Greek Lands and Letters

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.

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:—

And amongst the Taurians, overjoyed at her reunion with her brother, her thoughts likewise revert to Mycenæ:—

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:—

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.

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:—

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:—

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 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:—

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:—

As he yields there surges before the vision of the exultant Clytemnestra another sea:—

As she turns to follow her victim she prays:—

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:—

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:—

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:—

And Clytemnestra replies:—

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:—

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:—

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:—

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,—

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:—

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:—

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 PrœtusPrœtus, 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:—