Greek Pictures
By Sir John Portland Mahaffy, published in London in 1890 by the Religious Tract Society
Chapter XII, pages 152-165. Argos, Mykenae, and Tiryns.

    Instead of proceeding at once southward to Messene and Elis, we shall now cross the peninsula and visit the other great site where modern excavation has revealed to us the treasures of bygone days - I mean the province of Argos, known of old by its famous capital, but to us by the astonishing discoveries made by my friend, Dr. Schliemann, on the sites of the two capitals older than Argos, and once its rivals - I mean the sites of Mykenae and Tiryns. There is also in this most important section of the Peloponnesus the interesting fort and harbour of Nauplia, celebrated as far back as the oldest Greek legends, and Epidauros, where we have now recovered the great theatre built by the statuary Polycleitus, and once famed as the most perfect in Greece. So then Argos, where every step is full of historic suggestions, has many points of the highest archaeological interest.
    There was a day when Argos, not Sparta, was the leading capital in the Peloponnesus, and this is expressed by the legend which gives to the eldest brother of the Heracleids who conquered the land, the province of preference, and fixes him at Argos. From this mythical personage the royal families of Argos, and even the noblest Corinthians, loved to derive their genealogy; and many a notable Argive personage, like the tyrant Pheidon, has been put back a hundred years in time for the purpose of calling him the tenth from Herakles. I have elsewhere shown this to have been done in the case of Archias, the founder of Syracuse, who was considered a contemporary of Pheidon. It is one of the most ingenious points in Curtius' Greek History to have proved the same kind of error about Pheidon. We were all taught to put him in 747 B.C., which was called the eighth Olympiad; he seems really to belong to the year 660 B.C. But this is what may be called learned speculation.
    You can approach Argos through the mountains from Corinth, over rugged hills and dales covered with brushwood, and meadows full of arbutus and mastic, anemones and cistus, asphodel and sweetsmelling thyme, and then you come into the valley of the Inachus, high up from the sea, close to Mykenae. When I first went this route there was only a mule-track, and very rough riding it was. Since then they have advanced to a carriage road, and now, I believe, to a branch railway from Corinth, so that what once required two laborious days, now can be performed in a few hours. And yet how glad I am that I saw Greece before all these modern improvements-with its women in their rich home-made costume, as they still wear it about Megara, with even their mules covered with rugs of splendid Oriental colours, which now alas! are being displaced by the modern German taste. King Otho and his court have indeed much to answer for in Greece. They introduced good bread at Athens, and the good restaurants, but they also made dreadful things in dress the fashion, so that the poor country-women think it good style to abandon their picturesque woollen skirts and shaggy overcoats (I know no better name) for calicoes of arsenic green and magenta.
    You can also reach Argos by steamer from Athens-one of the best of all ways to see Greek life and scenery to the best advantage-landing at the picturesque port of Nauplia. The Gulf of Nauplia is very beautiful, and a sunset seen from the little port, with the gulf in the foreground, and the sun sinking behind the Arcadian mountains, is a sight one never forgets.
    From Nauplia to Argos is only a drive of an hour and a half, and on the way, not far outside the gates, we meet with the rock of Tiryns, standing out of the plain. But I will now take the reader on at once to the old capital, before we enter upon the consideration of the pre-historic splendours around us. The town of Argos is a typical Greek town, flat and unsightly, made of mud houses, with a semi-oriental bazaar, and hardly any accommodation for strangers. They naturally stay at Nauplia, so that an innkeeper would have little custom; and as it is the notion of this profession in Greece that an occasional guest must be made to pay extravagantly, because the host has so few opportunities for profit, it is well to beware of venturing into any inn in such a town without a strict bargain. On the other hand, I found private hospitality here and everywhere in Greece most abundant and kindly, provided travellers will not go in large parties, for whom there is not accommodation in the modest homes of the willing hosts. Twice over at Argos have I met with the most generous treatment from a gentleman whom I now, in the days of increased travelling, fear to name, lest my gratitude might bring upon him new and unexpected demands.
