have become famous only since the diggings of Dr. Schliemann brought
them to light. The names are perhaps unlucky; as, to those who have
not seen the spot, they may suggest a connexion between the treasuries
and the treasures which does not exist in fact. The treasures were
not found in the treasuries, nor even in the same part of the city as
the treasuries. The treasures come from the tombs, and all the tombs
that have been opened lie in the outer and lower enclosures of the
akropolis. The treasuries, one of which has long been famous, lie
altogether outside the akropolis, in what must have been the outer
city, among the wide streets of Mykênê. The word “treasures” again may
suggest a false idea. Objects thrown into tombs as part of the honour
done to deceased persons are hardly “treasures” in any ordinary sense
of the word. A treasure is something which may be drawn upon for use;
objects which are thrown into tombs are, in the nature of the case,
never meant to be used again. But, by whatever name they are to be
called, there they are; remains of a great age, of an age which, though
beyond the reach of chronology, we can hardly call unrecorded. Though
the great works of Mykênê are manifestly of various dates, yet all may
in a general way be said to belong to one period--the period, whatever
its length, whatever its distance from ourselves, when Mykênê was
the head of Hellas. To some stage of that period the objects found in
the tombs must belong. It is enough to say that they are work of the
period which Homer had before his eyes when he sang of the transfer of
the sceptre through the successive generations of the house of Pelops,
no stranger house in his song. To attempt to assign the tombs, the
skeletons, the ornaments, to particular persons is rash. And, on the
other hand, the time is hardly come for those who take a general view
of history to commit themselves to any decided judgment as to the place
which these objects have in the history of art, or as to their relation
to objects found in other lands. It is well that the specialists
should for a little time longer have that branch of the subject in
their keeping. Some new light will doubtless be thrown on the matter
by the find which has just been made in Attica. When all these points
have been thoroughly sifted, the historian will be glad to accept the
results. As it is, it is enough for him that here are the tombs of the
Mykênaian lords of Hellas, that here are the objects which the creed of
their days deemed becoming offerings of reverence for the dead.
Besides the field which these objects open for the more direct student
of art, they open also a field of almost higher interest for the
historian of customs. The mode of disposing of the dead seems to have
been a strange kind of compromise between burning and burying. If we
rightly understand the process, the bodies were placed in the tombs;
they were then half burned; lastly the masks were placed upon them, and
the tombs were filled up with the vases and other objects. Here indeed
is work for Mr. Tylor and any other labourers in that field. The
effect of the masks is wonderful. Whether they are really likenesses or
not, we accept them as such while we look on them; we feel ourselves
brought more directly into the presence of the men of old than we are
even by the sight of the skeleton. Physically the actual bones of the
man are more truly part of himself; but we really feel brought nearer
to him as we see the thin covering which has rested on his face, and
which seems at least to profess to keep the stamp of his features. We
will not dare to call him Agamemnôn or any other name. We look at least
on what would be the likeness of one of those on whom our own Alfred
so happily bestowed the name of the Cæsars that were to be, on one
whose historic position is best brought home to us if we call him, in
Alfred’s tongue, the Bretwalda of primæval Hellas.
The ornaments and other objects have been described and discussed over
and over again by those who have a special object in their study. But
there is one among them which we do not remember to have seen described
in any of the published accounts, one which, if it has been already
mentioned, will certainly stand being mentioned again. Of all the
objects which Mr. Stamatâkês has under his care, and which he so fully
and clearly explains to all who can follow him in his own tongue, there
is none more curious in itself, none which speaks more directly home
to us, than those pieces of thin gilding which were found in one of
the tombs over the breast of one of the female bodies, and which, when
put together, were found to make the complete figure of a young babe.
