THE AGE OF MYCENE.

By G. H. RENDALL, M.A., D.LITT.

[The paper was throughout illustrated with slides and diagrams, and arranged accordingly.]

THE last twenty-five years have seen a rapid and startling reconstruction of a past that seemed beyond hope of recovery, and European history has pushed its way into centuries which before gave scant foothold to the anthropologist and none to the historian. Eastern chronology was roughly mapped, but the earlier civilisations of the East shed no side-lights upon the rude infancy of the peoples of Europe. Speaking roughly, Egyptian history begins at Memphis, 4000 в.c.; Chaldæan, near the mouth of the Euphrates, 3000 B.C.; Phoenician, on the coast of Syria, 2000 B.C.; while Europe, prior to the first Olympian era, 776 B.C., and to the traditional A.U.C. 753 of Roman history, seemed virtually a blank. But the opening of pre-historic vistas has gone on apace, and civilisations which were hardly so much as names—the Hittite, the Philistine, the Thraco-Phrygian, the Cypriote, and the Mycenæan-are, year by year, taking more solid shape and content. The reconstructor of the buried past has been the traveller and the archæologist, and for the shores of the Egean, the pioneer and master-builder has been Schliemann.

The result has been upon the whole to substantiate the worth of the fragmentary records of tradition, legend, and folk-lore, and to rehabilitate Homeric literature as the encyclopædia of pre-historic Greece. In history, the spirit

of scepticism needed some sharp rebuff, for historians, infected with the principles and methods of experimental science, had become intolerant of tradition and of inference, and were refusing credence to everything for which objective or documentary proof could not be exhibited. The office of the historical imagination was falling into abeyance and contempt, and under the pressure of false criteria the pre-historic and sub-historic eras were decried and misunderstood. Only yesterday, as it were, Homer was charged with ignorance of Asia and ignorance of Greece, and the poems regarded as more idle than a traveller's tale, as the triflings of a troubadour, or the expansion of a sun myth, whose whole record of manners, customs, art, geography, and religion might, as witness to true fact, be unceremoniously brushed aside. Now, in the form of archæology, science has come to redress the balance, and to revivify the literalism of the student with the quickening ardours of the observer.

Schliemann turned his first sod at Hissarlik, in the spring of 1870; in 1874 to 1876 he gave three seasons to the excavations of Mycenæ, and, in 1884, he unearthed the stately ramparts and citadel of Tiryns.

The position of Argolis explains the primacy which, for a space, it held in the heroic age of Greece. Primitive Greece turned its face eastward towards the great civilisations of Asia and the Levant; westward lay barbarism and the unknown; progress and light lay with the Hittite civilisation of Asia Minor and North Syria, with the Phoenician civilisation that held the gates of commerce in the great emporia of Tyre and Sidon, and carried the wares of the west to the Babylonian peoples of the great Euphrates plain, with the Cypriote civilisation of the Levant, and with the Egyptian occupying the long valley of the Nile. The connecting link between these centres of

life lay in maritime enterprise. A glance at the map will show how the Argolic gulf opens its shielding arms to the little cruisers that felt their timorous way from island to island, as they braved the crossing from Africa or Asia to the eastermost peninsula of Europe. Befriending islands sheltered the mariner to his destination, whether he fared from Egypt by way of Crete, or from Knidos and Miletus, along the island stations of the Cyclades, by way of Crete and Cythera. From the head of the gulf, to which Argos gave its name, established trade-routes led the merchant by the Isthmus of Corinth to northern Greece, Euboea, and Thessalia, or by the waters of the Corinthian gulf to west Greece and the Adriatic. To understand the history of early Greece, it must be remembered always that the Egean with its island shoals is not a mare dissociabile, an estranging sea that severed continent from continent, but the bond of union and highway of intercourse, by which the spices of Arabia and the amber of the Baltic found currency among the Mediterranean nations. Greece for primæval days is, in fact, the continuous shore of the Egean, and, in pedigree, Greek and Trojan, Lycian and Cypriote, come probably of kindred ancestry.

