Chapter II: Front Matter (2)

In fact, on the plain of Marathôn, the famous saying of Johnson becomes clothed with a fuller meaning than its author is likely to have thought of. “That man is little to be envied whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathôn.” The saying is true, if we think merely of association, of example, of analogy. It becomes true in a yet higher sense, if we look on the day of Marathôn as being all that it truly is, as having fixed, not only the destiny of Athens, but the destiny of Europe. And we may look on that spot from another point of view, less wide indeed than this, but wider than that which looks on it simply as the scene of a single event of the year 490 before our era. Even setting aside the event which has made Marathôn famous with an undying fame, Marathôn would still have a considerable history, mythical and real--a history some chapters of which come within the memory of many of us. We must remember that, besides the view which looks on Greece as being almost in her first youth on the day of Marathôn, there is another view which looks on Greece as being then already in her decline. The one view is true, if we think only of Athenian democracy, of Athenian art, of Athenian poetry; the other view is no less true in the general history of the Greek nation. When the fight of Marathôn was fought, the bondage of the Greek nation had already begun; the work which was ended by Mahomet the Conqueror had been already begun by Crœsus and Cyrus. Asiatic Greece was already enslaved; the fight of Marathôn was fought in order that European Greece might not be enslaved like it. It may also flash across the minds of some who tread the plain of Marathôn that the fight which Miltiadês waged there in the cause of Hellenic freedom was not the last fight which has been waged on the same ground in the same cause. On that same plain, where the Athenians of one age fought to save Greece from coming under the yoke of the Persian, the Athenians of another age fought to free enslaved Greece from the yoke of the Turk. The modern fight of Marathôn, the fight of July, 1824, hardly ranks among the great events of the War of Independence, as its leader certainly does not rank among the purest heroes of the War of Independence. Yet when Gouras smote the janissaries of Omar of Karystos on the same ground on which Miltiadês had smitten the hosts of Datis and Artaphernês, to an eye which takes in the whole range of Grecian and European history, the fact has something more about it than mere association, than mere coincidence. The two fights of Marathôn were in truth only two stages in one long tale, the tale of the undying struggle between civilisation and the freedom of the West and the barbarian despotism of the Eastern world.

Marathôn, like Eleusis, gives us the usual lesson in Greek geography, and makes us better understand the greatness of that wonderful change which fused all the towns of Attica into a single commonwealth. We see at once that Marathôn--the name was, at least in later use, extended to the whole Tetrapolis--was, no less than Eleusis, designed, according to the common laws of Greek political geography, to form a separate state, distinct from Athens. Indeed it is more thoroughly cut off than Eleusis. In the view from the Akropolis, Pentelikos altogether hides the Marathônian plain; while, though Eleusis is actually kept out of sight by Aigaleôs, Kithairôn and the other greater heights beyond it suggest the existence of the Thriasian plain. Marathôn therefore, naturally enough, has a long mythical history distinct from that of Athens. Not only Thêseus, but Hêraklês and the Hêrakleidai figure in it, and legend tells of a fight of Marathôn earlier than either of those which history records. Hêraklês remained in historical times the chief object of local worship, and it was by his sanctuary that the Athenian host encamped before, what we suppose we must call, the second battle. Athênê too, as on other spots of Attic soil, was not without her temple by the marsh. Marathôn does not appear in the Catalogue any more than Eleusis, and for the same reason as Eleusis. But its name appears in the Odyssey in a passage which may suggest some geographical reflections:

Ὤς ἄρα Φωνήσασ’ ἀπέβη γλαυκῶπις Ἀθήνη
Πὸντον ἐπ’ ἀτρύγετον· λίπε δὲ Σχερίην ἐρατεινήν·
Ἴκετο δ’ ἐς Μαραθῶνα καὶ εὐρυάἈγυιαν Ἀθήνην,
Δῦνε δ’ Ἐρεχθῆος πυκινὸν δόμον·

If Scheriê really be Corfu, this may seem a most unexpected route to Athens, and yet it is hardly more wonderful than the route by Syra by which the modern traveller often actually goes. In history the first appearance of Marathôn is when Peisistratos lands there on his return from exile. The second is when the son of Peisistratos led the Persian host thither, as a fitting place for the use of the cavalry which after all they seemed not to have used. No battle in history has been more minutely examined, and that in some cases by men who united technical military knowledge with a thorough knowledge of the country. Colonel Leake, to mention only one inquirer, has done all that the union of both qualities could do, though one is amazed at his constantly referring to Herodotus as a contemporary writer. Yet, after all his labours, after all the labours of Mr. Finlay and others, everybody complains that the narrative of Herodotus is unsatisfactory. The comments of Dean Blakesley strike us as among the most acute that have been made. One may doubt whether Herodotus had ever been there; he certainly shows no knowledge of the ground. He makes no mention of the marshes which form so marked a feature in the character of the Marathônian plain. The marshes lie between the sea and the fighting-ground, as the fighting-ground lies between the marsh and the mountains. The marsh is not only not mentioned by Herodotus, but his account seems almost inconsistent with its existence. But Pausanias saw the picture in the Poikilê which showed the Persians falling into the marsh. It is like appealing to the Bayeux Tapestry from the later accounts of the battle of Senlac. Pausanias, though he lived so many ages after, was in this way really nearer to the time than Herodotus. The picture commemorated the fact; Herodotus tells the story as it had grown up a generation later. By that time, as Dean Blakesley says, the story had come under the operation of the law by which “popular tradition rapidly drops all those particulars of a battle which evince strategic genius, and substitutes for them exaggerated accounts of personal bravery.” Miltiadês, as a good general, took advantage of the ground, and largely owed his success to the nature of the ground. Popular tradition made everything be done by sheer hard fighting.

