in which commerce flits from one shore to another. With its fellow,
Spetza, the main interest of our voyage itself, as distinguished from
the interest of the spots to which our voyage is to lead us, pretty
well ends. We now turn the last main corner; we enter the specially
Argolic gulf. Before long, eyes familiar with the scene begin to point
out to us the whereabouts of the great objects of our pilgrimage. We
see--we at least see where we ought to look for--Tiryns on her lonely
hill in the plain, the Larissa of Argos crowning her peaked height,
Mykênê herself darkly spied out among the mountains. With these
objects before us, we may be forgiven if, as soon as we are once on
the shore, we hasten towards them, even to the prejudice of a spot
which has some claims, both earlier and later, upon our thoughts.
We land at Nauplia. With the great sites now close to us, we may be
again forgiven if we pass by the fortress which preserves the name of
the legendary Palamêdês, and the remains which show that Nauplia too,
though its fame and importance belong mainly to far later times, was
a dwelling-place and a fortress of primæval Hellas. Of little fame in
the old days of Hellenic freedom, Nauplia held under the later Empire,
under the Venetian, and under the Turk, so high a place that forsaken
and forgotten Tiryns came in popular speech to bear no other name than
_Old Nauplia_. To Old Nauplia then we hasten, but we do not hasten so
fast but that we catch a glimpse of the winged lion over the gate of
the younger city, the symbol of ages of Peloponnesian history which we
are too apt to forget. In those ages, if Tiryns had to take the name
of Nauplia, Nauplia had to take the name of a far more distant city.
By one of the many attempts to make a name in one language bear a
meaning in another--in this case it would be more accurate to say, to
make the name bear another meaning in its own language--Nauplia, the
port of Argos, became the Venetian stronghold of _Napoli di Romania_.
Peloponnêsos, no longer _Sclavinia_ was still Romania; on no man’s
lips in those days was it Hellas. Nowhere, least of all in such a seat
of its power as this, can the badge of the great republic be seen
without interest, wonder, and admiration. Another lion not far off,
commemorating the coming of a Bavarian king, it is only kindness to
pass by. We are on the road--for a road there is--to the most wondrous
relic of the præ-historic ages of the land. We soon stop before an
elevation in the plain which suggests our own Old Sarum, which, at a
second glance, may suggest Worlebury. We have at last reached one of
the objects which alone would repay us for coming from Old Sarum or
from Worlebury to see them. Salamis, Aigina, Pôros, Hydra itself, all
seem but mere stages on the way as we stand below the vast and desolate
walls of Tiryns.
Tiryns.
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:
Τίρυνθά τε τειχιόεσσαν.
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 σύριγξ, 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 καταφύγιον, 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 δῆμος
might or might not arise beyond their defences. At Rome and Athens such
a δῆμος 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 τειχιόεσσα in the days of the Homeric Catalogue. It is as
τειχιόεσσα and as τειχιόεσσα only, that it strikes us still.
Argos.
A short drive--we are still within the region where driving is
possible--takes us from Tiryns to Argos, from the destroyed city to the
destroyers. The contrast is striking. Argos, through all changes, has
always remained a dwelling-place of man, and not only a dwelling-place
of man, but a town of some importance, according to the standard of its
own age and place. Modern Athens is an artificial city. It is a town
which might have stood anywhere else, built at the foot of the ancient
akropolis and around the churches of Eirênê. Modern Argos is not an
artificial town; it has come to be what it is by the gradual operation
of ordinary historical causes. It shows us what an ancient Greek city,
neither ruined nor forsaken nor artificially fostered, but left to
the working of natural circumstances, finds itself after long ages of
Roman, Venetian, Turkish, and restored Greek rule. The chief remark
which the place suggests to a Western eye is how little there is to
remark. In the modern town there is no remarkable building of any kind,
old or new. The modern cathedral is large and is meant to be of some
pretensions, but one would gladly exchange it for the tiny metropolitan
church of Athens, or for any other church of genuine Byzantine
style and date. The town itself covers a large space, and contains
a considerable population. Setting apart the capital and the great
seaports, Argos ranks high among the existing cities of Greece. Yet to
a Western eye it has an unpleasing, almost a barbarous, look. It is
dirty, irregular, with neither Western neatness nor Eastern picturesque
effect. An old Venetian possession, one might have expected that St.
Mark might have planted somewhat of his impress here, as he has done
on so many of his subject cities. If Argos were even as Traü, no one
would complain, but, since the Venetian, Argos has seen the Turk, and
that is enough to account for the difference. Argos is not lacking in
recent history. It was the scene of important events during the War of
Independence, when it acted several times as the common meeting-place
of Greece. It is still, we believe, a thriving place after its own
standard, but that is not the standard of Western Europe, nor yet the
standard of Syra and Patras. Yet it sets us thinking whether a town in
Western Europe, five or six hundred years back, may not have looked
much the same. In one point indeed there was a difference. No Western
mediæval town of the same population as modern Argos would have spread
over the same space. That is to say, the modern town lies scattered,
doubtless because it represents an ancient city of far greater extent.
But the objects which give Argos its main interest in the eyes of the
historical inquirer, the objects which bear witness to the existence of
Argos in the days of its greatness, lie outside the modern town. One,
the chief of all, proclaims its presence from afar. The akropolis of
Argos, the famous Larissa, the soaring height crowned by the stronghold
which from a primæval fortress grew into a modern castle, is an
akropolis in quite another sense than the lowlier hill of Tiryns, or
even than that of Athens. The name leads to a long train of thought.
It is the Larissa of Argos. How many spots bear the name of Larissa?
How many lands and cities bear the name of Argos? He who has a taste
for Pelasgian speculation has a wide field opened to him. He who keeps
himself within the range of recorded history and of such tradition as
may be said to prove itself, may perhaps be led to think how largely
the fame of Argos is a borrowed fame. Argos and the Argeians meet us in
every page of the Homeric tale; they seem to be the most familiar names
for Greece and the Greeks before Greece and the Greeks had as yet an
acknowledged common name. A little thought will, however, show that in
most of the places where they are named there is no immediate reference
to the local city of Argos. The Bretwalda of Hellas ruled over many
islands and over all Argos. Whatever this means, it can hardly mean
anything short of all Peloponnêsos; at least it cannot mean the local
Argos, which did not come within his immediate kingdom. To suppose any
reference to the local Argos would be like quartering a Karling at
Paris or a West-Saxon at York. But the local Argos dealt with Mykênê
like the savage who swallows the eye of his slain enemy in order to
take to himself his strength, courage, and glory. Only a few years
after Mykênê fell we find the Attic dramatists transferring the whole
tale of Pelops’ line from its own place to the destroying city. The
confusion has become hopeless. Argos becomes surrounded by a mythical
glory to which it has no claim. The name of Argos brings up a crowd
of associations, most of which it is our first duty to drive back. We
must remember that Agamemnôn--we take the personal name to express the
fact of the Mykênaian empire--was lord of the local Argos only in the
sense in which he was lord of any other spot in Peloponnêsos. The two
neighbouring cities were the heads, as the Catalogue shows us, of two
kingdoms of strangely irregular shape, but whose very shape is the sign
that the geography is genuine. No inventor could have hit on anything
so unlike the arrangements of historic Greece. Argos destroyed Mykênê
and took its glories to itself. If we can conceive Paris and Laon--or,
by a still bolder flight, Paris and Aachen--within sight of one
another, and if we can further conceive the elder seat of rule not only
robbed of its history, but actually rased to the ground, by the younger
seat, we shall get a fair illustration of what really happened in the
case of Argos and Mykênê.