the Pelopids was other than a son of the peninsula to which the race gave its name. From the akropolis one may look down on the enclosure which holds the rifled tombs, on the space beyond—the site of the wide streets of MykÊnÊ—which holds the treasuries, and so on to destroying Argos and to Tiryns, the fellow-sufferer in overthrow. There is no other spot where we are carried so deep into unrecorded ages, and where unrecorded ages tell their tale so clearly. But the tale of the akropolis, even the tale of the inner fortress, is enough for one while. The tombs of the lower enclosure, the treasuries, if treasuries they be, of the outer city, may supply their own materials for separate thought.