There is nothing wonderful in this. A royal infant--a _clitunculus_,
as some of our own chroniclers would have called him--may have died
at Mykênê and have been buried with his mother, as well as anywhere
else. But the sight of the impression of the little limbs seems to
bring us more nearly into the presence of the home-life of those old
kings than any other object in the whole collection. Criticism for a
moment holds back; we are more inclined than usual to listen to the
voice of legend, when we are told that we are looking on the masks of
Kassandra and her child. Neither the Homeric nor the Æschylean story
would ever put it into our heads to attribute children to Kassandra;
but the local tradition in the days of Pausanias showed the tombs of
the twin sons of Kassandra and Agamemnôn, slain and buried with their
parents. In our fit of belief we even put aside the obvious question,
Where is the mask of the other brother? The legend doubtless erred;
in all cases where any tyrant seeks the destruction of a pair of twin
brothers, or of young brothers of any kind, one, whether in history or
in legend, escapes and lives. In our own eleventh-century history two
doubly widowed mothers are left with twin children, each pair sought
after by the Aigisthos of their own day. Of the original “clitunculi,”
the twin babes of Eadmund and Ealdgyth, both indeed were saved, but
one only lived. Of the second pair, the babes of Harold and the second
Ealdgyth, one fell into the hands of the Conqueror, safe in his hands
from death, though it might be to drag on life only in a dungeon; the
other lived to show himself like a shadow on the fleet of Magnus. And,
while we are believing, we may for a moment believe that, of a later
pair of princes, one escaped, and that Perkin Warbeck was truly Richard
the Fourth. The Mykênaian tradition must have erred in boasting of the
tomb both of Pelops and of Têledamos. One must have been carried away
along with Orestês his half-brother. The impression of the other’s form
in beaten gold we will for a moment indulge ourselves in believing that
our eyes have looked upon.
But, leaving dreams and analogies, leaving too the strictly scientific
examination of the objects as works of art, the picture which they give
us of the state of things in the age to which they belong is wonderful
and interesting beyond words. We are indeed in the age of Homer, the
age of gold and bronze, when, if we cannot strictly say with Hesiod
that black iron was not yet, we can at least say that it had gone no
way at all to displace the elder metal. We see before our eyes that
abundance of gold the tradition of which clave to the Pelopid capital
even in the days of the tragedians, and made Sophoklês speak of Mykênê
as πολυχρύσος. It jars indeed slightly on the feelings to see the tombs
themselves rifled and the more precious part of their contents borne
off to distant Athens. As a mere matter of sentiment we might have said
of the old King whose skeleton lies in the museum, “Let him alone, let
no man move his bones.” We might be tempted to wish that the treasures
themselves had remained in the state of
Aurum inrepertum, et sic melius situm
Cum terra celat.
But, without thus rifling the tombs of the dead, we should never have
known that the dead and their treasures were there. When once the tombs
were opened, the treasures could not be left in them; and, if they were
to be borne away at all, they were best borne away to the national
capital. In other cases we might plead for the capital of the district,
but in this case we could not bear to give Argos another triumph. We
must take the relics as they are, in their new place under the best of
guardianship. But what a moment it must have been to have stood by the
tombs themselves when they were first brought to light!
