ARGOLIS
“Few for our eyes are the homes of the heroes,
Lowly these few, they scarce lift from the plain;
So once I marked thee, O luckless Mycenæ,
Then, as I passed thee, a desert’s domain.
Never goat-pasture more lonely, thou’rt merely
Something they point at, while driving a-fold.
Said an old herd to me: ‘Here stood the city
Built by Cyclōpes, the city of gold.’”
ALPHEUS OF MITYLENE, _Greek Anthology_.
In the Argolid it seems reasonable to turn aside from history, in its
narrower definition, to recall the tales of heroes and the “grandeur of
the dooms imagined for the mighty dead.” The turbulent and uneven course
of events in which Argolis of historic times appears now as an ally, now
as an enemy of other powerful states, is of less moment than the legends
handed down and crystallized in great literature. Even if the sagas
which may have formed the nucleus of the Iliad sprang from the older
Thessalian “Argos,” the Homeric poems, as known to the classic Greeks
and to us, concern themselves with the mighty fortresses of the Argolid.
The Attic drama reënforced the epic tradition, and the interchanging use
in Homer of Achæans, Danai, and Argives to designate the Greeks,
suggests the elements which gave the later poets opportunity for varied
interpretation.
Argolis was the outpost of the Peloponnesus, and even of the whole Greek
mainland, for the prehistoric invaders and traders from Crete, the
southern Ægean or Phœnicia. The rugged eastern peninsula of Laconia,
indeed, extends southward nearly a whole degree of latitude further than
Argolis, but the dangerous promontory, Malea, did not so often entice
mariners to double it as it served for a beacon to direct their course
northward into the deep shelter of the beautiful Gulf of Argos. It is
easy to understand how naturally the early captains of commerce or
conquest would be guided up the long coast until they beached their
boats under the impregnable rock of Nauplia and the low hill of Tiryns
levelled, as it seemed, by the footprint of some god at whose bidding
the “Cyclopes” reared its prehistoric and superhuman walls.
[Illustration: A GALLERY OF THE ACROPOLIS OF TIRYNS]
But the southward-facing gulf was not the only approach to Argolis. The
earth’s crust, pushed up into a ridged peninsula between the Saronic and
Argolic gulfs, falls away also at the north to the Corinthian Gulf and
the Isthmus. From this direction migrating bands of Achæans came
overland to mingle with the more numerous “Pelasgians” and to dominate
them by their intellectual power and by their rich and conquering Greek
speech. When, after the lapse of long years, Achæan imagination,
combined with the highly developed “Pelasgian” skill in building, had
reared or developed a fortress on the acropolis of Mycenæ, robber barons
could control the mountain gateway. And with the probably earlier
Larisa, the acropolis of Argos, and with the fortresses of Tiryns and of
Midea, they could take their toll of all who would enter the Argive
plain from the north or the south. The masters of these palace castles,
as their wealth and their wants increased, could afford to be hospitable
to Cretan art or to the contributions from the Ægean or Asia. They may,
perhaps, as time went on, have visualized the spoken word in the new
characters of the alphabet, whatever its provenance, whether brought
over seas to Nauplia by some Palamedes, who might pose as its inventor,
or by the Phœnician traders, middlemen between the Greeks and the men of
Crete and the Ægean who, centuries before, had developed writing from
their picture script.
The blended prehistoric civilization, with its epochs checked off in
centuries or millennia, and, thanks to the archæologists, to-day rapidly
emerging throughout the Greek world in Attica, Bœotia, Asia Minor, the
islands and the Peloponnesus, has received not unnaturally, if
prematurely, the general name “Mycenæan” from the great royal tombs and
smaller graves and the strong walls of Mycenæ and from the rich and
amazing treasure recovered from the graves excavated within the Gateway
of the Lions. Accumulating evidence has indicated the insufficiency of
the term to include both the art and the architecture. Successive
periods and various origins must yet be disentangled. But Mycenæ and
Tiryns, as being the most impressive in their entirety, continue to
represent this prehistoric civilization to the majority of visitors, and
the term “Mycenæan” may serve until some happier names are suggested to
distinguish at once between the home-bred and the imported.
On the borderland between mere shadowy tradition and an approximately
exact chronology two events seemed to the Greeks themselves of
preëminent importance and were referred by them to the twelfth century
B. C.—the Fall of Troy, and the Return of the Heracleidæ, or the Dorian
conquest, as we should now describe this movement. Although Thucydides
states that “in the eightieth year after the Trojan War the Dorians, led
by the Heracleidæ, conquered the Peloponnesus,” it may be found
necessary to assume a much longer interval, especially if we allow for a
series of Dorian conquests.
The Dorians were one of the Greek clans pushed down from further north
into central Greece in prehistoric times. They have left, as the
memorial of this period, their name attached to little Doris wedged in
between Parnassus and Mount Œta. When they were impelled to move still
further south, whether by external pressure or the desire to send out
colonies, the Achæans already held the land approach to the Peloponnesus
and also the littoral of Achæa on the opposite side of the Corinthian
Gulf. They were thus forced to take to the sea, and the Dorian
settlements in Crete, Thera, Melos, and Asia Minor seem to have been
followed by Dorian invasions of the Peloponnesus from the south and
east, especially in Laconia and Argolis. In Laconia the invaders
established themselves as conquerors and retained their own character
almost unchanged, while in Argolis they amalgamated with the people
already in possession. In readjusting pedigrees it was more agreeable to
native pride to assume that these invaders were themselves of good old
Peloponnesian stock, rather than foreign Dorians, and incidentally to
localize the spreading fame of Heracles. Both of these objects were
provided for in Argolis when Heracles proved to be of the Perseid line,
the original and most distinguished Argive dynasty. Under his
grandchildren the invaders merely came back to their own. Thus the
Dorian invasions came to be described by the senseless and confusing
name of the Return of the Heracleidæ. With this event is perhaps to be
associated the sudden destruction of Mycenæ and Tiryns by fire and the
reinstatement of Argos and the Larisa citadel as supreme.
