We have slightly sketched the main objects which flit before the eye in the delightful voyage from the harbour of Athens to what we may in some sort look on as the harbour of Argos. Once on the Argolic soil, close in the very centre and cradle of Hellenic legend, among the cities whose names have from childhood been surrounded with a halo of mythic lore, we must pause and muse at greater length on each of the famous and wondrous objects before us. Each has its own charm, its own lesson. MykÊnÊ is the special goal of our pilgrimage, the object which—even putting modern discoveries apart—would of itself fully reward a journey from the Western world. But half the charm, half the lesson, of MykÊnÊ comes from its relation to the other cities in the neighbourhood. Argos and MykÊnÊ, the destroyer and the destroyed, suggest one another, and are coupled together, confounded together, in many a verse and many a legend. But they do not stand alone. Before we reach them we come to another spot, less famous, less striking in many points, but still having its own fame, its own charm, a spot which must not be passed by even by those who are hastening on to the most famous spot of all. The first of our hill-fortresses plays, beside its fellows, a comparatively small part either in legend or in history. Fixed on a less striking spot than either, not crowning such a height as the Larissa of Argos, not backed by mountain and gorge like the akropolis of MykÊnÊ, desolate as MykÊnÊ itself, but containing no such wonders of primitive art within its walled circuit, Tiryns stands before us, claiming our study simply by its walled circuit and nothing else. It is the hill-fort, and nothing but the hill-fort. But it is something to gaze on a hill-fort whose walls were ancient and wonderful in Homer’s day, and which abide much as they must have stood in Homer’s day. Argos, MykÊnÊ, Corinth, are all to be seen and studied; but we shall lose no small part of the teaching of those cities and of the land of which they form a part, unless we begin our research with the wonderful spot which enabled the first of Greek poets, the first no less of Greek geographers, to fill up his verse with the sounding formula:

??????? te te????essa?.

There is moreover one aspect of Tiryns which will give it a special interest to any one who has already seen something of the primitive cities of Italy, but to whom Tiryns itself is his first introduction to the primitive cities of Greece. He who has visited FÆsulÆ and Tusculum, he who has looked thoroughly at Rome itself, will feel a certain impression come strongly upon him that his work is imperfect as long as he keeps himself on the western side of the Hadriatic. Tusculum, above all things, points to Tiryns. The collection of primÆval remains in Greece and Italy made long ago by Dodwell—an observer, we may add, second only to the great name of Leake—was perhaps unlucky in helping to give greater currency to the dangerous word Pelasgian. But it was a great gain to bring the Greek and Italian examples together. It would be a greater gain still to bring together as many examples as possible of the same kind from all parts of the world. The rash theorist may be indeed led into any number of those wild imaginings which find their expression in names like “Druidical” in Britain, and “Pelasgian” in Italy and Greece. But the critical inquirer, the votary of the Comparative method, will be strengthened in his researches by seeing how in the art of building, as in everything else, like effects spring from like causes, how the same stage of process leads to the same results in distant lands and distant ages. The helpless devisers of theories about the origin of the arch, and especially of the pointed arch, may profitably learn that the arch has been striven after in endless places—that it has been successfully striven after in many places—that the pointed arch, simply as a constructive form, is as old as the round, and most likely older. The guide who shows the single “arco Gotico” at Tusculum illustrates the state of mind in which professed inquirers into architectural history were only two or three generations back. To them the Gothic style and the pointed arch meant the same thing. That belief, as well as many other kindred beliefs, may be well unlearned on the akropolis of Tiryns.

Tiryns lies on the way to Argos; and Argos lies on the way from Tiryns to MykÊnÊ. The three should be studied together; their position and history supply at once so much of likeness and so much of contrast. All alike, no less than FÆsulÆ and Tusculum, no less than Athens itself, no less than “the great group of village communities by the Tiber,” are examples of the primitive hill-fort which has grown into the later city. All show, in different ways, the peculiarities which are characteristic of cities of this immemorial type. But they show also the different forms which that immemorial type might assume, according to difference of local or other circumstances. Athens, Corinth, a crowd of others, all belong to the same general class. We might say that all the strictly immemorial cities of Greece did so. For the river city the small streams of Greece gave no room; and, even where the river city was possible, it doubtless marks a later stage than the hill-fort. The cities of colonial Greece, founded close by or actually in the sea, mark a later stage still. Tiryns, Argos, MykÊnÊ, are all hill cities; but they occupy hills of very different heights and figures. They all stand at no great distance from the sea, but none of them ever grew into a maritime city like Athens, Corinth, or Megara. Near together, but not so near that they could be fused together like the constituent elements of Rome or Sparta, they had to endure the other alternatives which commonly waited on cities which lay near together, but where such union was impossible. Rivalry, enmity, destruction of the weaker by the stronger, formed the staple of the history of the three most famous among the cities of the Argolic land.