In short, almost every detail of this memorable fight seems shrouded in uncertainty. It is hard to fix the exact position of either army, and the very name of Marathôn has perhaps shifted its place. The site of the old town seems quite as likely to be, not at the modern Marathôn, but, as Colonel Leake puts it, at Brana. Yet, amid all this doubt, there is essential certainty. Of the work that was done that day, of the general site, there is no doubt, and the most living and speaking monument of all is there to bear its witness. We stand, not, as the poet puts it, on the Persians’ grave, but on the mound which covers the ashes of the men of Athens who fell that day. Within the space between the bay with its blue waters and the hills which fence in the plain, the fate of Europe was fixed. We stand on the mound; the eye passes over the hills, from Probalinthos to the cape of Kynosoura. We look on the older and the newer candidate of the name of Marathôn; we look on the hill where older legends fixed the home of Pan, and where the later name of Drakonera speaks of some older or later dragon myth. We know that it was within these bounds that the might of Asia was broken by the force of two Hellenic cities. Standing on that mound, instead of dreaming, as the poet dreamed in the days of enslaved Greece, we may call to mind how, in the cycle of human things, another triumph of Europe over Asia was won on the same spot, and if there be, as other poets tell us, two special voices which call to freedom, no spot could be better chosen for the work that was done there than the Marathônian plain. Once that land was said to be

Unchanged in all except its foreign lord.

Now the foreign lord is gone, and for the rest no change is needed. The mountains are there, the sea is there, and, almost as imperishable as themselves, the mound of the fallen heroes is there also. At no great distance from the mound, some stones remain which are held to mark the separate monument of the leader of that day’s battle. Standing there, by the grave of Miltiadês, we think of that day only. On the plain of Marathôn, we will not think either of Paros or of Chersonêsos.

While we write, perhaps no inopportune moment, the news comes that Greece has lost the last and the noblest of her later heroes. The man of other times in whom all his countrymen trusted--the man before whom the chiefs of contending parties could lay their jealousies aside--is taken away from his country in the moment of her utmost need. One tie which binds us to the past is rudely snapped, when the last of the heroes of the past, the last of the ἡμιθέων γένος ἀνδρῶν, passes away from the work to which his county had again called him. After a life of ninety years and more--a life in which the severest of censors, whose scourge spared neither Greek nor Englishman, could not find a single flaw--the hero of the fire-ships is no more. The name of Constantine Kanarês is added to the same roll of departed worthies as Miaoulês and Botzarês, as Church and Hastings. And in the long list of men who for so many ages have done honour to the Hellenic name, among the chosen few whose glory no speck tarnishes, along with Phormiôn and Kallikratidas, men of his own calling and his own element, the pen of history will engrave no nobler name than the name of him who has just gone, of him who has as truly died in the service of his country as if he had fallen fifty years back, like Kynaigeiros himself by the shore of Marathôn.

The Saronic Gulf.