By way of acquiring the chief poet as well as the chief hero of Greece,
Argos claimed, with other cities, to be the birthplace of Homer—an echo,
doubtless, of the dimly remembered sagas of Achæan Argos in Thessaly. In
reality, Argolis, like other Dorian cantons, contributed more subject
matter for poets than poetry itself. Yet it was not wholly parasitical.
It partially balanced the Dorian debt by sending to Athens two
poet-musicians whose activity cannot be justly appraised from the meagre
fragments that have come down to us. The Dorian contributions to music
must be kept in mind. The Argives, we are told, furnished many of the
famous musicians of Greece.
From Hermione on the southern shore of the peninsula came Lasus, who, as
a theoretical and practical musician, did much to develop the dithyramb.
He was the teacher of Pindar and, under the cultivated tyrant
Hipparchus, was a rival of Simonides in Athens. The other poet,
Pratinas, came from Phlius, geographically within the northwestern
corner of Argolis, although the independent Phliasians long maintained
their autonomy. The city lay in green meadowlands high among the
mountains on the grassy banks of the Sicyonian Asopus which, according
to local belief, was generated by the Carian Meander coming under the
sea to link the two sides of the Ægean together, as the Alpheus, on the
other side, united Sicily to the mother land. Although Pratinas was
inevitably drawn by the lure of the intellectual to live at Athens, he
stands out as a Dorian poet. He is known as the first writer of the
satyr dramas, one of which it was for a while the custom to add to the
trilogy of tragedies, and he competed even with Æschylus.
The literature of Ionian Athens lacked one element which developed among
the Æolians and Dorians. The more independent life of Dorian women
called forth two poetesses in the Peloponnesus. One of these lived at
Sicyon. This city, lying on the Asopus, which comes tumbling down
through the deep ravine from Phlius, early became Dorian. Once included
in the widespread kingdom of the Agamemnon of tradition, it was now
independent, now dependent on Argos or on Sparta. With the mountains of
the Peloponnesus around it and the Corinthian Gulf and Parnassus in
front, it is beautiful for situation. Its rich treasure-houses were
among the notable sights at Delphi and Olympia, and it was famous for
its schools of painting and of sculpture. Here Praxilla, the Dorian
poetess _par excellence_, lived in the fifth century B. C. The fame of
her dithyrambs, a few fragments of which have reached us, survived her,
and she was deemed worthy of a bronze statue by Lysippus, a later
compatriot.
In aristocratic Argos itself another woman, Telesilla, was honoured both
as a writer of choral hymns for maidens and as a heroine in war.
Pausanias adds to the Herodotean account of the Argive men massacred by
the Spartans in Hera’s grove the story of how Telesilla manned the walls
with old men, boys, and slaves, and then drew up the Argive women for
actual conflict with the Spartans and repulsed them, partly by stout
fighting, partly by the shame inspired in them by the thought of
contending with women. Pausanias saw, furthermore, a carved relief
representing the warrior poetess, her scrolls scattered at her feet as
she gazes at a helmet which she is about to put on.
Kydias, also from Hermione the home of Lasus, wrote, in the first half
of the fifth century, love songs highly esteemed by Plato.
The Argolid contains more than a dozen places prominent in Greek
literature and in history. Among the northern mountains were Phlius,
Cleonæ, and Nemea; overlooking or on the Argive Gulf were Mycenæ, the
Heræum, Argos and the Larisa acropolis, Midea, Tiryns, Nauplia, and
Lerna; on the eastern coast of Akte, the old name for the promontory
that with other parts merged its name in that of Argos, were Epidaurus,
Troezen, and Calauria, with Hermione on the south coast; and on the west
side of the gulf was the narrow strip of land, Cynuria, bone of
contention between Sparta and the Wolf of Argos. Of all these places the
famous group on the Argive Gulf, together with Epidaurus, is most easily
accessible from Athens, and travellers who cannot go farther afield may
gain from this brief excursion in the Argolid an adequate impression
both of its prehistoric interest and of its natural beauties.
Herodotus, in leading up to his account of the Persian War, selects as
the origin of the rivalry between the Orient and Greece the rape by
Phœnicians of Io, daughter of Inachus, the personified Argive river.
This was doubtless a typical scene on the shores of the Mediterranean.
The seamen landed and “undid their corded bales;” the native women
crowded about the bargain counter at the vessel’s stern; it was easy for
the sailors to seize the handsomest and, launching their vessel, to bear
them away. The Phœnicians, however, were merely an episode, and the
early “Outlanders” came into the Argolid over the northern mountains.
If one were entering Argolis neither by the modern railway nor in
company with one of these instalments of prehistoric Achæans that
descended from the north, but were faring along the good highroad from
Corinth in the days of Mycenæ’s glory, he would follow up the
_Longopotamo_ River, which flows down west of Acrocorinth into the
Corinthian Gulf. Before crossing the watershed that slopes to the
Argolic plain he would have come to Homer’s “well-built” Cleonæ in a
semi-circle of wooded mountains. Here the ancient roads part, one going
east of Mount Treton more directly to Mycenæ, the other making a detour
to the west to the Argive plain and then to Mycenæ, stationed like a
huge spider at the centre of its web. When Lucian’s Charon, off on a
day’s furlough from the Ferry, asks Hermes to point out the famous
cities of antiquity, the latter shows him Babylon and then adds: “But
Mycenæ and Cleonæ I am ashamed to point out to you, and Ilium above all.