    It is not easy to define the limits of Argos. You find yourself in the middle of fruit gardens, with oranges, lemons, oleanders, roses, growing within mud fences, and you imagine it a suburb of the town, whereas you are really in its centre. When seen from its fortress above, it shows that peculiar character which I cannot remember anywhere else save in the towns of Canada, of a collection of gardens and orchards with their houses making up a city. The type of the people is peculiarly fair. If you see the children coming out of school, you will be surprised how few have the brown skin and black eyes and hair of real Southrons. The most valuable produce of the plain is tobacco, which, if properly grown, would supply all the country round with considerable wealth. Turning round a corner, you stumble upon a priest, followed by two acolytes carrying upon a cross-stick between them a copper cauldron of water, with the Byzantine cross upon the handle. It is the pappas returning from a baptism. The Orthodox Church still practises baptism by immersion. For this purpose infants are generally carried to the neighbouring church; in case they are delicate, or in case their parents can pay a sufficient fee, the pappas goes to the house, mumbles some prayers among the assembled household, and, seizing the infant by the arm, plunges it three times into the cauldron. Though this treatment is sometimes fatal to life, the orthodoxy of the people and their clergy will not tolerate any modification of the ritual of this sacrament.
    On the slope of the ascent to the Larissa or fortress is a great theatre, larger, I think, than that of Athens; for it is said to measure 150yards in diameter, and to be capable of holding 20,000people. Of course it was intended as a place of assembly for the whole free population as well as for a theatre. There are no ornaments or carved seats preserved, as there are at Athens. But the view from the higher tiers, looking eastward towards Nauplia, across the rich plain and the gulf, is hardly less beautiful than that from Nauplia over the same ground westward.
    In 1822, the castle of Larissa, which looms down from the top of Mount Chaon, 1000 feet above the theatre, was held by the insurgents, whom the Turks besieged there for many weeks. In the end the Turkish army was taken in the rear by other insurgents coming from Corinth, and destroyed. The Greeks fought singing the patriotic songs of their poet Rhigas, which turned their shepherds and peasants into real soldiers. Wonderful stories are now told of their individual heroism. Perhaps these acts have been exaggerated. but the fact remains, that without any leaders of genius, or even of high character, the Greek people persisted in this awful struggle for tea years, and finally obtained their liberty. it is false and ridiculous to translate these rude and ignorant shepherds into just and wise heroes, so that they have suffered unduly, when they were found to deviate widely from the antique type invented by the pedants for the old Greeks, and foisted by enthusiasts upon the new. When the heroism of this enslaved people is mentioned there are never wanting those who expose in them acts of treachery, cruelty, and duplicity, which are so exaggerated as to obscure the grand general features of the insurrection-the love of liberty and the spirit of sacrifice. Thus the mountaineers of Maina (the old 'free Laconians'), when summoned by the new national government to come and defend Argos, began, when they came from their homes, by pillaging all the Greek villages which they found recently deserted, and they then went back and hid their spoil in the mountains; but when this was over, they rallied round their standard, and fought with the utmost bravery against the Turks. But the notion of profiting by patriotism, of taking rewards or even pay for personal services while doing the service of the country, is as old as Demosthenes, and is expounded in the coolest way by his rival Hypereides.
    But we must leave the capital, the historic centre of the province, to visit the pre-historic castles, which were famous long before Argos rose to power, and which have quite recently recovered their ancient importance, owing to the genius and perseverance of that indefatigable excavator, Dr. Schliemiann. After he had won his first laurels by discovering the real site of New Ilium, and then proving that the universal belief of classical days was correct, which placed the Troy of Homer at or under the same site, he undertook to examine the old sites in Argolis, which are indeed well marked, but seemed such barren rock as to allow little chance of finding many underground treasures.