Travelling in Greece has in some measure to be done backwards. The stranger who reaches Athens, as it will often be convenient to reach it, by way of Syra, and who does not mean to cross the bounds of the Greek kingdom, will naturally take Athens on his way homewards. The voyage from Syra to Athens is a voyage made from the rising to the setting sun. In the like sort Athens itself is the practical centre for many points which lie to the west of it, and which geographically form further steps on the return journey. To a traveller of the age of Pausanias, one of the earliest of antiquarian travellers in the modern sense, Athens might have seemed a strange centre for a journey in the Argolic land, with Mykênê as its main object. Mykênê was in his day as desolate as it is now, but Argos and Corinth were in a very different case. In his day Argos and Corinth were united by a carriage road, as there is hope that they may before long be united again. The sea was then less thoroughly the highway of Hellas than it had been in earlier times, or than it has become again in later times. Now the traveller who has not a frame of extra hardihood will most likely look on Mykênê and what naturally goes with Mykênê as an excursion to be done from the capital, an excursion as great a part of which as possible is to be made by water. That is to say, the most natural approach to the Argolic land will be to most travellers by sea from Peiraieus to Nauplia. The traveller will thus begin his researches with one of those charming voyages among islands and peninsulas which form so special a feature in Greek travel. The voyage from Peiraieus to Nauplia strongly brings out some of the characteristics of Greek geography and history. As Sulpicius remarked long ago, famous cities lie close together. We better understand the nature of Greek politics and Greek warfare when we fully take in the fact that so many of the contending powers lay within sight of one another. This feeling comes strongly into the mind when we look down from such a point as the hill of Brescia and see the commonwealths of Lombardy grouped as it were in order before us. But there is a wide difference between commonwealths thus grouped, almost as it were in regular array, marked each by its tower rising from the boundless plain, and commonwealths the site of each of which forms a marked natural feature, an island, a promontory, an inland hill. We see why the duration of the Greek commonwealths was far longer than those of Lombardy, and why they were not in the same way easily brought together under the hands of a few powerful lords. Mr. Mahaffy, who occasionally arrives at untrustworthy conclusions on things which he has not sufficiently studied, but who yields to few in keenness of observation on the things which he has really studied, has some good remarks on the geographical separation between state and state which was brought about by the physical features of the country, above all by the mountain ranges. Athens and Thebes were, as modern states go, very near to one another, but Athens and Thebes had real difficulties in getting at one another. The sea indeed was, whether for peaceful or for war-like purposes, not a barrier but a highway, but just as the physical position of the Greek commonwealths gave them a more distinct national being, so the long and winding coasts of the islands and peninsulas on which so many of them were placed gave them, near as they lay together, an actual extent of territory altogether out of proportion to their nearness. Thus, short as the life of the commonwealths of ancient Greece seems to us, it was at least far longer than the life of the commonwealths of mediæval Italy. Of the last, the few that survived were just those whose geographical position enabled them to survive. Venice and Genoa speak for themselves; so does Ragusa on the other side of the great gulf. Lucca too, it has been well observed, was, just like Athens and Thebes, cut from its neighbour Pisa by mountains which hindered either of the once rival states from seeing each other.

With this train of thought in our minds, we may start on our voyage from Peiraieus to Nauplia, the first stage of our journey from Athens to Mykênê. The heights of Megaris, the Akrokorinthos itself, come within the distant view; but, as our course is marked out, of Megara and Corinth we shall see something more and nearer, while of the other states which border the gulf we take our nearest glimpse on the present voyage. From the Akropolis of Athens, from not a few other points of Attic soil, we have looked down on the varied outlines of the two rocky islands which form the main features of the maritime landscape. Farther from us lies Aigina, eyesore of Peiraieus; nearer lies Salamis, the proudest name, save one, in Athenian history. In the general view one island is as prominent as the other, and we naturally ask the cause of the wide difference in their history. Aigina is itself a famous island; Salamis is simply an island which became the scene of one of the most famous of events. One of those caprices of destiny which, above all, make and mar the fortunes of commercial states, made Aigina for a while one of the great powers of Greece. The rival of Athens on the element which belonged to Aigina before it belonged to Athens, she became first the subject, then the victim, of her rival. So, when again an independent state in after days, she underwent a blow no less fearful at the hands of Rome and her Aitolian and Pergamene allies. Salamis has no such history. The isle of the Aiakids, the subject of the poetical oratory of Solon, once disputed between Megara and Athens, became an integral part of the Attic land, the scene of the great fight where Athenian and Aiginetan fought side by side against the barbarian. But Salamis had no share in the glories of Aigina, though she had some share in her sorrow. Aigina has a history of her own, though a history in which her relations towards Athens play the chief part. The history of Salamis is simply a part of the history of Attica. Long indeed after the days of Solôn or of Periklês she suffered at Athenian hands only less severely than Aigina had done, but that was when Athens, tossed to and fro from one Macedonian lord to another, suspected Salamis of treacherous dealings with one to whom the city was for a while hostile. Salamis has gained a separate being in the days of Kassandros, as Eleusis has again a separate being in the days of the Thirty. Is the cause of this difference between the conquered rival and the incorporated territory to be found in the fact that there was no power in the Argolic _Aktê_ which could possibly draw Aigina to itself--the island was far more likely to attract its neighbours on the mainland--while Salamis lay near enough to the Attic coast to come within the range of that strange influence which made the history of Attica so opposite to that of all other Hellenic lands? As Eleusis and Marathôn could be fused into Athens, so could Salamis; but Aigina lay out of that influence, and lay within no other. Aigina, too powerful to be incorporated with Athens, became, as we have seen, the rival and victim of Athens, while Salamis, weaker and less powerful, became indeed her victim, but in the character, not of a foreign enemy, but of a home district charged with treason.