For when you go down home again you’ll certainly be throttling Homer for
his big boasts. Long ago, to be sure, they were prosperous, but now they
are dead and gone. For cities, Ferryman, die out just like people, and,
queerest of all, whole rivers. For instance, there’s not so much as a
ditch left of the Inachus in Argos now-a-days.” Lucian forgets his quasi
sixth century perspective in this pessimistic outlook and descends to
things as they were in his own time, when his contemporary Pausanias
explained the “summer-dried” condition of the Inachus as due to
Poseidon’s anger because Hera had been given the preference to himself
in the Argive land. But not even the Lynceus vision, temporarily put at
the disposal of Charon by an Homeric incantation, could have been
expected to reveal, beneath the oblivious Argive soil of the second
century of our era, the rich treasures of Mycenæ, to which the X-rays of
the archæologists have now penetrated.
Before descending along the bed of the northern tributary of the Inachus
into the plain we turn aside to the precinct of Nemea. This lies in a
valley of its own between those of Phlius and Cleonæ and, like them, on
a stream, the Nemea, which also flows down to the Corinthian Gulf. The
deep grass, fed by the overflowing waters, gave the name Nemea,
“pasture-land.” The biennial Nemean games, celebrated on the high
watershed at this entrance to the peninsula, were especially
pan-Peloponnesian. They were instituted, according to a charming story,
by Adrastus and the rest of the “Seven” on their way to Thebes, as an
atonement for the death of the child Opheltes, carelessly left by his
nurse on a bed of wild parsley (or celery) and slain by a dragon while
she fetched water for the warriors. The solemn funereal origin of the
games was kept before the mind by the dun-colored raiment worn by the
umpires and emphasized by the cypress grove which in antiquity
surrounded the temple. Pindar seems to reflect this feeling when he
refers to the “solemn plains” in connection with Adrastus. Elsewhere he
speaks of the “lovely contests of Nemea.” Where the little Opheltes died
on his bed of wild parsley and the Argive champions passed by to Thebes
are the lonely ruins of the Temple of Zeus. Three slender columns still
stand to watch over their fallen companions, stretched upon the ground
by the Earthshaker whose envy has shaken down so many temples of rivals
while, by the cunning of Athena in sharing with him her precinct, he has
left the great rock in Athens unmoved. Zeus, the virile god of the
Achæans, is lord and master at Nemea, while Hera presides in the Argive
plain as she did originally at Olympia.
The cave of the Nemean lion slain by Heracles at the bidding of
Eurystheus, king of Mycenæ or Tiryns, cannot be identified with
certainty. Indeed, the king of beasts himself, so far as Argolis is
concerned, has been now confined by the excavators within the narrow
limits of a Phrygian gem. Heracles, in his search for rare fauna, flora,
and other exhibits, completed six of his twelve labours in the
Peloponnesus, two of them within the borders of Argolis, before he was
compelled to go abroad for the fruit of the Hesperides or the
three-headed hound of Hades. He had already killed a lion on Mount
Cithæron and assumed its skin as his conventional uniform, and when the
spoils of the Nemean lion were delivered at Mycenæ the king might well,
it may be thought, have deemed it suitable to commemorate by a “totem”
on the Gate of the Acropolis the subjugation of this original autochthon
of Mount Treton, which dominated the two highways leading to the
fortress.
In the Homeric poems it is Mycenæ, “rich in gold,” and “well-walled”
Tiryns that are predominant in Argolis. The legendary kingdom of the
Atreidæ extended over a large part of the Peloponnesus, and it was
pleasing to Argive pride to reserve Mycenæ as headquarters for
Agamemnon, king of men, and to parcel off Lacedæmon to Menelaus when he
was not represented as also living in Argolis. Mycenæ commanded the
mountain roads to the Corinthian Gulf and the Isthmus, and a prehistoric
network of roadbeds that focus at Mycenæ lifts out of the realm of mere
legend the controlling influence of the mighty fortress over the
territory to the northward. To the south of the mountains it was
connected with Tiryns and Argos in a varying sequence of leagues and
rivalries.
Mycenæ is now as familiar to the modern world as the Acropolis of
Athens. Its resurrection within our own times has called forth manifold
accounts and pictures of the “beehive tombs,” the Cyclopean walls, the
Gate of the Lions (never, indeed, wholly buried), the circle of shaft
graves on the acropolis and the treasure found within them.
The three great dramatists all dealt with scenes from the family history
of the Atreidæ or Pelopidæ, the illustrious but blood-stained dynasty
that for a few generations only (if we allow the Heracleidæ their
pedigree) broke in upon the continuity of the Perseid line, descended
through Danaus from Inachus. When Eurystheus was slain, as Thucydides
records, by the Heracleidæ in Attica, the kingdom passed to his mother’s
half-brother Atreus, the son of Pelops. Agamemnon, his son, or his
grandson, is described by the historian as “the greatest naval potentate
of his time,” and he cites the Iliad which speaks of him as “lording it
over many ships and over all Argos,” that is, over all the Argolid.
Although Æschylus, by reason of a contemporary _rapprochement_ between
the Athenians and the Argives, explicitly lays the scene of his
“Agamemnon” at Argos, the traditional association with Mycenæ, handed
down from Homer, has usually prevailed. Sophocles returned to it, and in
his “Electra” assumes Mycenæ as the home of the royal pair, while
Euripides, in his “Electra,” loosely refers to both cities, although in
other plays Mycenæ is uppermost in his mind. Thus Iphigeneia at Aulis,
about to be sacrificed, exclaims:—
“O mother mine, Pelasgian land,
O virgin’s home, Mycenæ!”
And amongst the Taurians, overjoyed at her reunion with her brother, her
thoughts likewise revert to Mycenæ:—
“O home and hearth-stone mine,
Built by Cyclopic hand,
Mycenæ, fatherland,
Our love is thine!”
Pausanias speaks of Agamemnon and others of the family as buried within
the walls of Mycenæ, and places the tombs of Clytemnestra and her
paramour without. The various attempts to identify with literary
tradition the beehive tombs below or the shaft graves discovered by
Schliemann on the acropolis above involve varying degrees of
improbability or of contradiction, and from these ingenious attempts to
reconcile facts it is a relief to turn to the realities of pure fiction.
