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We see all the beautiful work in gold and silver and gems and ivory, and we think, "Those men of old Mycenae were artists." Digging within this circle, Dr. Schliemann found the famous treasure of golden gifts to the dead, which he gave to Greece. In the Museum at Athens you can see these wonderful things. This picture is taken from Dr. Schliemann's own book on his work.
It seems that some critics cannot divest themselves of the idea that "the original poet" of the "kernel" was contemporary with them who slept in the shaft graves of Mycenae, covered with golden ornaments, and that for body armour he only knew their monstrous shields. Mr. Leaf writes: "The armour of Homeric heroes corresponds closely to that of the Mykenaean age as we learn it from the monuments.
They are neither buried with their arms, in stately tholos tombs nor in shaft graves, as at Mycenae: whether they be princes or simple oarsmen, they are cremated. Usually a stele or pillar crowns the edifice. This method is almost uniform, and, as far as cremation and the cairn go, is universal in the Iliad and Odyssey whenever a burial is described.
Polycleitos won his chief successes in portraying human figures. His statues of divinities are not numerous: a Zeus at Argos, an Aphrodite at Amyclae, and, more famous than either, the chryselephantine Hera for a temple between Argos and Mycenae. The goddess was represented as seated on a throne of gold, with bare head and arms.
Schlieman in his superb house which was filled with the trophies of his exploration of the Troad and Mycenae. I found him a most genial man; and he told me that he had never surrendered his American citizenship, acquired in 1850.
Add to this superior energy in Lanceshire, the immeasurably profounder feelings generated by the mysteries which stand behind Christianity, as compared with the shallow mysteries that stood behind paganism, and it would be easy to draw the inference, that, in the capacity for the infinite and impassioned, for horror and for pathos, Mycenae could have had no pretentions to measure herself against Manchester.
We shall see that when a truly Greek art came into being, figures of goddesses and women were decorously clothed. Of sculpture on a larger scale we possess nothing except the gravestones found at Mycenae and the relief which has given a name, albeit an inaccurate one, to the Lion Gate. The gravestones are probably the earlier.
Even the lord of Mycenae, the mighty Achaeans' general, sank on his own threshold edge under his accursed wife's hand, where the adulterer crouched over conquered Asia. Now likewise sights of appalling presage pursue me; my comrades, lost to me, have soared winging into the sky, and flit birds about the rivers ah me, dread punishment of my people! and fill the cliffs with their melancholy cries.
Yet this astonishing people gave it a form as far removed from its barbarous originals, as the Doric capitals of the Parthenon from the capitals of the columns of Mycenae, and when the Greeks of both sides of the Aegean drew together after the defeat of the Persians, the Ionic order crossed the sea, and assumed a place of honour in the temples of Greece, still, however, with rare exceptions, in subordination to the Doric order.
The twelve arduous labors of the celebrated hero Hercules, who was a son of Jupiter by the daughter of an early king of Mycenae, are said to have been imposed upon him by an enemy Eurys'theus to whose will Jupiter, induced by a fraud of Juno and the fury-goddess A'te, and unwittingly bound by an oath, had made the hero subservient for twelve years.
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