We pass then by Salamis. We muse on the great sea-fight; we muse specially as we pass by the little dependency of Salamis, that isle of Psyttaleia, beloved by Pan, where Aristeidês dealt the last blow against the noblest of the Persian host. These things happened at Salamis and Psyttaleia, but they were not the work of the men of Salamis and Psyttaleia, even if Psyttaleia had any men. But we do see the work of the men of Aigina, the memory of the greatness of Aigina, as we draw near the coast of the historic isle, and the temple of Panhellenian Zeus looks down upon us from its height. We pass round the northern end of the island; we mark the modern town, and the fringe of fertile land which lies between the sea and the soaring and jagged heights of the island. We catch a glimpse of Epidauros, city of Asklêpios, and our thoughts wander away to the second Epidauros on the Lakonian coast, to the third Epidauros far away, parent of Ragusa and all her argosies. We pass by Methana, of all peninsulas the nearest to an island, cleaving to the Argolic _Aktê_ as the _Aktê_ cleaves to Peloponnêsos, as Peloponnêsos cleaves to Hellas, as Hellas and the adjoining lands cleave to the general mass of Europe. We pass on to the spots famous in later as well as in earlier times, to some which are famous in later times only. Kalaureia, with its Amphiktiony, is perhaps less thought of than modern Pôros, the arsenal of Greece, the scene of stirring events in the war which made Greece free. We skirt the Troizenian land, but Troizên itself hardly comes within our ken; and, if Pôros disputes the place with Kalaureia, Hermionê cannot even attempt to dispute the place in our thoughts with the islands lying off her shore which the warfare of modern days has made so illustrious. There lie the homes of those famous Albanian colonists, two of the three great nurseries of the seamen of Hellas. Their fate has been what to shallow observers may seem a strange one, but which simply follows the commonest laws of human nature. Specially privileged under the Turk, they were foremost in the war against the Turk. Delivered from his yoke, they have greatly fallen from the position which they held under his yoke. The explanation is simple. The Hydriots, independent in their own island on the single condition of furnishing men to the Sultan’s navy, enjoyed that kind of half-freedom which makes men long more keenly for perfect freedom. They know better what freedom is than those who are utterly crushed down, and, as they know better what it is, they also know better how to win it. In such cases we always hear the silly charge of ingratitude--gratitude seemingly being due to the invader if, for his own ends, he leaves his victim something. Hydra then, the land of Miaoulês, was foremost in the strife simply because it could be foremost. But when the strife was over, Hydra lost not a little. That is to say, what was lost by Hydra was won by Greece as a whole. In the days of bondage Hydra flourished, because it was comparatively free. With the establishment of general freedom, Hydra lost all special privilege; commerce, as commerce always will, went to such spots as best suited it; Peiraieus and Syra rose as Hydra went down. Yet Hydra and Spetza at least form part of free Greece. Psara, the isle of Constantine Kanarês, is still in bondage. It is something to stand before the house of the last of the old heroes, to look out on Salamis, and to remember that, when the battle was fought, Themistoklês too was ἄπολις ἀνήρ. By a happy analogy men speak of that house as Caprera; the owner of Caprera is ἄπολις ἀνήρ also.

Hydra then, like Aigina in an earlier day, is a witness of the way in which commerce flits from one shore to another. With its fellow, Spetza, the main interest of our voyage itself, as distinguished from the interest of the spots to which our voyage is to lead us, pretty well ends. We now turn the last main corner; we enter the specially Argolic gulf. Before long, eyes familiar with the scene begin to point out to us the whereabouts of the great objects of our pilgrimage. We see--we at least see where we ought to look for--Tiryns on her lonely hill in the plain, the Larissa of Argos crowning her peaked height, Mykênê herself darkly spied out among the mountains. With these objects before us, we may be forgiven if, as soon as we are once on the shore, we hasten towards them, even to the prejudice of a spot which has some claims, both earlier and later, upon our thoughts. We land at Nauplia. With the great sites now close to us, we may be again forgiven if we pass by the fortress which preserves the name of the legendary Palamêdês, and the remains which show that Nauplia too, though its fame and importance belong mainly to far later times, was a dwelling-place and a fortress of primæval Hellas. Of little fame in the old days of Hellenic freedom, Nauplia held under the later Empire, under the Venetian, and under the Turk, so high a place that forsaken and forgotten Tiryns came in popular speech to bear no other name than _Old Nauplia_. To Old Nauplia then we hasten, but we do not hasten so fast but that we catch a glimpse of the winged lion over the gate of the younger city, the symbol of ages of Peloponnesian history which we are too apt to forget. In those ages, if Tiryns had to take the name of Nauplia, Nauplia had to take the name of a far more distant city. By one of the many attempts to make a name in one language bear a meaning in another--in this case it would be more accurate to say, to make the name bear another meaning in its own language--Nauplia, the port of Argos, became the Venetian stronghold of _Napoli di Romania_. Peloponnêsos, no longer _Sclavinia_ was still Romania; on no man’s lips in those days was it Hellas. Nowhere, least of all in such a seat of its power as this, can the badge of the great republic be seen without interest, wonder, and admiration. Another lion not far off, commemorating the coming of a Bavarian king, it is only kindness to pass by. We are on the road--for a road there is--to the most wondrous relic of the præ-historic ages of the land. We soon stop before an elevation in the plain which suggests our own Old Sarum, which, at a second glance, may suggest Worlebury. We have at last reached one of the objects which alone would repay us for coming from Old Sarum or from Worlebury to see them. Salamis, Aigina, Pôros, Hydra itself, all seem but mere stages on the way as we stand below the vast and desolate walls of Tiryns.

Tiryns.