    Let us consider for a moment what hints or suggestions were to be found in the old writers-hints which seemed plain enough when he utilised them, though nobody else had ever thought of applying them in a practical way. The relation of the three capitals of Argolis to each other is not very easily determined. Lying in a triangle, of which we may call the base the four miles between Tiryns and Argos, the sides the eight miles from either to the vortex at Mykenae, far up the valley of the Inachus, this much is certain, that in Homer's poetry, Mykenae is the chief city, and the home of the most splendid royalty, while nevertheless one of the most notable heroes, Diomede, is King of Argos. He is also lord of Tiryns, which in the poem is alluded to as a strong fort, but no longer as a separate capital or resi dence. In the legends, however, of the Perseids, and of the birth of Herakles, reruns is so prominent that we can hardly avoid considering it as the earliest capital of the country, probably settled and fortified by invaders who came from the sea, and ruled till they or some rival race founded and fortified Mykenae, evidently to defend the head of the plain, so that the principal danger then lay not seawards, but towards the mountains of Corinth. It is probable that at this time forest and perhaps careful irrigation made the head of the valley the most fertile part, whereas, when the trees of the hills were cut down, and the irrigation was neglected, the centre of gravity, agriculturally, moved down to Argos, near the sea, which Homer calls very thirsty-why I know not, seeing that the plain is watered by two rivers, considerable for that country, the Inachus and Erasinus, and that the coast between Argos and Tiryns was always marshy, so that even the legends place there the famous swamps of Lerna, with its horrible hydra, which Herakles slew.
    Thus Argos succeeded to the heritage of both Tiryns and Mykenae and destroyed these cities, for the purpose of unifying or centralising the power, probably under the royalty of Pheidon, somewhere in the seventh century B.C.  Late Greek writers have spread the notion that Mykenae and Tiryns lasted till after the Persian wars, because citizens from both are named in the catalogue of the Greeks who conquered, both by Herodotus and on a tripod inscription recovered at Constantinople, which was actually contemporary. But I was able to show that these were only a few loyal exiles, magnified in importance because of their loyalty to Greece, when Argos took the Persian side, or behaved with mean neutrality. I also pointed out that Aeschylus, the patriotic poet who fought at Marathon and Salamis, who must have shared in the general ill-will against Argos, nevertheless knew so little about Mykenae, that he violates all Homeric tradition, and lays the scene of his great dramas about Agamemnon at Argos, while he never even once mentions Mykenae. This proves so clearly that Argos did not conquer and raze that city in consequence of the part she took in the Persian wars, that I predicted to Dr. Schliemann, when commencing his excavations, that he would find neither inscriptions, nor coins, nor any other of those many objects which existed in every Greek town after the year 500 B.C. The results verified exactly these predictions. All the treasure, all the stone carvings, all the ornaments found there were strictly pre-historic, or so archaic as to be rather pre-Homeric than post-Persian in character. But I must descend from these speculations to some easier details.
    The famous lion-gate at Mykenae was a thing long cited and admired, though the later Greeks, such as Pausanias and Strabo, seem either not to know it or to neglect it. But this massive portal, with its strange heraldic lions over the great lintel, with its ashlar masonry of great squared stones, showed plainly enough that here had once dwelt men who had vast resources of labour under their hands. But it was not till Schliemann's researches that differences were observed in the building of the walls. Most of the circuit was in polygonal or irregular' masonry, whereas here the ashlar or rectangular building was actually set as a facing of ruder work behind it, evidently by later hands. It seemed likely, therefore, that this ancient fort had been occupied by successive races, who made improvements in their art of construction. Burrowed into the hill facing Mykenae were also the famous 'Treasury of Athens' and its fellows-beehive tombs built with an art fully equal to that of the lion-gate, therefore probably belonging to the same race. Unfortunately this great beehive tomb has long since been rifled, so that we had no evidence of its contents, save that it was coated within with bronze plates, of which some of the fastening nails survive, and that we know there was some ornament in the triangular aperture over the door corresponding to the lion-slab of the gateway. The aperture was intended to relieve the lintel stone of excessive superincumbent weight, and it was filled with a thin limestone slab carved by way of ornament. So far then we feel that a race of splendid builders had succeeded to an older and ruder people, and had either remodelled the older work or built additional monuments in their own style. Thus, in many cathedrals throughout Europe, old Romanesque or Norman work has been cut away, or faced with Perpendicular, with Renaissance, or even eighteenth century classical work, hiding what was really beautiful with what we now feel to have been far inferior, if not positively hideous.