The “Agamemnon” of Æschylus, the greatest of extant Greek dramas, opens
with a soldier posted on the palace roof at Argos continuing the ten
years’ watch for the beacon signal[34] that is to flash across the Ægean
the news of the capture of Troy, in order that the guilty Clytemnestra
may not be taken unawares. Presently the beacon flashes out on Mount
Arachneum, seen, as the watcher looks eastward across the plain, between
the Heræum and Tiryns. The long chorals contain the kernel of the poet’s
thought. The Argive elders enter chanting their anapæsts:—
“Now this year is the tenth since ’gainst Priam of Troy,
As antagonist great,
Menelaus the lord, Agamemnon besides
Holding power two-throned and two-sceptred from Zeus,
Mighty yoke-pair, two sons they of Atreus their sire,
Sped forth from this land in a thousand of ships
Of our Argives a host
As a warrior band bringing succour.”
The old men even in the hour of victory are filled with strange
foreboding of coming ill and with fear of a still unadjusted Nemesis. A
curse is inbred in the royal house. “The fearsome wrath, recurrent,
house-haunting, guileful, unforgetting, exacting vengeance for the
children” more than hints at the grim story of Thyestes fed by Atreus on
the flesh of his children. Iphigeneia’s sacrifice at Aulis by
Agamemnon[35] is skilfully introduced to complicate the ethical
situation by giving Clytemnestra a plausible justification for her
unfaithfulness and for the secret plottings of which the chorus is not
unaware.
Footnote 34:
See extract from _Agamemnon_ in chapter i, p. 11.
Footnote 35:
See extract from _Agamemnon_, chapter xiv, p. 308.
Clytemnestra, intoxicated with the thought that Agamemnon is about to
fall into her snare, tells the chorus how the beacons, her “racers with
the torch,” have brought the news, and then breaks forth with a recital,
swift and vivid, reminding them how, even while she speaks, the Argive
warriors are stalking triumphant through the streets of Troy:—
“Troy the Achæans have and hold this very day!
Methinks I hear commingling outcries in the town.”
The captive Trojan women “from throats no longer free” bewail their
dead, while the Argives plunder as they shout or seat themselves at an
impromptu breakfast:—
“In captured Trojan homes they make their dwelling now,
Set free from roofless bivouac in frost and dew.
How they, the happy men, will sleep the livelong night
Unpicketed!”
Agamemnon enters in his chariot, with Cassandra, the captive princess of
Troy, in his retinue, driving up from Nauplia. He addresses Argos and
the gods. He boasts of the capture of Ilium. The interval necessary for
the Ægean voyage is minimized—Troy’s ruins still smoulder sulkily:—
“From smoke still rising even now conspicuous
Is seen the captured city; blasts of ruin live;
From out the smould’ring ashes there keep jetting forth
Fat puffs of plunder!”
From the ruined wealth of Troy the thought is turned to the traditional
costly splendour of the Argive palaces. Clytemnestra cunningly avails
herself of Agamemnon’s only half-concealed vanity to cover her own
murderous intent and, if possible, to transfer to his account, in the
eyes of the gods, a certain debit to Nemesis. She would persuade him to
enter the palace treading presumptuously upon royal purple tapestries,
and with grim ambiguity she says:—
“And now to pleasure me, dear heart, down from thy car!
Set not upon the ground, my lord, that foot of thine
That hath sack’d Ilium. Maid servants! Why delay
To strew the foot-path of his road with tapestries?
Forthwith be purple-paved his way! Let Justice lead
On to a dwelling where he scarce had hoped to come.”
Agamemnon, flattered, makes a show of resistance, and finally, to ward
off the evil consequences of presumption, compromises by bidding the
slaves unloose his shoes:—
“Lest bolt of envy from the gods’ eyes from afar
Shall strike me as the costly purple I tread down.”
As he yields there surges before the vision of the exultant Clytemnestra
another sea:—
“There is a sea and who shall ever drain it dry?
It guards the drops of bounteous purple, ever fresh,
As silver precious, raiment’s dye. Our house, my lord,
With God’s help hath sufficient store of these. Our halls
Are far from understanding ways of poverty.”
As she turns to follow her victim she prays:—
“O Zeus! O Zeus Fulfiller! these my prayers fulfil.”
The captive Cassandra is left without. Before her searching but futile
insight pass by-gone scenes in the bloodguilty palace to which she has
just come as a stranger. She points to the murdered infants of Thyestes
and their “roasted flesh upon which their father banqueted.” Then her
prophetic vision forecasts the details presently to be enacted:
Agamemnon’s death and her own, the welcoming bath, the ensnaring robe,
“hand after hand outstretching blow on blow.” As she goes in to her
death she utters lines unsurpassed in Greek tragedy, if anywhere, for
the pathos of self-abnegating contrast between the littleness of the
individual and the wider aspects of the universal:—
“O life of mortal men! If that it fareth well,
’Tis like a painting sketch’d, but, comes adversity,
The wet sponge, blurring, touches and the picture’s gone!
And this than that I count more piteous by far.”
Two solitary outcries from Agamemnon, struck down within the palace,
float out on the waiting silence as the chorus ceases its chant. To the
elders in their consternation appears Clytemnestra, exultant, glorified
by success, standing over the dead Agamemnon and Cassandra. One might
reconstruct the scene from the palace bathroom uncovered at Tiryns. She
speaks:—
“Here stand I where I struck him, o’er the finished work,
And so I managed—no denial will I make—
That there was no escape nor warding off of fate.
A netlike wrap without an outlet, as for fish,
I stake around, the evil bounty of a robe.
And thereupon I strike him twice and with two groans
He straight relaxed his limbs and, for him lying thus,
I add a third blow, thereunto, as votive thanks
To Hades underground, the corpses’ saviour god.”