We have slightly sketched the main objects which flit before the eye in the delightful voyage from the harbour of Athens to what we may in some sort look on as the harbour of Argos. Once on the Argolic soil, close in the very centre and cradle of Hellenic legend, among the cities whose names have from childhood been surrounded with a halo of mythic lore, we must pause and muse at greater length on each of the famous and wondrous objects before us. Each has its own charm, its own lesson. Mykênê is the special goal of our pilgrimage, the object which--even putting modern discoveries apart--would of itself fully reward a journey from the Western world. But half the charm, half the lesson, of Mykênê comes from its relation to the other cities in the neighbourhood. Argos and Mykênê, the destroyer and the destroyed, suggest one another, and are coupled together, confounded together, in many a verse and many a legend. But they do not stand alone. Before we reach them we come to another spot, less famous, less striking in many points, but still having its own fame, its own charm, a spot which must not be passed by even by those who are hastening on to the most famous spot of all. The first of our hill-fortresses plays, beside its fellows, a comparatively small part either in legend or in history. Fixed on a less striking spot than either, not crowning such a height as the Larissa of Argos, not backed by mountain and gorge like the akropolis of Mykênê, desolate as Mykênê itself, but containing no such wonders of primitive art within its walled circuit, Tiryns stands before us, claiming our study simply by its walled circuit and nothing else. It is the hill-fort, and nothing but the hill-fort. But it is something to gaze on a hill-fort whose walls were ancient and wonderful in Homer’s day, and which abide much as they must have stood in Homer’s day. Argos, Mykênê, Corinth, are all to be seen and studied; but we shall lose no small part of the teaching of those cities and of the land of which they form a part, unless we begin our research with the wonderful spot which enabled the first of Greek poets, the first no less of Greek geographers, to fill up his verse with the sounding formula:

Τίρυνθά τε τειχιόεσσαν.

There is moreover one aspect of Tiryns which will give it a special interest to any one who has already seen something of the primitive cities of Italy, but to whom Tiryns itself is his first introduction to the primitive cities of Greece. He who has visited Fæsulæ and Tusculum, he who has looked thoroughly at Rome itself, will feel a certain impression come strongly upon him that his work is imperfect as long as he keeps himself on the western side of the Hadriatic. Tusculum, above all things, points to Tiryns. The collection of primæval remains in Greece and Italy made long ago by Dodwell--an observer, we may add, second only to the great name of Leake--was perhaps unlucky in helping to give greater currency to the dangerous word Pelasgian. But it was a great gain to bring the Greek and Italian examples together. It would be a greater gain still to bring together as many examples as possible of the same kind from all parts of the world. The rash theorist may be indeed led into any number of those wild imaginings which find their expression in names like “Druidical” in Britain, and “Pelasgian” in Italy and Greece. But the critical inquirer, the votary of the Comparative method, will be strengthened in his researches by seeing how in the art of building, as in everything else, like effects spring from like causes, how the same stage of process leads to the same results in distant lands and distant ages. The helpless devisers of theories about the origin of the arch, and especially of the pointed arch, may profitably learn that the arch has been striven after in endless places--that it has been successfully striven after in many places--that the pointed arch, simply as a constructive form, is as old as the round, and most likely older. The guide who shows the single “arco Gotico” at Tusculum illustrates the state of mind in which professed inquirers into architectural history were only two or three generations back. To them the Gothic style and the pointed arch meant the same thing. That belief, as well as many other kindred beliefs, may be well unlearned on the akropolis of Tiryns.

Tiryns lies on the way to Argos; and Argos lies on the way from Tiryns to Mykênê. The three should be studied together; their position and history supply at once so much of likeness and so much of contrast. All alike, no less than Fæsulæ and Tusculum, no less than Athens itself, no less than “the great group of village communities by the Tiber,” are examples of the primitive hill-fort which has grown into the later city. All show, in different ways, the peculiarities which are characteristic of cities of this immemorial type. But they show also the different forms which that immemorial type might assume, according to difference of local or other circumstances. Athens, Corinth, a crowd of others, all belong to the same general class. We might say that all the strictly immemorial cities of Greece did so. For the river city the small streams of Greece gave no room; and, even where the river city was possible, it doubtless marks a later stage than the hill-fort. The cities of colonial Greece, founded close by or actually in the sea, mark a later stage still. Tiryns, Argos, Mykênê, are all hill cities; but they occupy hills of very different heights and figures. They all stand at no great distance from the sea, but none of them ever grew into a maritime city like Athens, Corinth, or Megara. Near together, but not so near that they could be fused together like the constituent elements of Rome or Sparta, they had to endure the other alternatives which commonly waited on cities which lay near together, but where such union was impossible. Rivalry, enmity, destruction of the weaker by the stronger, formed the staple of the history of the three most famous among the cities of the Argolic land.