We stand then before Tiryns. We are almost surprised at finding that we have so soon reached it from modern Nauplia. Itself as utterly forsaken as MykÊnÊ, it does not stand in the same way as MykÊnÊ, utterly cut off from all signs of modern life, from all signs of any date later than that of the primÆval days of Greece. There is indeed something startling in finding a primÆval city, and that a city so rich in mythical renown, standing at only a small distance from the roadside. More than seventeen hundred years back Pausanias lighted on it in the same way, and found it as desolate as it is now; then, as now, the wall remained, and nothing more. The site is not for a moment to be compared with that of either of the rival cities. The site of MykÊnÊ would be striking indeed as a mere piece of scenery, even though MykÊnÊ were not there. So would the site, if not of Argos itself, at least of its Larissa and its theatre. But the hill of Tiryns is simply one, and that the lowest, of several small isolated hills in the low ground between the gulf and the mountains. Had other hill-forts arisen on those other nearer hills, the group might have been fused together into one great city by the same process which girded the hills of Rome with a single wall. But this was not to be; Argos was to grow, but it was to grow only by the utter wiping out of Tiryns and MykÊnÊ as inhabited cities. There then, wholly forsaken, not containing so much as a shepherd’s hut, stand the mighty walls, the walls which supplied Homer with a speaking epithet, the walls which in later days men deemed to be too great to be the work of mortal hands, and set down as having been wrought by the superhuman skill of the legendary KyklÔpes. The name marks a change in the idea which had come to attach to that name since the days of Homer. The KyklÔpes of later Grecian legend, always artists of one kind or another—sometimes builders of gigantic walls, sometimes forgers of the thunderbolts of Zeus—have no likeness but in name and strength to the solitary and savage KyklÔpes of the Odyssey. But when we see, not only a vast expenditure of mere force, but the display of real skill which is shown in these primitive works of defence—works, as we are tempted to think, of a rude age, when, if force was abundant, no great skill was to be looked for—it is not wonderful if men in later days looked on them as the work of more than mortal hands. For ornament, for polish or finish of any kind, we are not to look in the stage represented by Tiryns. Yet the way in which the rugged material is dealt with, the piling together of these vast unhewn rocks so as to fit them together and to bring to the front so many comparatively smooth surfaces, was, in the ages and under the circumstances of the builders, as true a work of artistic skill as the care which dictated the delicate curves, the minute differences in distance and direction, in the portico of the ParthenÔn itself. Who those builders were it is in vain for us to guess. They belong to the primÆval, the unrecorded, days of Hellas, to the days before even legendary history begins. MykÊnÊ has a history—a history which different minds may set down as truth, as mere fable, as fable grounded upon truth, but which still is a history, which still is something different from that mere guessing at the names of founders which was prescribed by the supposed necessity of finding an eponymous hero for every land and city. The legends of Tiryns hardly get beyond this stage. HÊraklÊs indeed figures in its story, but HÊraklÊs is in his own nature ubiquitous. That MykÊnÊ contains monuments marking a far higher stage of art than anything at Tiryns proves nothing as to the relative date of the two cities. For the works at Tiryns and the oldest work at MykÊnÊ may well be of the same date. All that we can say is that these walls belong to an age before history, before tradition. If Homer had spoken of these walls as the works of KyklÔpes, we might have seen in it a dim tradition that they were the works of some race of men older than his own Achaians. As it is, we can only say that they are the works of the earliest inhabitants of PeloponnÊsos of whom any works remain to us. Whatever we may guess from the analogy of other lands, we have no evidence of the existence of any inhabitants of PeloponnÊsos earlier than the Achaians of Homer.

We come then somewhat suddenly on the hill-fortress by the roadside. We are guided to the southern face of a hill much longer from north to south than from east to west, and we find ourselves before the main approach of Tiryns, or at least of its akropolis. The great gate has perished; there is nothing to set against the lions of MykÊnÊ. But to the right of where it stood is one of the two main features which have given the walls of Tiryns their special fame. This is what the Greek antiquaries call the s?????, what in English may be called the sally-port, the long passage with its roof made of the great stones of primÆval masonry so placed together as to make the form, though not the construction, of the pointed arch. Of the many examples of striving after the archaic construction without ever actually reaching it which are to be found scattered through so many parts of the world, none is more instructive than this. In the history of architectural construction it fully deserves a place alongside of the Mykenaian treasuries. Here is a great military work of the earliest times, the builders of which were striving hard, though without perfect success, to form an arch. This fact at once puts a barrier between the primitive and the historical buildings of Greece. It is indeed strange that a people which had come so near to the greatest of mechanical discoveries should have failed of altogether reaching it, and should have developed its historical architecture from a principle altogether different. In Italy it was otherwise. We there see exactly the same strivings after the arch which we see in Greece; but here the strivings were rewarded with success at an early time. The attempt succeeded; the perfect arch was lighted on, and the historical architecture of Rome was developed from the principle of the arch. Thus, while FÆsulÆ, Tusculum, Signia, a crowd of others have their Greek parallels, there is no Greek parallel to the cloaca maxima of Rome.

