Freeman Edward Augustus
Studies of Travel - Greece
The Treasuries and Treasures of Mykênê
The Treasuries of Mykênê we have heard of all our days; the Treasures 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.
We pass on, over ground which five-and-fifty years ago beheld one of the fiercest struggles of the War of Independence. Each of the passes, each of the heights, was held and stoutly contested in the August of 1822, when the men of Peloponnêsos beat back the Turkish host of Dramali in utter defeat. On our immediate path the ground rises and falls, but we are led over no special heights till, as we descend, the plain of Nemea breaks upon us. The columns rise in all the stateliness of solitude. Beyond rise the hills in which the ancients placed the cave of the Nemeian lion. This then is one of the seats of Pan-hellenic religion and Pan-hellenic festive gathering. If its glory did not reach that of Olympia or Delphi or even of the Isthmus, it is the first of the four to which our journey leads us, and we remember that Nemeian victories called forth the song of Pindar, and that Alkibiadês did not disdain either to win triumphs there, or to have those triumphs recorded in the choicest art of the sculpture of his day. There is the temple in the plain, a plain well fitted for the purposes of the games, and, cut out of one of the hills to the right as in the Larissa of Argos, we see where the theatre of Nemea once was. Though the place hardly ranks among sites of first-rate interest, though it calls up no such primæval associations as Mykênê which we have left, no such later associations as Corinth to which we are going, there is much to muse upon in the plain of Nemea. The legend of the lion comes home to us all the more strongly after seeing the sculptured forms which the world has agreed to call lions in the Mykênêan akropolis. Science and scholarship going hand in hand have given him a new interest. The lion, whose cave we cannot see, though we see the mountain side in which it is hollowed, may be mythical in his own person, but he is no mere creature of fiction. If, with Mr. Dawkins, we trace out the retreat of the lion from Europe, we see at Nemea one very important stage in his retreat. We trace him from the day when he made his lair in the caves of Mendip to the day when Herodotus so accurately marked out his geographical limits within the European continent. In his day the lion was still found in the region which stretched from the Achelôos to the Nestos; and when we look at the evidently careful nature of the notice itself, and when we go on to put that notice in its right place among other notices, we shall not be tempted for one moment to think that the lions of Herodotus were other than real lions. Some indeed have suggested that Herodotus was so poor a naturalist as to mistake lynxes or wild cats for lions. No one will be likely to think this when he has once put the whole evidence in its right order. Just as we can believe in a Mykênaian empire without pledging ourselves to a personal Agamemnôn, so we can believe in lions in Peloponnêsos without pledging ourselves to a personal Hêraklês. The constant references to the lion in the Homeric poems must come from actual knowledge or from very recent tradition. The beast has a two-fold name; he is not only λέων but λῖς, and we are tempted, though it is slightly dangerous, to carry our thoughts on a little further with regard to his name. We ourselves seem never to have called him by anything but a name borrowed from the Latin; but are not Löwe and λῖς strictly cognate, signs of a time when the king of beasts had a name common to the whole Aryan family? Anyhow we may be sure that primitive legend would not have quartered the lion at Nemea, that primitive art would not have sculptured him at Mykênê, except at times when his presence in Peloponnêsos was, if a thing of the past at all, a thing of a very recent past.
The modern fauna of Nemea, as it strikes the passer-by, is of a lowlier and more harmless kind. The shepherdesses are there with their goats among the ruins, and a draught of their milk in the Greek May is a refreshment not to be scorned. And he who uses his eyes as he passes along may have the same luck as the infant Hermês when he met the tortoise in his path. The tortoise of that adventure willingly sacrificed himself for the good of mankind, that the baby-god might make a lyre out of his shell. The tortoise kept his place in the human nursery speech of Greece, and we may still ask the question of the Greek girls,
χελὶ χελώνη, τί ποεῖς ἐν τῷ μέσω;
There is a temptation to carry him off as a living memorial of the spot; but the way from Nemea to Britain is long.
But we must not forget man and his works when we are in one of the chief seats of Hellenic worship. Here is the temple of Nemeian Zeus, standing desolate in the plain, almost as some of our Cistercian abbeys stand in their valleys. The history of the holy place is characteristic of Greek religion and of Greek politics. As Elis wrested the possession of Olympia from Pisa, so Argos wrested the possession of Nemea from Kleônai. In each case the possession of the temple and all that belonged to it was a source of dignity and political power. It was therefore eagerly sought for, and unscrupulously seized, by the greater city at the expense of the smaller. In the Olympian case indeed, one ground of refusing the ancient claim of the men of Pisa was that they had no city at all, but were mere villagers, unable and unworthy to preside over one of the great religious solemnities of the Greek nation. With our Northern notions, we are inclined to ask why Olympia and Nemea did not themselves grow into cities. Why did not a town grow up around the sanctuary? Not a few English towns, some of them of considerable size, grew up round some venerated monastery or other great church. A few devotees of the saint, a few dependents of his ministers, began the settlement. Traffic, shelter, all the motives which draw men together, increased the colony. In course of time it either wrested municipal rights from its ecclesiastical lords or received them as a free gift. In either case a new borough was formed, a borough which had not been made but had grown. But in Greek ideas a city was something which did not grow but was made. It might grow indefinitely after it was once made; but its first making did not take the form of growing. A new city was called into being by special and solemn acts, and no such foundation would have been endured at Olympia by Elis or at Nemea by either Argos or Kleônai. Some accommodation there must have been for the ministers of the God and his worshippers, even in ordinary times. At the great festival seasons, so we gather from the story of the assault on the tents of the envoys of Dionysios at Olympia, the crowds which assembled were encamped in the open plain like an army. But such a camp did not, like so many of the camps of Rome, grow into a permanent city. One might have fancied that it might become an object of Pan-hellenic policy to remove these national sanctuaries from the power of particular cities, and to place them under some kind of management in which all who had a right to share in the festival might be represented. But such an idea was foreign to the Greek political mind. The presidency of the temple and the games was essentially a privilege of this or that city. Pisa or Kleônai, Elis or Argos, were hosts, and the rest of Greece were their guests. There were, indeed, Amphiktionies, where a temple belonged to several cities in common; but the action of the most famous of their number in Greek affairs did not do much to impress the general Greek mind in favour of that system of management. Throughout Grecian history the Delphic Amphiktiony either does nothing or becomes the tool of some powerful commonwealth or prince.