We stand then before Tiryns. We are almost surprised at finding that we have so soon reached it from modern Nauplia. Itself as utterly forsaken as Mykênê, it does not stand in the same way as Mykênê, utterly cut off from all signs of modern life, from all signs of any date later than that of the primæval days of Greece. There is indeed something startling in finding a primæval city, and that a city so rich in mythical renown, standing at only a small distance from the roadside. More than seventeen hundred years back Pausanias lighted on it in the same way, and found it as desolate as it is now; then, as now, the wall remained, and nothing more. The site is not for a moment to be compared with that of either of the rival cities. The site of Mykênê would be striking indeed as a mere piece of scenery, even though Mykênê were not there. So would the site, if not of Argos itself, at least of its Larissa and its theatre. But the hill of Tiryns is simply one, and that the lowest, of several small isolated hills in the low ground between the gulf and the mountains. Had other hill-forts arisen on those other nearer hills, the group might have been fused together into one great city by the same process which girded the hills of Rome with a single wall. But this was not to be; Argos was to grow, but it was to grow only by the utter wiping out of Tiryns and Mykênê as inhabited cities. There then, wholly forsaken, not containing so much as a shepherd’s hut, stand the mighty walls, the walls which supplied Homer with a speaking epithet, the walls which in later days men deemed to be too great to be the work of mortal hands, and set down as having been wrought by the superhuman skill of the legendary Kyklôpes. The name marks a change in the idea which had come to attach to that name since the days of Homer. The Kyklôpes of later Grecian legend, always artists of one kind or another--sometimes builders of gigantic walls, sometimes forgers of the thunderbolts of Zeus--have no likeness but in name and strength to the solitary and savage Kyklôpes of the Odyssey. But when we see, not only a vast expenditure of mere force, but the display of real skill which is shown in these primitive works of defence--works, as we are tempted to think, of a rude age, when, if force was abundant, no great skill was to be looked for--it is not wonderful if men in later days looked on them as the work of more than mortal hands. For ornament, for polish or finish of any kind, we are not to look in the stage represented by Tiryns. Yet the way in which the rugged material is dealt with, the piling together of these vast unhewn rocks so as to fit them together and to bring to the front so many comparatively smooth surfaces, was, in the ages and under the circumstances of the builders, as true a work of artistic skill as the care which dictated the delicate curves, the minute differences in distance and direction, in the portico of the Parthenôn itself. Who those builders were it is in vain for us to guess. They belong to the primæval, the unrecorded, days of Hellas, to the days before even legendary history begins. Mykênê has a history--a history which different minds may set down as truth, as mere fable, as fable grounded upon truth, but which still is a history, which still is something different from that mere guessing at the names of founders which was prescribed by the supposed necessity of finding an eponymous hero for every land and city. The legends of Tiryns hardly get beyond this stage. Hêraklês indeed figures in its story, but Hêraklês is in his own nature ubiquitous. That Mykênê contains monuments marking a far higher stage of art than anything at Tiryns proves nothing as to the relative date of the two cities. For the works at Tiryns and the oldest work at Mykênê may well be of the same date. All that we can say is that these walls belong to an age before history, before tradition. If Homer had spoken of these walls as the works of Kyklôpes, we might have seen in it a dim tradition that they were the works of some race of men older than his own Achaians. As it is, we can only say that they are the works of the earliest inhabitants of Peloponnêsos of whom any works remain to us. Whatever we may guess from the analogy of other lands, we have no evidence of the existence of any inhabitants of Peloponnêsos earlier than the Achaians of Homer.

We come then somewhat suddenly on the hill-fortress by the roadside. We are guided to the southern face of a hill much longer from north to south than from east to west, and we find ourselves before the main approach of Tiryns, or at least of its akropolis. The great gate has perished; there is nothing to set against the lions of Mykênê. But to the right of where it stood is one of the two main features which have given the walls of Tiryns their special fame. This is what the Greek antiquaries call the σύριγξ, what in English may be called the sally-port, the long passage with its roof made of the great stones of primæval masonry so placed together as to make the form, though not the construction, of the pointed arch. Of the many examples of striving after the archaic construction without ever actually reaching it which are to be found scattered through so many parts of the world, none is more instructive than this. In the history of architectural construction it fully deserves a place alongside of the Mykenaian treasuries. Here is a great military work of the earliest times, the builders of which were striving hard, though without perfect success, to form an arch. This fact at once puts a barrier between the primitive and the historical buildings of Greece. It is indeed strange that a people which had come so near to the greatest of mechanical discoveries should have failed of altogether reaching it, and should have developed its historical architecture from a principle altogether different. In Italy it was otherwise. We there see exactly the same strivings after the arch which we see in Greece; but here the strivings were rewarded with success at an early time. The attempt succeeded; the perfect arch was lighted on, and the historical architecture of Rome was developed from the principle of the arch. Thus, while Fæsulæ, Tusculum, Signia, a crowd of others have their Greek parallels, there is no Greek parallel to the _cloaca maxima_ of Rome.