From the treasures, better perhaps called the relics, let us turn to
the treasuries. What were they? Tombs, treasuries, or what? In the time
of Pausanias they were clearly deemed to be treasuries. His words are
explicit:--Ἀτρέως καὶ τῶν παίδων ὑπόγαια οἰκοδομήματα, ἕνθα oἰ θησαυροί
σφισι τῶν χρημάτων ἦσαν. He pointedly distinguishes them from the tombs
of Atreus and of those who perished with Agamemnôn on his return, among
them Kassandra and her babes. These tombs can hardly fail to be the
tombs which have been lately brought to light, though we should hardly
find out from Pausanias’s account that the tombs are in the outer
circle of the akropolis, while the treasuries are in the outer city of
all. The treasuries--at least the great one, that known specially as
the Treasury of Atreus--have been described and engraved over and over
again. Yet when we at last stand before the gateway, when we pass in
and stand beneath the mighty roof, the thing is not the less wonderful
because we come to it as to an old friend. The feeling of familiarity
is stronger than in the case of the lion-gate. Of this last we may know
every detail, but certainly none of the ordinary engravings, hardly
the best and latest photographs to be found at Athens, can thoroughly
set before us its peculiar effect in the position where it stands. The
treasuries we know to be underground works--one is strongly tempted to
say vaults or cupolas--and we have a general notion of what they must
be. But our previous knowledge takes away nothing from the feeling of
the approach--the part which the common views least bring out; and the
fact that the building is one which we have so long known and thought
of, that it is the goal of a long-hoped-for pilgrimage, brings out
feelings as strong and as keen, though of quite another kind, as those
which are drawn forth by the act of discovery. And, after all, the
best representation cannot fully bring home to us such features as the
mighty stone which covers the entrance to the great treasury. Whence
came it? who raised it, and wherefore? Was it a proud display of mere
mechanical skill on the part of men whose works showed that they had
advanced far beyond mere mechanical skill? Our thoughts flit beyond the
sea to the yet mightier stone beneath which Theodoric once lay. In
both cases, in the age when constructive art was slowly feeling its way
and in the age when constructive art had reached all but its highest
stage, there is a display of mere power, when the same result might
have been brought about by easier means. There was no absolute need to
seek and to raise so vast a block as that under which we pass into the
great treasury. Still less was there any need to bring that gigantic
block across the sea from Istria, when Theodoric might have been as
easily covered with a dome of the ordinary construction as Galla
Placidia had been.
We enter. It needs some effort of faith to believe that this roof, so
cunningly put together of stones which have all but reached the secret
of the true cupola, was once covered with brazen plates--that we are,
in fact, in what once was one of the brazen chambers of which the
poets tell us. From one point of view we may be glad that they are
gone, as otherwise we could not so well have studied this wonderful
construction. It is as marked a moment in a course of constructive
study when we stand in the treasury of Mykênê as when we stand in the
peristyle of Spalato. Each marks a great step in the history of art. In
one we see how nearly men could come to the arched construction without
actually reaching it. In the other we see the perfect construction
applied for the first time to its highest artistic use. But Spalato
is the direct parent of all that came after it. Mykênê is the parent
of nothing. It surely points to some great revolution, some overthrow
of the more civilized people by the less civilized, that the art
of primæval Greece should have stopped where it did. In all these
early buildings we find the arched construction only not brought to
perfection. In the artistic architecture of historical Greece the arch,
or any approach to it, as an artistic feature, was utterly unknown.
At the outside, it is barely used here and there, in works which did
not claim to be works of art, where the merest constructive necessity
called for it.
To any one who is familiar with Irish remains the treasury of Mykênê
cannot fail to suggest New Grange. The essential construction of the
two works is the same. But here again the ever needful warning comes
in. All that the undoubted likeness really proves is that the same
stage of constructive skill was reached, in times perhaps far removed
from one another, in Ireland and in Peloponnêsos. It does not prove, it
does not even suggest, any nearer connexion than this. Otherwise, no
field could be more tempting for a mystic ethnologist. Were there not
Danaoi in Argolis? And was there not in Ireland also a people with a
name very like Danaoi, but which we will not attempt to spell without
an Irish library at hand?
The treasuries are, as Pausanias says, underground, wrought in the
hill-side. There is something very singular in a work of this kind, a
work of real building as much as anything that ever was built above
ground, a work which has nothing in common with rock-hewn tombs,
temples, churches, or houses, hidden so that a wayfarer who was not on
the look-out might pass by without notice. Was concealment or safety
the object sought? Then why were they not made within the fortified
akropolis, and not in the midst of the outer city? And, be they tombs,
be they treasuries or anything else, why were they so many and so
scattered? Five have been reckoned up in all. One, the best preserved
after the great one, has been, if not actually discovered, at least
brought more fully to light, during Dr. Schliemann’s researches. The
roof is broken through, so that it can be looked into from above; but
the entrance is as perfect as that of the great treasury. Here it is
that the quasi-Doric column is found, a sign perhaps of later date
again than the great one. The others are partly pushed down, partly
choked up. The great stone of the gateway thus brought near to the
ground has much the air of a cromlech. We need hardly say that in
mechanical construction a cromlech and the Parthenôn are exactly the
same.