A lyrical dialogue between the Queen and the chorus follows: exultation
and execration; justification and lamentation. Clytemnestra, to the
indignant question of the chorus, “Who is to bury him?” replies that he
is her dead and adroitly takes refuge once and again in the necessity of
avenging Iphigeneia. The climax of bitterness is reached when she flings
forth the taunting suggestion that the murdered child will most
appropriately welcome her dear father as he disembarks at Charon’s
ferry. The chorus, bemoaning him “laid low in the bath, on his pallet
bedding of silver,” asks again:—
“Praises and requiem who shall be singing,
Loyal heart to the labour bringing,
And shower the godlike man with tears?”
And Clytemnestra replies:—
“It becomes not you for this duty to care.
At my hands he fell down and he lies—down there!
And ’tis I that shall bury him—down below!
And ’tis not with laments of his house he shall go,
But his Iphigeneia with welcoming grace,
As ’tis just to require, the daughter her sire
By the swift-flowing Ferry of Groans shall face
And with locked arms kiss and embrace him!”
The plays by the three dramatists dealing with the slaying of
Clytemnestra by her son and the meeting and recognition of Orestes and
his older sister Electra fill out many a detail of the Argive land and
cities as they were seen or imagined in the fifth century. Although
Sophocles lays the scene of his “Electra” at “opulent Mycenæ,” his
allusions to the “renowned temple of Hera,” to the “Lycæan agora of the
wolf-slaying god,” and to the “grove of the frenzied daughters of
Inachus”—all as part of the immediate environment—seem to imply
stage-setting which brought before the spectator the Heræum and Argos
itself as well as Mycenæ. In all three plays the tomb of Agamemnon,
around which the action goes on, seems to be outside of the city.
The scene of the “Electra” of Euripides is laid on the mountain
frontier, by which way the exiled Orestes would naturally arrive from
Phocis. Not only does this play give a feeling for the Argive landscape,
changing little while Mycenæ rose and fell, but the simple and dignified
peasant farmer, Electra’s husband in name only, is one of the
dramatist’s noblest creations. The suggestion of his high-born though
remote ancestry only emphasizes the chivalry, far removed from
servility, with which he reverences his nominal wife as a princess of
the land. When Electra, in the shadow of the “Night, dark foster mother
of the golden stars,” goes to fetch water, like any peasant girl, with
the water-jar poised on her head, he remonstrates with her, but divining
her mood, withdraws his objection:—
“Nay, go thy way, an so thou wilt, not distant far
The fountains from our dwelling. I, when breaks the dawn,
Must with my oxen turn the furrows for the seed.”
In this play the horror of the mother-murder in the peasant home is
sensibly heightened by the background of simple hospitality. The deed
seems more inevitable in the “Choëphoroi” of Æschylus, in which Orestes
goes in to slay his mother just where she had slain his father, and the
knocking, knocking at the palace doors seems more like the hand of fate,
or like the two outcries of the king in the “Agamemnon.” The play
closes, as it should, just as the “wrathful hounds” of his mother have
appeared to the matricide.[36] No assurance of the chorus that they are
unreal fancies of his confused brain can help him. He must away over the
mountains and the Isthmus by the long pathway to Delphi to seek the
restoring purification of Apollo:—
“You cannot see them, see them there, but I can see.
I’m driven onward—nay, no longer might I stay.”
Footnote 36:
For extracts from the _Eumenides_, the sequel of the _Choëphoroi_, see
chapter v, p. 104, and p. 105; also see chapter xi, p. 246.
Homer lets Hera, wrangling with Zeus, in regard to Troy, exclaim:
“Verily three are the dearest to me among cities: wide-wayed Mycenæ and
Sparta and Argos.” The Heræum, the ancient sanctuary of the goddess,
once belonged to Mycenæ, and traces of the Cyclopean road that connected
them are still visible. Here the “kings” took the oath of allegiance
before sailing to Troy with Agamemnon and Menelaus. Here on their return
the Argives dedicated the Trojan spoils to Hera. The herald in the
“Agamemnon” says:—
“While speeding over land and sea, to yonder light,
The sun’s light, it is fitting that we make this vaunt:
‘Once, sacking Troy, an Argive host to gods of Greece
Nailed up these spoils, a glorious heirloom in their halls.’”
Among the spoils was the shield of the Trojan hero Euphorbus, slain by
Menelaus. In the sixth century, Pythagoras, to prove that in a previous
round of existence he had been Euphorbus, entered the Heræum and
instantly identified the shield as his own.
From Argos to the Heræum it was a distance of more than five miles.
Herodotus relates how a woman of Argos, wishing to be present at Hera’s
festival, was unable to start because the oxen were not forthcoming in
season to draw her car. Her two athlete sons put on the yoke and drew
the heavy car quickly across the plain and up the hill. When the Argive
women congratulated her on being mother of such sons, she, “exultant
over their deed and fame, stood before the statue of Hera and prayed
that to her sons, Cleobis and Biton, who had honoured her greatly, the
goddess would give whatever gift is best for man to have. And the
youths, after sacrifice and banquet, lay down to sleep in the sacred
precinct itself and rose up no more.” This answer of the goddess so
impressed the Argives that they set up the statues of the young men at
Delphi. It pleases the imagination to identify with these the two
archaic statues there excavated by the French; and a beautiful Parian
marble head of Hera, found by the American excavators of the Heræum, has
preserved to us the gracious presentation of the goddess by some great
sculptor of the fifth century.
The _dramatis personæ_ of the “Suppliants” of Æschylus vaguely suggest a
chapter in the early history of Argolis. Danaus with his fifty daughters
comes from the south, fleeing over the sea from his brother Ægyptus and
his fifty sons. The early Pelasgian inhabitants of Argos are represented
by the king, Pelasgus, who receives the suppliant fugitives into the
safe refuge of his Cyclopean walls, which we may identify with the
prehistoric Larisa citadel above Argos: “Go get ye to my city fenced
with goodly walls, fast locked within the lofty ramparts, subtly
wrought.” Henceforward, as in Homer, the Argives and Danai are
convertible names. All objection to the newcomers as foreigners is
neutralized by realizing that they have only returned to their original
home. Inachus, the river god, was the father of Io, who, half
transformed into a heifer by the jealousy of Hera, had been made to
wander frenzied over land and water until in Egypt she brought forth a
son, the great-grandfather of this same Danaus.