    But no one felt this duality of the work at Mykenae, till Dr. Schliemann, finding within the circuit wall one spot with a deep accumulation of soil, probed this spot, and found first a circuit of upright slabs, then stone slabs which appeared to be sepulchral monuments, and at last, far beneath them, a group of tombs full of treasure, but of a very different construction indeed from that of the famous 'Treasury.' For here the bodies were crammed into a space too small for them, not laid in a great chamber with a high vaulted roof over them, and the offerings or other objects with them were simply thrown in upon them, not laid out, as they would be in a spacious chamber. Not that these objects were either rude or cheap. In the first place, the head and bust of some of the dead were covered with golden ,masks, while around and over them lay dozens of beautiful gold cups, of which we give specimens on page 159, as well as rosettes of gold, an ox head in gold and silver, bronze swords, cauldrons, and many more objects of various kinds for which the reader must either consult Dr. Schliemann's splendid record Mykenae, or go to the museum at Athens and examine them for himself. But I fear he will not see upon them the beautiful red bloom that astonished us when we first beheld them; for the zealous curators of the Athenian Museum had unfortunately taken to polishing them when I was last at Athens, and so we shall lose that flavour of antiquity so very exquisite, and so suggestive of the fact that no lapse of centuries will cause gold to rust, whereas it reduces silver vessels to mere lumps of oxidised rust. This is the true value of gold, and the reason why the human race has from the first recognised its peerless qualities.
    Into the identifications of the bodies with Agamemnon and his family I need not here enter. Nothing was more natural in the first moment of enthusiasm; and yet now that we have been able to reflect over it calmly, nothing seems to me more certain than that the bodies found by Dr. Schliemann belong to a date far anterior to the Homeric poems, or even to the worthies whose traditions they preserved. For, in the first place, there succeeded, as I have said, another race of great builders, and even in what we know of these latter we cannot identify the dress, the weapons, the manners, the life of the heroes as described by Homer. A huge gap seems to separate the Mykenae of Schliemann from that of Homer, and but that the consistent epithet of much golden is especially applied to it by the poet or poets, we could well imagine the pre-historic greatness of the place to have passed into oblivion, and its Hellenic supremacy to have been a new and distinct growth. But I will not go so far as this; it is enough to assert the superior antiquity of the tombs and their occupants to anything told in Homer.
    We must not forget to add that in addition to these deep-sunk earthen tombs, Dr. Schliemann discovered several more beehive tombs in the immediate neighbourhood ; proving that the 'Treasury of Athens' was no solitary work, but represented the deposit of one of a line of kings. As the Greek legends describe an earlier family, the Perseids, expelled by the richer Pelopids who came from Lydia, Adler has suggested calling the ruder tombs the Perseid, and the beehive buildings the Pelopid epoch of Mykenae.
    What additional light have we obtained from the subsequent excavation of the sister fort at Tiryns? For this too must be added to the crown of glory earned by our veteran friend, whose book called Tiryns is hardly less interesting than his Hykena. It represents even a superior stage in the art of excavation. For while in his former researches he had mainly occupied himself digging holes, to probe, and then to reach his treasure, the work at Tiryns consisted in taking off layers of soil, by which floors, walls, and so ground plans were disclosed. This is the true method, by which we can find the successive dates of any building, represented by strata; and by this careful process it became possible for Dr. Dorpfeld to reconstruct the whole plan of the palace at Tiryns, which the reader may wonder at in Dr. Schliemann's book.
    Did this palace belong to the Perseid or the Pelopid era? To judge from the building of the walls of Tiryns, I should say, the earlier. The giant fort is put together of huge rough stones, certainly not squared, though possibly roughly hewn, to make them fit more easily, and present a face outwards. It has only recently been proved by Dr. Dorpfeld, through these very excavations, that there was once mortar in the interstices, though in all the exposed portions it was long since washed away. The oftdescribed galleries within the wall, with apertures looking outward made like very rude Gothic arches, seem to have been intended for granaries, perhaps sleeping room for slaves, but not for siege purposes.