Such are some of the thoughts which press upon the mind as we walk
where once were the wide streets of Mykênê rich in gold. There is no
other spot like it. It is something to stand among the temples of
Poseidônia, standing well nigh perfect within the Hellenic walls,
while the remains of Roman Pæstum have to be sought for around them.
It is something to stand on the akropolis of Kymê, and to feel that
its very desolation has in sort brought things back to their ancient
state. But at Mykênê the temples of Poseidônia would seem modern.
They would seem as much out of place as the Roman amphitheatre seems
at Poseidônia. They would, like them, speak of foreign invasion and
foreign conquest, of the invading Dorian instead of the invading Roman.
At Mykênê, not only is there no trace of later times, Macedonian,
Roman, Frankish, Turkish; the very works of the Dorian are swept away.
The Pelopid city is there, and the Pelopid city only. The Argive swept
away the memorials of his own kinsfolk; he left the memorials of the
elder race. There is nothing to disturb, nothing to keep us back from
the thoughts of primæval times, and of none other. Beside Mykênê,
Kymê itself seems modern, as Poseidônia seems modern beside Kymê.
The colony far away on the Italian shore, with the akropolis rising
almost straight above the sea, belongs to a state of things many stages
later than the akropolis nestling among the inland mountains of Hellas
itself, with the sea which brought so many dangers as a mere distant
object in the landscape. The works at Mykênê stand as relics neither
of a recorded nor of an unknown time; they stand as relics of days
before history, but of days of which they are themselves the history.
Once more we may give the warning: let names and dates be eschewed. It
is enough that the stones were piled, the gold was hammered, the lions
were carved in their slab of basalt, the skeleton on which we gaze was
buried with its strange rites, by men of the race and age whose picture
lives in the oldest and noblest songs of European man. At Mykênê we
have reached the hearth and cradle of all Hellas; we have reached the
hearth and cradle of all Europe. There we can give thanks for those
lights of modern science which teach us to feel that in that hearth and
cradle we are not wholly strangers. There we can feel that we come of
the same ancestral stock, that we speak a form of the same ancestral
speech, that we have our share in the ancestral institutes, which the
common forefathers of Greek and Teuton brought from the common home.
On the wonders of Egypt and Nineveh we may gaze with simple wonder; in
them and their makers we have no share. At Mykênê we may say, as we
gaze on the imperial skeleton, “The man is near of kin to us.” Within
those walls the lay of Agamemnôn and the lay of Beowulf seem like
strophes of the same poem. We may say, with our own Traveller in our
own tongue:--
Mid Creacum ic wæs,
And mid Cásere,
Se þe win-burga
Ge-weald áhte.
Nowhere else do the remains of a time at once so famous and so distant
stand up with such full life before our eyes. There is in truth no spot
like it on earth.
Mykênê to Corinth.
Mykênê and Tiryns have taught us a lesson in the history of those Greek
cities which perished in days which we are used to look on as still
ancient. Argos has given us one type of the Greek city which has lived
on through all changes down to our own times. Corinth, a city hardly
less famous than Argos, from some points of views even more famous,
has had yet another destiny. After perishing utterly and rising again,
Corinth has lived on through all later changes down to recent times,
to give way, in recent times, to a new city bearing its own name. And
on the way which leads us from Mykênê to Corinth we pass by a site of
another kind, the site of a spot which never was a city, but which was
as famous and venerable in Hellenic legend and Hellenic religion as
any city not of the very foremost rank. Olympia is yet far off, but a
foretaste of Olympia may well be had in the plain which was hallowed
by the lesser festival, beneath the columns of Nemea, alongside of its
ruined church.