In the sequel to the “Suppliants” Æschylus gave his interpretation of
the story of the Danaides and their trial for the forty-nine murders of
that Saint Bartholomew wedding night. Only fragments of this play
remain, and the romance of Hypermnestra is familiar to the modern world
chiefly from Horace’s incomparable ode. In the “Prometheus,” however,
Æschylus both tells the Io story at length and briefly sketches the
story of Hypermnestra, which, with the “lovely tale” of Danaë and the
infant Perseus, sheds around the Perseid dynasty of Argos a fragrant
aroma of romance in striking contrast to the gruesome annals of the
Pelopid family, which waft now and again to our nostrils the scent of
human blood and the breath of the charnel vault. Prometheus prophesies
to Io that, in the fifth generation from her Egyptian-born son, fifty
maidens, daughters of Danaus,—
“Shall come, not willing it, to Argos back again.
Wedlock with kinsmen cousins they are fain to shun,
But these with hearts a-flutter, falcons after doves,
Not distanced far, shall come to hunt their quarry down,
Seeking a wedlock that should not be sought. But God
Shall grudge their mating. In her soil Pelasgia
Shall give them lodging, slain, laid low by women’s hands,
Ares-emboldened, waking sentinels of night.
For wife each husband of his life shall rob, and dye
Her two-edged sword in murder. May God grant, with love
Like this, that Cypris come upon my enemies!
One maiden only shall love soften and forbid
To slay her love-mate. Nay, her purpose she shall blunt
And of twain choices offered she shall rather choose
To bear the name of coward than of murderess.
From her in Argos shall be bred a royal line.”
Lynceus is saved, under cover of night, by Hypermnestra, and escaping,
as Pausanias tells us, by the Diras gate, he signals back to her his
safety by means of a beacon light on Mount Lyrcea, and she replies by
another from Larisa. On this Larisa mountain, rising above the plain,
there is lavished as a setting for the picturesque ancient and mediæval
ruins a colour scheme of green, rich reds and brown that delights the
artist’s eye.
Argos itself, continuously inhabited through the centuries, offers few
reminders of antiquity except the steep seats of the theatre. The
beautiful wolf head on the extant Argive drachmas reminds us of the Wolf
Agora of Sophocles and of the Wolf Apollo dedicated by Danaus when he
had ungratefully snapped away the kingdom from his Pelasgian host. We
are glad to leave to Pausanias the description of the sights of historic
Argos and to follow Amymone, one of the Danaids, as she goes down the
plain of “thirsty Argos,” water-jar on head, to fetch water at Lerna.
She went to the fountain once too often, if we may trust the legend.
Lucian describes how Poseidon, inflamed by Triton’s account of her
beauty, too impetuous to wait for his royal team, had thrown himself
hastily on the fastest dolphin available and had come riding up the bay.
Amymone, as she is carried off, cries out: “Fellow, where are you
carrying me off to? You’re a kidnapper sent after us, I suppose, by
uncle Ægyptus. I’ll call my father!” (Triton) “Hush, Amymone, it’s
Poseidon.” (Amymone) “What Poseidon are you talking of? Fellow, why do
you drag me and force me into the sea? I’ll choke, poor me, as I go
down!” Poseidon comforts her by telling her that she shall escape, as
his bride, not only her daily five-mile walk as a water-carrier in Argos
but her sisters’ futile task in Hades of carrying water in a sieve. He
promises her also a fountain, called by her name. This promise was kept;
by leaving the railroad at Myli, the second station below Argos, we can
still see the fountain. Here Heracles, her sister’s descendant, slew the
Lernæan hydra.
If we coast down the west side of the bay we come to Cynuria, whose
autochthonous inhabitants would seem to have belonged, like their
Arcadian neighbours, to the pre-Dorian “Pelasgic” stock. Herodotus gives
a dramatic account of one of the contests for the possession of this
territory between Spartans and Argives, in the sixth century, which
might serve as a pendant for the Roman story of the Horatii and the
Curiatii. Three hundred Spartans and three hundred Argives, chosen as
champions, engaged while the main armies withdrew. Two Argives only
survived, and they, thinking the Spartans all dead, ran off home to
announce the victory. One half-dead Spartan, however, Othryades, was
able to write with his blood his name upon a trophy which he erected of
Argive armour. Each side claimed the victory, with the result that the
full armies engaged and the Spartans conquered. Othryades, however,
ashamed to survive his comrades, killed himself on the field.
Nauplia, across the bay from Lerna, is full of suggestion for the
prehistoric settlement of Argolis, and of associations with modern
history. It has fewer direct points of contact with classic literature.
Nauplius, the founder, according to tradition, was the son of Amymone
and of Poseidon, who was here able to assert himself against the
predominance of Hera further inland. Hera, indeed, had the Achæan Zeus
to curb on the north and may have been glad to compromise with Poseidon
for a safe-conduct permitting her to make her necessary annual visit to
the baths of Kanathos, east of Nauplia. By way of Nauplia, as we have
seen, the alphabet may have entered Greece, and here the less valuable
but costly cargoes of Trojan spoils were landed, bringing one and
another hint and pattern of trans-Ægean art. Here Menelaus, detained by
storm long after his brother, finally landed:—
“Back to the land has Menelaus come from Troy,
At Nauplia in harbour moored, while near the beach
The oar-blades fall, returned from his long wandering.”
No more beautiful mooring-place for home-coming warriors could be found
than the water-front of Nauplia, lying beneath the majestic rock of
Palamidi, guard of the sea-entrance to the Argolid.