    Far more interesting than these great walls, with their gate-tower commanding the approach, which leads up so as to have the right or unshielded side of the assailants exposed to the defenders, is the plan of the palace, on the uppermost part of the rock, which is approached through two separate gates, in addition to the main entrance gate. It is very interesting to note that the so-called temple in antis, that is to say, with only two pillars filling the opening left in the enclosing wall, which ends on either side of them in two square pilasters-this simple plan, so common in the older or simpler temples, was copied from the pre-historic gateways evidently universal in early times. Those at Tiryns were partly of wood. The actual gate had a portico looking either way, with an upper cross-beam of wood forming the architrave, and supported by two pillars of wood, set on stone bases, found in their place by Schliemann. The side walls were of sun dried bricks, and to protect the face or end which was next the pillars, it was cased in wood-the prototype of the square pilasters which stand outside either pillar, forming the frame of the wide aperture in the front wall which forms the entrance. Within these gates were floors, stamped hard, of clay, on some of which were rude designs, and inside the court, one great chamber, with evidences of a hearth in the middle for the men; detached from it, and not easily accessible, was a similar chamber intended for the ladies. The upper stories, being all of wood, and the roofs-which consisted, no doubt, as they now do through remoter Greece, of reeds and shingle, laid flat upon wooden beams and laths-are totally gone. But on some of the walls were rude but handsome ornaments, especially rosettes, in that blue glass paste which we still find in Egypt, and which is alluded to by Homer. There was even a bath-room found, of which the floor was made of one stone, twelve feet by nine, with a raised edge, into which upright wooden panels were set, to withstand the splashing of the walls; and in the midst, the fragments of a large terra-cotta tub, in which the kings of Tiryns, or their guests, bathed. A hole pierced in the stone floor, with a pipe leading through the building outward, made the use of this room quite unmistakable. These are only a few of the many curiosities found at Tiryns, and destined to make its excavation one of the most important performances in recent archaeology.
    There were, then, once in Argos great kings, living in strong palaces, as Homer described them, and in considerable luxury, being furnished not only with what the country could produce but with the luxuries of foreign trade, amber, gold, ornaments of Egyptian and Oriental rnanufacture, even ostrich eggs, of which a fragment was found at Mykenze. Let the reader remember that the amber came from the North Sea or Baltic, the ostrich egg from far inland in Africa, and he will see that even in those remote days, a thousand years or more before Christ, there was that lively traffic by caravans, and by ships, which meet us in the Bible narrative of the lives of the earliest patriarchs. The old Greek legends consistently ascribe this early Argive power and civilisation to foreign and Oriental invaders. There seems little reason to doubt the truth of this impression. We know that the Phoenicians discovered and developed trade in the Mediterranean by means of their ships, and it is more than likely that the so-called kingdom of Minos in Crete, that great island fortress in the Southern Levant, with its mighty mountain tops in their snow the beacon for southern sailors, symbolises the first empire of these traders in the tents of javan. Nothing was more natural, when they crept up the bleak and barren coast from Malea, which affords no refuge for ships, that they should hall with delight the first great open bay, with good anchorage and rich lands lying close to the sea. Thus the earliest forts of the invaders from the, south-cast would most naturally be placed in the very district where we find these pre-historic castles.
    It was formerly our great difficulty to fill the supposed gap between the days of Homer and the first dawn of real Greek history-a gap imagined to be three centuries wide. It is now our difficulty to fill, not this gap, which we have reduced to very small dimensions, but the gap which separates the Homeric civilisation from what went before. For we have now discovered an early culture so different from what is known as Greek, that it is indeed hard to realise how Greek art and its style were developed from such beginnings. Oriental affinities are plain enough; what we desire to learn, and some day we shall learn it, is the gradual progress from the art of Tiryns and Mykenae - to the archaic art of the Parthenon contemporary with the Persian wars.