Then, again, as we have already hinted, these examples show that the pointed arch, simply as a constructive form, is as old as the round. Because the pointed arch happened to become the leading feature of an architectural style later than the round arch, we are apt to fancy that the form is later in its own nature, that it must have been developed out of the round, that he who built the first pointed arch must have seen round arches. Yet the pointed form is just as natural in itself, just as likely to occur to a primitive builder. Indeed we might almost say that it was more likely. The first step towards the arch would doubtless be setting two stones to lean against one another, and this would lead much more easily to the pointed arch than to the round. It so happened that the first Italian builders whose strivings after the arch were quite successful were led to the round and not to the pointed form. But had the Tusculan or the Tirynthian engineer actually reached the construction to which he came so near, an architectural style, with the pointed arch for its great constructive feature, might have arisen in Latium or Argolis a thousand years before it actually did arise under Saracenic hands.

Again, in considering these matters, we must carefully keep ourselves back from any tempting ethnological theories, above all from such ethnological theories as lurk in the dangerous word Pelasgian. No one doubts the near connexion of the old Italian and the old Greek races, a connexion nearer than that of common Aryan origin. But the same kind of analogies which may be seen in their earlier buildings may be seen also in the early buildings of races which are much further apart. If Tiryns finds its best parallel at Tusculum, Mykênê finds its best parallel at New Granga. Nearly just the same strivings after the arch may be found in more than one land altogether beyond the pale of European or Aryan fellowship, as for instance in the ruined cities of Central America. The analogies in the primæval architecture of remote nations exactly answer to the analogies in their weapons, dress, and customs. They belong to the domain of Mr. Tylor.

But, while the remains at Tiryns have this special interest for the student of architectural history, they show also how far the primitive engineers had advanced in the scientific study of the art of defence. Even the non-military observer can well take this in on the eastern side. There rises what, seen from within, seen in a direct view from without, the beholder is apt to call a tower. But it is merely that the wall is either better preserved at this point or else was higher from the beginning. Here was one chief approach to the fortress, and it was guarded by what, in the technical language of Colonel Leake, is called a ramp. The only approach to the gate was by going up an ascent formed by an advanced wall, made so that an assailant would expose his unshielded side to the defenders of the fort. This skilful piece of fortification, with the sally-port which is so nearly perfect, and another, traces of which remain on the other side, shows that the primitive engineers, call them Kyklôpes or anything else, had advanced a long way beyond mere mechanical piling together of stones.

The walls doubtless fence in only the akropolis, the primitive city, answering to the oldest Athens, to the oldest Rome on the Palatine. How far the town may have spread itself over the surrounding plain we have no means of judging. We cannot believe that Tiryns ever became a great city like Argos and Corinth. Its name vanishes from history too soon for that. But at Tiryns, as we shall also see at Mykênê, there was an upper and a lower city within the fortified enclosure itself. Greek antiquaries call the higher level a καταφύγιον, a place of refuge, but it is the strongly fortified part to which the approaches lead. Was this the royal citadel, and was the lower part the dwelling-place of the other original settlers before the town had spread at all beyond the present akropolis? The military objects of the two levels are gone into by Colonel Leake, but we must remember that these ancient strongholds were not, like modern forts, built simply to be attacked and defended. They were dwelling-places of man, fortified because they were dwelling-places of man. One would think that the whole of the first body of settlers would find shelter within the walls. There was the king on the higher level; the rest of the tribe was below. A δῆμος might or might not arise beyond their defences. At Rome and Athens such a δῆμος did arise, and made the history of Rome and Athens different from that of Tiryns.

It is a wonderful thing to stand beneath these mighty walls, raised out of the huge blocks which seem too great for mortal men to have piled. Nowhere else does the line of thought which they suggest come out so strongly. On the Athenian akropolis there are blocks ruder than those of Tiryns itself, but they are hidden by the great works of more polished days. At Mykênê the walls, mighty as they are, have almost yielded to tombs, gates, and treasuries. At Tiryns it is the walls and the walls alone which seem to speak of its days of power. Tiryns struck men as being τειχιόεσσα in the days of the Homeric Catalogue. It is as τειχιόεσσα and as τειχιόεσσα only, that it strikes us still.

Argos.

A short drive--we are still within the region where driving is possible--takes us from Tiryns to Argos, from the destroyed city to the destroyers. The contrast is striking. Argos, through all changes, has always remained a dwelling-place of man, and not only a dwelling-place of man, but a town of some importance, according to the standard of its own age and place. Modern Athens is an artificial city. It is a town which might have stood anywhere else, built at the foot of the ancient akropolis and around the churches of Eirênê. Modern Argos is not an artificial town; it has come to be what it is by the gradual operation of ordinary historical causes. It shows us what an ancient Greek city, neither ruined nor forsaken nor artificially fostered, but left to the working of natural circumstances, finds itself after long ages of Roman, Venetian, Turkish, and restored Greek rule. The chief remark which the place suggests to a Western eye is how little there is to remark. In the modern town there is no remarkable building of any kind, old or new. The modern cathedral is large and is meant to be of some pretensions, but one would gladly exchange it for the tiny metropolitan church of Athens, or for any other church of genuine Byzantine style and date. The town itself covers a large space, and contains a considerable population. Setting apart the capital and the great seaports, Argos ranks high among the existing cities of Greece. Yet to a Western eye it has an unpleasing, almost a barbarous, look. It is dirty, irregular, with neither Western neatness nor Eastern picturesque effect. An old Venetian possession, one might have expected that St. Mark might have planted somewhat of his impress here, as he has done on so many of his subject cities. If Argos were even as Traü, no one would complain, but, since the Venetian, Argos has seen the Turk, and that is enough to account for the difference. Argos is not lacking in recent history. It was the scene of important events during the War of Independence, when it acted several times as the common meeting-place of Greece. It is still, we believe, a thriving place after its own standard, but that is not the standard of Western Europe, nor yet the standard of Syra and Patras. Yet it sets us thinking whether a town in Western Europe, five or six hundred years back, may not have looked much the same. In one point indeed there was a difference. No Western mediæval town of the same population as modern Argos would have spread over the same space. That is to say, the modern town lies scattered, doubtless because it represents an ancient city of far greater extent.