But how is Nemea to be reached? It is perhaps a tribute to the ancient
greatness of Mykênê that it is there that civilization in one important
branch may be said to come to an end. From Nauplia the journey by
Tiryns and Argos may be made in a carriage; but it cannot be said that
the latter part of the road from Argos to Mykênê is made according
to the principles of Macadam. Indeed, we think it would be possible
to carry the drive a little further than Mykênê, or, to speak more
accurately, than Chorbati. But as such a drive would not take the
traveller to any point in particular, and as he certainly could not
continue it to Corinth, we may say that the carriage-road ends at
Mykênê. Mykênê is the last point which the traveller can examine by
that mode of journeying. At Chorbati he will begin his really Greek
journey. He will have to go after the fashion of the country so far as
to travel, as one of a cavalcade, on one of the small and hardy horses
of the country, which seem, very much like their guides or drivers, to
be able to do anything and to eat nothing. Perhaps however he may not
so far conform to the fashion of the country as himself to become a
package on the back of his pack-horse, and to sit there with both his
legs on one side. Such a manner of going, besides other things to be
said against it, has this manifest disadvantage, that it compels the
traveller to take a one-sided view of the land which he goes through.
On a journey on which the traveller has to take everything with him,
he will hardly forget to take European saddles also. But, even with a
European saddle, it needs a calm head and good horsemanship to take in
much of the view, or to call up many of its associations, when you are,
not indeed, like General Wolfe, “scrambling up,” but, if the phrase be
accurate, “scrambling down”
... Rough rugged rocks
Well nigh perpendiklar.
The scrambling up is well enough; it is with the scrambling down, that
the hardship comes. It is easy to convince one’s intellect that there
is really no danger, that the beast on which one is mounted, most
unfairly called ἄλογον, knows thoroughly what he is about, and is far
wiser than the ζωὸν λογικόν whom he carries. To give him his head, and
to let him go where he pleases, is the dictate of common-sense; but
there are moments when common-sense will not be heard. At such moments
the traveller begins to wish that he was like Pheidippidês--most
rightly named as sparing horses and not sparing his own feet--to whom
the journey from Mykênê to Corinth would clearly have been no more than
a pleasant morning’s walk. Or better still would it be, if the days
of Pausanias could come back, as there is indeed fair hope that they
soon may, and that the whole road from Nauplia to Corinth may again be
passed by the help of wheels. To the young and adventurous the novelty
and roughness of the mode of going seem to have their charms. The
traveller more advanced in life would be better pleased even to go on
his own feet, and he might think it better still if he might enjoy the
Eastern luxury of going
ἐφ’ ἁρμαμαξῶν μαλθακός κατακείμενοι.
One thing however is certain--a land without inns is in every
way better than a land with bad inns. The travelling party is
self-supporting, and carries along with it all the necessaries of life,
as well as some of its comforts and conveniences. It is wonderful
how shortly and how thoroughly a sleeping-room and a well-furnished
dinner-table can be called as it were out of nothing. It may be better
not to ask too minutely what becomes of the hospitable inhabitants
who so readily turn out to make way for the strangers. Certain it
is, that for the native part of the travelling party, reasonable and
unreasonable, any quarters for the night will do. One point, however,
calls for a protest; if the man chooses to look on his fustanella and
his other garments as an inseparable part of himself, that is his
own look-out; but it is hard to treat the unreasonable beast as if
his pack-saddle were an inseparable part of him, and to give him no
rest from his burthen either by day or by night. As for the traveller
himself, he certainly would not exchange the fare, he might not always
be anxious to exchange the lodging, which he makes for himself in
the museum at Mykênê or in the house of the single priest of fallen
Corinth; for those that he could get in some lands where, as there are
inns, people do not take everything with them.
The cavalcade leaves Chorbati to make its way to Corinth by way of
Nemea. Pausanias gives a choice of routes; the one chosen is that
which he distinguishes as the τρητὸς, which he describes as narrow,
but passable for carriages. Narrow enough it is, and well it deserves
its name as a passage cleft through the rocks, but the wheel tracks
are there to show that carriages did once go that way. We are between
Corinth and Argos, not between Thebes and Delphi; but we can well
fancy the difficulties and the likelihood of quarrel if Laios and
Oidipous met in such a strait as this.