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They were collected in fortified towns, which were surrounded by walls and adorned with palaces and temples. The massive ruins of Mycenae and the sculptured lions on the gate of this city belong to the Heroic age, and still excite the wonder of the beholder. Commerce, however, was little cultivated, and was not much esteemed.
But it was older even than Varro. A Chicago business man visiting Mycenae picked up and brought home a bit of rubbish from Schliemann's excavations of the ancient masonry: lying on his office desk it attracted the attention of an engineering friend who exclaimed, "That is one of the best samples of the new gravel concrete I have seen. Did it come out of the Illinois tunnel?"
On the other side we have the family name of Ahmes and a series of full-blown flowers issuing one from another and diminishing towards the point. A poignard found at Mycenae by Dr. Schliemann is similarly decorated; the Phoenicians, who were industrious copyists of Egyptian models, probably introduced this pattern into Greece.
Did I spend it an exile on Gaetulian quicksands, did it surprise me on the Argolic sea or in Mycenae town, yet would I fulfil the yearly vows and annual ordinance of festival, and pile the altars with their due gifts.
Next comes the story of Pelops's line, of all that befell in Mycenae, and before Mycenae was; of Inachus and Io and Argus her guardian; of Atreus and Thyestes and Aerope, of the golden ram and the marriage of Pelopeia, the murder of Agamemnon and the punishment of Clytemnestra; and before their days, the expedition of the Seven against Thebes, the reception of the fugitives Tydeus and Polynices by their father-in-law Adrastus; the oracle that foretold their fate, the unburied slain, the death of Antigone, and that of Menoeceus.
Even the divine powers, the gods themselves, are almost visible to the eyes of their worshippers, as they revel in their mountain-propped halls on the far summits of many-peaked Olympus, or lean voluptuously from their celestial balconies and belvederes, soothed by the Apollonian lyre, the Heban nectar, and the fragrant incense, which reeks up in purple clouds from the shrines of windy Ilion, hollow Lacedaemon, Argos, Mycenae, Athens, and the cities of the old Greek isles, with their shrine-capped headlands.
It was very wonderfully made and beautifully ornamented. The big stone over the doorway was nearly thirty feet long, and weighs a hundred and twenty tons. Men came to this beehive tomb in the old days of Mycenae, down a long passage with a high stone wall on either side. The doorway was decorated with many-colored marbles and beautiful bronze plates.
And Turnus, if one retrace the earliest source of his line, is born of Inachus and Acrisius, and of the midmost of Mycenae. When in this vain essay of words she sees Latinus fixed against her, and the serpent's maddening poison is sunk deep in her vitals and runs through and through her, then indeed, stung by infinite horrors, hapless and frenzied, she rages wildly through the endless city.
Any one who will study either the ornaments of Mycenae, or those of any old Scotch or Irish collection, will readily recognise in that art the development of a system of ornament like that of the Maoris.
A horror rests upon the palace at Mycenae; there is a scent of blood, the exhalations of the tomb. The queen, Clytemnestra, enters the inner room, terrible as Lady Macbeth. A cry is heard: "'Agam. Woe's me! I'm stricken a deadly blow within! "'Chor. Hark! who is't cries "a blow?" Who meets his death? "'Agam. Woe's me! Again! again! a second time I'm stricken! "'Chor.
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