On the low acropolis of Tiryns recent excavations have uncovered the
“Lower Castle” to the north of the Middle and Upper fortresses already
known. Pausanias attributed the founding of Tiryns to members of the
Danaus family, Acrisius remaining in Argos and Prœtus taking as his
share the Heræum, Midea, Tiryns, and the coast of Argolis. Acrisius, to
forestall an oracle, according to which he was to be slain by a
grandson, shut up Danaë, his daughter, in a tower of bronze. Zeus
descended to her in a shower of gold, and when Perseus was born Acrisius
committed to the sea mother and child in a chest. The translation by
John Addington Symonds of a fragment from Simonides describing this
event fully preserves the pathos for which Simonides was famous:—
“When in the carven chest,
The winds that blew and waves in wild unrest
Smote her with fear, she, not with cheeks unwet,
Her arms of love round Perseus set,
And said: ‘O child, what grief is mine!
But thou dost slumber, and thy baby breast
Is sunk in rest,
Here in the cheerless brass-bound bark,
Tossed amid starless night and pitchy dark.
Nor dost thou heed the scudding brine
Of waves that wash above thy curls so deep,
Nor the shrill winds that sweep,—
Lapped in thy purple robe’s embrace,
Fair little face!
But if this dread were dreadful too to thee,
Then wouldst thou lend thy listening ear to me;
Therefore I cry,—Sleep babe, and sea be still,
And slumber our unmeasured ill!’”
The Nereids, charmed with the beauty of the child, guided the chest
safely into the net of the fishermen of the little island of Seriphos.
Perseus, on his return to Argos, went up to Larisa, to which Acrisius
had retired, and while displaying his skill with the quoit accidentally
killed his grandfather. Thus was fulfilled the doom to avoid which
Acrisius had shut up Danaë in the bronze tower at Argos. Perseus,
ashamed at this homicide, and perhaps disliking Argos by reason of his
mother’s ill-treatment, persuaded the son of Prœtus to change kingdoms
with him, and so he came to live at Tiryns, and from there went up the
plain and founded Mycenæ where a mushroom (_mykes_) that he pulled up
when thirsty gave him a draught of water. The greater antiquity of
Tiryns implied in this legend is not inconsistent with archæological
evidence, and the fable that Prœtus, the first king of Tiryns, imported
from Lycia seven Cyclopes as builders is a vague record of the foreign
contribution made to this ancient centre. The Cyclopean walls in
Argolis, often alluded to in the fifth century, were at least as
conspicuous at Tiryns as elsewhere, and this acropolis near the sea
would fit the situation in the “Trojan Women” of Euripides where the
captive, lamenting her dead husband deprived of burial rites,
anticipates with dread the landing at Nauplia:—
“Belovèd, O my husband dear,
Thou’rt wandering, a spectral fear,
Unburied and unlaved.
But me the hull that cleaves the sea
Shall bear with spread wings far from thee
To Argos, nurse of steeds,
Where Cyclopēan walls rear high
Their giant stones to flaunt the sky.”
To-day, in the spring, the hill of Tiryns is covered with slender stalks
of asphodel, while amidst flowers delicate and shadowy as these, along
the pathways of the “asphodel meadows” below, steal the ghosts of the
ancient masters of these Cyclopean walls and galleries.
Mycenæ and Tiryns, linked in tradition with the name of Perseus, both
sent men to Platæa to fight against the Persians. In a little more than
a decade thereafter they were both captured and destroyed by Argos,
jealous of their proximity and of their place on the national roll of
honour from which she had excluded herself. At the end of another decade
Æschylus chose to flatter the Argives, just then the allies of Athens,
by transferring from Mycenæ to their town the scene of the “Agamemnon.”
In addition to the plain of Argolis the “Akte,” or peninsula proper, has
its own history and associations. Leaving Tiryns and Nauplia behind, the
road to the inland Epidaurus sanctuary is overlooked from the north by
the naked ridge of Mount Arachneum, from which flashed to the palace
roof at Argos the last relay of flame in the chain of beacons. The
Epidaurian Asclepieum claimed the honour of the birth of the god of
healing, the foundling son of Apollo, who was suckled by a goat. From
this parent sanatorium others were established throughout Greece. The
Athenians even called “Epidauria” one of the days used for the worship
of Asclepius. In a fragmentary hymn to the god, found at Athens,
reference is made to the oracle quoted by Pausanias as beginning: “Great
joy for mortals all thy birth, Asclepius! Thou, love-child of Koronis
and my own, wast born in rugged Epidaurus!” In the precinct of this
famous health-resort was found a tablet inscribed with a hymn by
Isyllus, an Epidaurian poet, containing the genealogy of the god’s
mother and telling how Apollo named the child and called him “Destroyer
of disease, Health-giver, mighty Gift to men.” Homer’s epithet for
Epidaurus is “abounding in vines,” and in later days Dionysus was not
neglected. The auditorium, with the circle of the orchestra still
completely marked by a sunken rim of stone, is the most beautiful and
the best preserved of the theatres in Greece, and one may here better
than at Athens imagine the _mise-en-scène_ of the great dramas for which
the Argolid furnished so largely the subject matter. The opening scene
of the “Ion” of Plato brings before us the star rhapsodist of his day,
relating how he is just back from the Asclepius festival at Epidaurus
where the Epidaurians held a contest, not only in his own specialty of
reciting Homer but in lyric poetry besides. In Epidaurus were celebrated
the usual games, as the well-preserved Stadium testifies and as we know
from more than one passage of Pindar. In the Abaton, now more fully
excavated, have been found some of the tablets dedicated by grateful
patients who had been cured by sleeping in the precinct. Cures of
blindness, palsy, ulcers, dropsy, internal maladies and external wounds
are recorded in this medical literature, which Strabo tells us was here
displayed in great abundance, as in the great Sanatorium of Hippocrates
on the island of Cos.