In the province of Argolis, two towns claim our attention-Tiryns and Mycena. The legendary record is this— that on dismemberment of the kingdom of Danaus, Argos passed to Acrisius, and Tiryns to Protus; that in the days of the son of Prœtus, Mycena was founded by Perseus, and reduced the rival Tiryns to vassalage. One item in the legend at least is familiar, by which Heracles of Tiryns performs his labours for Eurystheus, king of Mycena. Thus legend, with some foreshortening of time, represents the rise of Mycena as succeeding to the decay of Tiryns, and the truth of its testimony is vindicated by the evidence of excavation. The greatness of Tiryns was

anterior to the Homeric age, and passing notice only is accorded to it in the Homeric catalogue, but it must have had a notable history as a stronghold of the race who made the Mycenæan empire. It stands on a great slab of solitary rock, set back a mile and a quarter from the sea, elevated some 60 feet above the plain, and 72 feet above the sea level. The upper platform, on which stood the citadel, consists of three terraces rising in broad steps, and was walled by the colossal ramparts, which have been displayed to view by the labours of Schliemann. The walls of the lower citadel, unearthed in places to a height of 24 feet, average 25 feet in thickness; while, in the upper citadel, the walls, pierced with passages and galleries and chambers of storage, at places show the astonishing thickness of 57 feet. The masonry is Cyclopean, wrought in huge blocks of stone, six to ten feet long, and over a yard in depth and height, and the whole treatment shows to what perfection the science of fortification had been brought by these ancient dwellers in walled cities. How far the development was indigenous, or how far it was imported from Asiatic soil, is not yet fully clear. Troy has yielded up its secrets, but Phrygia, Lycia, Syria, and Crete have not yet told their buried tales.

The chief interest centres on the construction and ground-plan of the interior palace; though Tiryns precedes, perhaps by centuries, the composition of the Homeric poems, the methods of domestic architecture are conservative, and Tiryns has disclosed what is in all essentials a perfect specimen of the Homeric palace. There is not merely correspondence in the large features of the plan-in the great courtyard, in the sounding porch and open colonnades, in the central megaron or hall for men, parted by special modes of access from the chambers of the women, in the store-chambers and their

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ways of approach-but even in minor details, for instance in the treatment of threshold and jamb and fixings of doors, in the decoration of wall surfaces, in the placing of altar and hearth and fixed settles, in the adjustment of central columns to carry a raised clerestory or roof, in the arrangement and fittings of the bath-room and its appliances, striking and illuminating resemblances occur to the descriptions of the palaces of Odysseus and Alcinous.

The position of Mycena explains the ascendancy it gained over Tiryns. Where the plain of the Inachus curves northward into the basin of the Argive hills, at a distance of nine miles from the sea, Mycena planted its citadel at an altitude of 900 feet on a projecting spur of Mount Euboea. Behind it the mountain lifts its double peaks, Mount Elias to the north, Mount Zara to the south, to upwards of 2,000 feet. And from this watchtower on the hills, "in the recess of horse-feeding Argos," (ἐν μυχῷ ̓́Αργεος ἱπποβότοιο), “the established fortress” (ἐϋκτίμενον πτολίεθρον) of Mycenæ held the thoroughfares between the Bay of Argolis and the Corinthian Gulf. The net-work of Cyclopean tracks, by which pedlars and pack animals crossed from the bay to the isthmus or the port, can still be descried, and Mycenae, with its palace keep, held the key to the position. In Homer it is distinguished as "the city of wide ways" (supuάyvia), and the city "rich in gold” (πoλúxpuros). Its remains represent that Achæan age, with the latter days of which Homer was contemporary, and to recent memories of which he gives epic form. In his verse the greatness of Mycenae is associated with the short-lived Pelopid dynasty, particularly with the sovereignty of Agamemnon and Menelaus, the two sons of Atreus, enthroned at Mycena and at Sparta. The type of