II. IN THE PALACES OF THE KINGS

On a long low hill five miles east of Argos and a mile north of the sea, stood, in the fourteenth century before our era, the fortress-palace of Tiryns. Today one reaches its ruins by a pleasant ride from Argos or Nauplia, and finds them half lost amid quiet fields of corn and wheat. Then, after a little climb up prehistoric stone steps, the traveler stands before the cyclopean walls built, said Greek tradition, for the Argive prince Proetus, two centuries before the Trojan War.† Even then the town itself was old, having been founded, said ancient memory, by the hero Tiryns, son of Argus of the hundred eyes, in the infancy of the world.¹⁴ Proteus, the story went on, gave the palace to Perseus, who ruled Tiryns with the dusky Andromeda as his queen.

The walls that protected the citadel rose from, twenty-five to fifty feet in height, and were so thick that at several places they contained spacious galleries, vaulted and arched with immense overlapping horizontal slabs. Many of the stones still in place measure six feet in length by three in breadth and depth; the smallest of them, said Pausanias, “could hardly be moved by a pair of mules.”¹⁵ Within the walls, behind a propylon or gateway that set a style for many an acropolis, lay a broad paved court bounded with colonnades; and around this, as at Cnossus, was a medley of rooms gathered about the megaron—a hall of state thirteen hundred square feet in area, with a pavement of painted cement, and a ceiling supported by four columns enclosing a hearth. Here, in contrast to merry Crete, was established a lasting principle of Greek architecture—the separation of the women’s quarters, or gynaeceum, from the chambers of the men. The king’s room and the queen’s room were built side by side, but, so far as the remains reveal, they were eremitically sealed against intercommunication. Of this palace-castle Schliemann found only the ground plan, the column bases, and portions of the wall. At the foot of the hill were the remnants of stone or brick houses and bridges, and some fragments of archaic pottery; there, in prehistoric days, the town of Tiryns huddled for protection below the palace walls. We must picture the life of Bronze Age Greece as moving insecurely around and within such feudal fortresses.

Ten miles farther north, perhaps in the fourteenth century before Christ, Perseus (if we wish to believe Pausanias¹⁶) built Mycenae—the greatest capital of prehistoric Greece. Here too, around a forbidding citadel, a town of several villages grew, housing a busy population of peasants, merchants, artisans, and slaves, who had the happiness of eluding history. Six hundred years later Homer called Mycenae “a well-built city, broad-avenued and abounding in gold.”¹⁷ Despite a hundred despoiling generations some parts of these also cyclopean walls survive, to attest the immemorial cheapness of labor and uneasiness of kings. In a corner of the wall is the famous Lion Gate, where, carved upon a stone triangle over a massive lintel, two royal beasts, now worn and headless, dumbly stand guard over a grandeur that is gone. On the acropolis beyond are the ruins of the palace. Again, as at Tiryns and Cnossus, we can trace the divisions of throne room, altar room, storerooms, bathroom, and reception rooms. Here once were painted floors, columned porticoes, frescoed walls, and majestic flights of stairs.

Near the Lion Gate, in a narrow area enclosed by a ring of erect stone slabs, Schliemann’s workers dug up nineteen skeletons, and relics so rich that one could forgive the great amateur for seeing in these shafts the burial chambers of the children of Atreus. Had not Pausanias described the royal graves as “in the ruins of Mycenae”?¹⁸ Here were male skulls with crowns of gold, and golden masks on the bones of the face; here were osseous ladies with golden diadems on what had been their heads; here were painted vases, bronze caldrons, a silver rhyton, beads of amber and amethyst, objects of alabaster, ivory, or faïence, heavily ornamented daggers and swords, a gaming board like that at Cnossus, and almost anything in gold—seals and rings, pins and studs, cups and beads, bracelets and breastplates, vessels of toilette, even clothing embroidered with thin plates of gold.¹⁹ These were assuredly royal jewels, royal bones.

In the hillside opposite the acropolis Schliemann and others discovered nine tombs altogether different from these “shaft graves.” Leaving the road that comes down from the citadel, one enters at the right a corridor lined with walls of large, well-cut stones. At the end is a plain portal, once adorned with slim cylindrical columns of green marble, now in the British Museum; above it is a simple lintel of two stones, one extending thirty feet and weighing 113 tons. Within, the traveler finds himself under a dome, or tholos, fifty feet high and as many wide; the walls are built of sawn blocks Reinforced with decorative bronze rosettes; each stratum of stones overlaps the one beneath, until the uppermost layer closes the top. This strange structure, Schliemann thought, was the tomb of Agamemnon, and a smaller tholos near by, discovered by his wife, was at once described as the tomb of Clytaemnestra. All the “beehive” tombs at Mycenae were found empty; thieves had anticipated the archeologists by several centuries.

These gloomy ruins are the reminders of a civilization as ancient to Pericles as Charlemagne to ourselves. Current opinion dates the shaft graves near to 1600 B.C. (some four hundred years before the traditional age of Agamemnon), and the beehive tombs about 1450; but prehistoric chronology is not a precision tool. We do not know how this civilization began, nor what people it was that built towns not only at Mycenae and Tiryns but at Sparta, Amyclae, Aegina, Eleusis, Chaeronea, Orchomenos, and Delphi. Probably, like most nations, it was already composite in stock and heritage; Greece was as diverse in blood before the Dorian invasion (1100 B.C.) as England before the Norman Conquest. So far as we can guess, the Mycenaeans were akin to the Phrygians and Carians of Asia Minor, and to the Minoans of Crete.²⁰ The lions of Mycenae have a Mesopotamian countenance; this ancient motif probably came through Assyria and Phrygia to Greece.^20a Greek tradition called the Mycenaeans “Pelasgi” (possibly meaning People of the Sea—pelagos), and pictured them as coming down from Thrace and Thessaly into Attica and the Peloponnesus in a past so distant that the Greeks termed them autochthonoi—aborigines. Herodotus accepted this account, and ascribed the Olympian gods to a Pelasgic origin, but he “could not say with any certainty what the language of the Pelasgi was.”²¹ No more can we.

Doubtless these autochthonoi were themselves late-comers into a land that had suffered cultivation since neolithic days; there are no aborigines. In their turn they too were overrun; for in the later years of Mycenaean history, towards 1600, we find many indications of a cultural-commercial, if not a military-political, conquest of the Peloponnesus by the products or emigrants of Crete.²² The palaces at Tiryns and Mycenae, except for the gynaeceum, were designed and decorated in the Minoan manner; Cretan vases and styles reached into Aegina, Chalcis, and Thebes; Mycenaean ladies and goddesses adopted the charming fashions of Crete, and the art revealed in the later shaft graves is unmistakably Minoan.²³ Apparently it was this stimulating contact with a higher culture that lifted Mycenae to the peak of its civilization.