Troezen, far down the eastern side of the peninsula, both geographically
and by its associations, historical and mythological, turns our thoughts
away from Dorian Argos and across the Saronic Gulf to Athens. It was
here that some of the Athenian women and children found a place of
refuge during the Persian invasion. In a colonnade of the market-place
Pausanias saw portrait statues of those refugees whose rank and wealth
permitted this expression of their gratitude. Here in the harbour the
Greek fleet assembled before sailing to take its position in the Straits
of Salamis. The ruined remains of the acropolis are insignificant, but
our vision, like that of the refugees, may range over the wonderful
landscape—Parnassus beyond the Isthmus and gulf, mountains and
headlands, and the Ægean set with island jewels—back to the fertile
plain below, which in modern times has welcomed the beauty of the orange
and the lemon to replace the vanished glory of the kings and heroes of
antiquity.
Plutarch, in his “Life of Theseus,” relates the well-known story that
the young prince in the dawning vigour of manhood is taken by his mother
to test his strength on the great rock beneath which lie concealed the
tokens left by his father to guarantee his royal birth. He lifts the
rock and takes the sword and the sandals. Emulous of the fame of
Heracles, he rejects the suggestion of the easy voyage across the
Saronic Gulf, and by the dangerous land route, where wild beasts and
giants must be met and slain, he makes his way past the ill-famed
Scironian rocks to Athens, and claims the paternity of Ægeus and becomes
the national hero of his father’s land.
In the “Hippolytus” of Euripides we find Theseus, self-exiled from
Athens for a year, again in Troezen, the realm of Pittheus, his maternal
grandfather, who has had the rearing of his son, Hippolytus. The
handsome youth has been seen at Eleusis by Phædra, his young stepmother,
who then and there falls in love with him. He is, however, a somewhat
intractable compound of a Jehu and a Joseph, wholly absorbed in
colourless devotion to Artemis and inaccessible to the blandishments of
Aphrodite, who uses the unlucky Phædra as a cat’s-paw to punish the
intrusion of the divine huntress into the sphere of influence rightfully
belonging to the goddess of love. Phædra, despairing and mortified at
her rejection by Hippolytus, very properly hangs herself, but by way of
securing her posthumous justification leaves a note for her husband,
accusing the innocent Hippolytus. Theseus, in his rage, banishes his son
and invokes a curse by Poseidon. Faring forth in his chariot Hippolytus,
though an excellent whip, is unable to cope with the great bull sent up
from the sea. This so terrifies the horses that their driver is thrown
upon the rocks and dies, after Artemis, a somewhat tardy _dea ex
machina_, has appeared to the now remorseful Theseus and has exonerated
his son. This favourite drama, in addition to the admirable drawing of
Phædra’s character, combines the grandeur of the sea as it roars up in a
tidal wave, envisaging the terrible sea-bull, and the loveliness of the
Troezenian meadows where Hippolytus, a replica of the young Ion in
Apollo’s temple, presented the vision of human beauty, so dear to Greek
eyes, in its appropriate setting of nature’s lonely charm.[37]
Footnote 37:
See chapter i, p. 26, for hymn to Artemis from the _Hippolytus_.
In addition to these more superficial attractions there was at Troezen
one of the most popular entrances to the lower world. Here Heracles
fetched up Cerberus, and by this route Dionysus brought back his mother
Semele. It is also reasonable to suppose that Theseus, from a sense of
local pride, must have passed down this way when he assisted his friend
Pirithöus in carrying off Persephone.
Troezen, however, had a rival in this underground traffic. Hermione, the
home of the poets Lasus and Kydias, on the south coast of the peninsula,
claimed the rather dubious advantage of the closest proximity to Hades.
Strabo, the geographer, records the boast of the people of Hermione that
on their short line Charon’s obol is not exacted of the passengers, “and
therefore,” he adds, “they do not here put in a fare for the corpse.”
The cost of travel to Hermione would have overbalanced for people at a
distance the Ferryman’s very moderate fee, or perhaps the route may have
been open for local traffic only. At all events this exception was not
known in Greece generally. We find in Lucian’s dialogues that the Cynic
Menippus, with never an obol to his mouth, takes his chance as a
stowaway or offers to Charon to work his passage, while the corpse of
the poor cobbler Micyllus, also unprovided with the necessary fee,
heedless, since he is dead already, of the risk of drowning, starts in
to swim.
[Illustration:
CALAURIA
Temple of Poseidon. Scene of the death of Demosthenes
]
Close to the Troezen shore is the island of Calauria, the modern Poros,
where “outrageous Fortune” shot home one of her most virulent arrows. On
a high plateau near the middle of the island are the remains of the
ancient precinct and temple of Poseidon. Here, where he could look over
to Sunium, the “headland of Athens,” Demosthenes, a fugitive from the
wrath of Macedon, waited for his pursuers. Plutarch relates that,
discrediting the promises of safety made to lure him from sanctuary, he
withdrew within the temple and, after taking the poison which he had
secreted, tottered forth to die outside in order to avoid defiling the
sacred precinct. The Athenians later set up his statue in bronze, and on
it was inscribed:—
“Had but thy power, Demosthenes,
Equalled thy will,
Macedon ne’er had ruled Hellas,
Free were she still.”
The great orator whose powerful will had first, as it was said, won
control over his unruly tongue and weak voice amidst the roar of the
sea, and who by his words had controlled the still more turbulent
populace, died here with unbroken will under the gray shadow of
Poseidon’s sanctuary. This was one of the oldest stone temples in
Greece, probably contemporary with the sixth century temple of the
sea-god at Posidonia, the modern Pæstum. Already dignified by time its
columns looked down on the fleet that put forth for Salamis from the
neighbouring Troezen, relying now for the sea-fight on the help of
Poseidon rather than upon the goddess of the Heræum who had presided
over the start for Troy, at the time of the preliminary clash, still
unforgotten, of Asia with Greece.