Then, again, as we have already hinted, these examples show that the pointed arch, simply as a constructive form, is as old as the round. Because the pointed arch happened to become the leading feature of an architectural style later than the round arch, we are apt to fancy that the form is later in its own nature, that it must have been developed out of the round, that he who built the first pointed arch must have seen round arches. Yet the pointed form is just as natural in itself, just as likely to occur to a primitive builder. Indeed we might almost say that it was more likely. The first step towards the arch would doubtless be setting two stones to lean against one another, and this would lead much more easily to the pointed arch than to the round. It so happened that the first Italian builders whose strivings after the arch were quite successful were led to the round and not to the pointed form. But had the Tusculan or the Tirynthian engineer actually reached the construction to which he came so near, an architectural style, with the pointed arch for its great constructive feature, might have arisen in Latium or Argolis a thousand years before it actually did arise under Saracenic hands.

Again, in considering these matters, we must carefully keep ourselves back from any tempting ethnological theories, above all from such ethnological theories as lurk in the dangerous word Pelasgian. No one doubts the near connexion of the old Italian and the old Greek races, a connexion nearer than that of common Aryan origin. But the same kind of analogies which may be seen in their earlier buildings may be seen also in the early buildings of races which are much further apart. If Tiryns finds its best parallel at Tusculum, MykÊnÊ finds its best parallel at New Granga. Nearly just the same strivings after the arch may be found in more than one land altogether beyond the pale of European or Aryan fellowship, as for instance in the ruined cities of Central America. The analogies in the primÆval architecture of remote nations exactly answer to the analogies in their weapons, dress, and customs. They belong to the domain of Mr. Tylor.

But, while the remains at Tiryns have this special interest for the student of architectural history, they show also how far the primitive engineers had advanced in the scientific study of the art of defence. Even the non-military observer can well take this in on the eastern side. There rises what, seen from within, seen in a direct view from without, the beholder is apt to call a tower. But it is merely that the wall is either better preserved at this point or else was higher from the beginning. Here was one chief approach to the fortress, and it was guarded by what, in the technical language of Colonel Leake, is called a ramp. The only approach to the gate was by going up an ascent formed by an advanced wall, made so that an assailant would expose his unshielded side to the defenders of the fort. This skilful piece of fortification, with the sally-port which is so nearly perfect, and another, traces of which remain on the other side, shows that the primitive engineers, call them KyklÔpes or anything else, had advanced a long way beyond mere mechanical piling together of stones.

The walls doubtless fence in only the akropolis, the primitive city, answering to the oldest Athens, to the oldest Rome on the Palatine. How far the town may have spread itself over the surrounding plain we have no means of judging. We cannot believe that Tiryns ever became a great city like Argos and Corinth. Its name vanishes from history too soon for that. But at Tiryns, as we shall also see at MykÊnÊ, there was an upper and a lower city within the fortified enclosure itself. Greek antiquaries call the higher level a ?ataf?????, a place of refuge, but it is the strongly fortified part to which the approaches lead. Was this the royal citadel, and was the lower part the dwelling-place of the other original settlers before the town had spread at all beyond the present akropolis? The military objects of the two levels are gone into by Colonel Leake, but we must remember that these ancient strongholds were not, like modern forts, built simply to be attacked and defended. They were dwelling-places of man, fortified because they were dwelling-places of man. One would think that the whole of the first body of settlers would find shelter within the walls. There was the king on the higher level; the rest of the tribe was below. A d??? might or might not arise beyond their defences. At Rome and Athens such a d??? did arise, and made the history of Rome and Athens different from that of Tiryns.

It is a wonderful thing to stand beneath these mighty walls, raised out of the huge blocks which seem too great for mortal men to have piled. Nowhere else does the line of thought which they suggest come out so strongly. On the Athenian akropolis there are blocks ruder than those of Tiryns itself, but they are hidden by the great works of more polished days. At MykÊnÊ the walls, mighty as they are, have almost yielded to tombs, gates, and treasuries. At Tiryns it is the walls and the walls alone which seem to speak of its days of power. Tiryns struck men as being te????essa in the days of the Homeric Catalogue. It is as te????essa and as te????essa only, that it strikes us still.