But the objects which give Argos its main interest in the eyes of the historical inquirer, the objects which bear witness to the existence of Argos in the days of its greatness, lie outside the modern town. One, the chief of all, proclaims its presence from afar. The akropolis of Argos, the famous Larissa, the soaring height crowned by the stronghold which from a primæval fortress grew into a modern castle, is an akropolis in quite another sense than the lowlier hill of Tiryns, or even than that of Athens. The name leads to a long train of thought. It is the Larissa of Argos. How many spots bear the name of Larissa? How many lands and cities bear the name of Argos? He who has a taste for Pelasgian speculation has a wide field opened to him. He who keeps himself within the range of recorded history and of such tradition as may be said to prove itself, may perhaps be led to think how largely the fame of Argos is a borrowed fame. Argos and the Argeians meet us in every page of the Homeric tale; they seem to be the most familiar names for Greece and the Greeks before Greece and the Greeks had as yet an acknowledged common name. A little thought will, however, show that in most of the places where they are named there is no immediate reference to the local city of Argos. The Bretwalda of Hellas ruled over many islands and over all Argos. Whatever this means, it can hardly mean anything short of all Peloponnêsos; at least it cannot mean the local Argos, which did not come within his immediate kingdom. To suppose any reference to the local Argos would be like quartering a Karling at Paris or a West-Saxon at York. But the local Argos dealt with Mykênê like the savage who swallows the eye of his slain enemy in order to take to himself his strength, courage, and glory. Only a few years after Mykênê fell we find the Attic dramatists transferring the whole tale of Pelops’ line from its own place to the destroying city. The confusion has become hopeless. Argos becomes surrounded by a mythical glory to which it has no claim. The name of Argos brings up a crowd of associations, most of which it is our first duty to drive back. We must remember that Agamemnôn--we take the personal name to express the fact of the Mykênaian empire--was lord of the local Argos only in the sense in which he was lord of any other spot in Peloponnêsos. The two neighbouring cities were the heads, as the Catalogue shows us, of two kingdoms of strangely irregular shape, but whose very shape is the sign that the geography is genuine. No inventor could have hit on anything so unlike the arrangements of historic Greece. Argos destroyed Mykênê and took its glories to itself. If we can conceive Paris and Laon--or, by a still bolder flight, Paris and Aachen--within sight of one another, and if we can further conceive the elder seat of rule not only robbed of its history, but actually rased to the ground, by the younger seat, we shall get a fair illustration of what really happened in the case of Argos and Mykênê.

Yet Argos has a history of its own, and that a long and stirring history, though it is a history which can seldom be called honourable, and one which never, in the days of contemporary record, places the city in the first rank, along with Sparta, Athens, and, for a moment, Thebes. In contemporary history Argos seems chiefly to live on the memory of earlier days when she did hold such a place. And it is one of Mr. Grote’s services to those parts of Grecian history which lie rather out of the range of his main strength that he has brought out clearly that there was a time when Argos did hold the first place in Peloponnêsos. In the Iliad she is one of the three cities which Hêrê best loved, but which she could endure to see overthrown as the price of seeing the overthrow of hated Ilios. Argos there ranks with Sparta and Mykênê. When the day of overthrow came, when Achaian rule gave way to Dorian, when Argos in the wider sense became Peloponnêsos, the local Argos appears as first of three chief Dorian powers, with Sparta and, no longer Mykênê, but Messênê--the land and not the later city--as her secondary yokefellows. _Prima inter pares_ among these, she gradually loses the first place to Sparta, and spends the rest of her days as a Greek city in feeble assertion of the place which she had lost. In every age of Greek history, in the days of Persian, Peloponnesian, Corinthian, Macedonian, and Achaian warfare, the name of Argos meets us at every page, but the annals of the city are nowhere adorned by any great strokes of heroism or wisdom. Her policy is often isolated, often cowardly, almost always dictated by jealousy of Sparta. In her last age Pyrrhos dies beneath her walls, and she joins the League under a reclaimed tyrant. But the distance between Aristomachos and Lydiadas may mark the distance between Argos and the first of Grecian cities, when that name had passed away from Argos, Sparta, Athens, and Thebes to Megalopolis, mother of Achaian statesmen.