Mycenae

“ This was the characteristic ware of the Mycenaean civilization. The probability is that it was manufactured at several different places, of which Mycenae may have been one and perhaps the most important. It was an article of export and thus found its way even into Egypt, where specimens have been discovered in tombs of the Eighteenth Dynasty and later. The variations in form and ornamentation are considerable, as is natural with an article whose production was carried on at different centers and during a period of centuries. ”

“ One such old palace has been uncovered at Tiryns near Mycenae. To-day a visitor can walk there through the house of an ancient king. The watchman is not there, so the stranger goes through the strong old gateway. He stands in the courtyard, where the young men used to play games. He steps on the very floor they trod. He sees the stone bases of columns about him. The wooden pillars have rotted away, but he imagines them holding a porch roof, and he sees the men resting in the shade. He walks into the great room where the warriors feasted. ”

“ These may have been worn by King Agamemnon, or by the Trojan warriors. They are now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
GEM FROM MYCENAE.
Early men made many pictures much like this—a pillar guarded by an animal on each side.
BRONZE DAGGERS.
It would take a very skilfull man to-day, a man who was both goldsmith and artist, to make such daggers as men found at Mycenae. First the blade was made. Then the artist took a separate sheet of bronze for his design. This sheet he enamelled, and on it he inlaid his design. On one of these daggers we see five hunters fighting three lions. ”

“ The inner court of the palace in Mycenae is the scene of the drama. Since Clytemnestra, in league with her paramour, Aegisthus, has compassed the murder of her husband, Agamemnon, her daughter Elektra lives only with the thought of vengeance. She exists like a wild beast, banished from the society of human beings, a butt of ridicule to the servants, a horror to all, only desirous of the blood of her mother and Aegisthus in atonement for that of her father. The murderers too have no rest. Fear haunts them. ”

“ In Orestes the problem of discrete localities is quite differently handled. The play falls into five quasi-acts of unequal length, which are situated successively at Mycenae, Crete, Mycenae, Athens, Mycenae. For all, as in Gorboduc, the same sketchy palace background might serve, with one interesting and prophetic exception. The middle episodes (538–925) , at Mycenae, afford the first example of those siege scenes which the Shakespearian stage came to love. A messenger brings warning to Aegisthus and Clytemnestra of the purpose of Orestes ‘to inuade this Mycoene Citie stronge’. ”

“ If we assume that the civilization was foreign, then must the Greek hero-tales become unintelligible. When Homer speaks of Tiryns and Mycenae, "rich in gold" (γ, 305) , of Amyclae (Β, 584) , of Boeotian Orchomenos (Β, 511; λ, 284) ; when he mentions the tale of the Argonauts (μ, 79) ; when he brings Crete into touch with the royal house of Mycenae (Γ, 230; τ, 172) ; and when he has the blind bard Demodocus sing of the great events which occurred before the walls of Troy (θ, 44) , the poet undoubtedly refers to Mycenaean times. ”

“ There is much in Homer that seems to find confirmation or explanation in Schliemann’s finds. Mycenae is Agamemnon’s city; the plan of the Homeric house agrees fairly well with the palaces at Tiryns and Mycenae; the forms and the technique of Mycenaean art serve to illustrate passages in the poems; such are only a few of the arguments that have been urged. It is the great merit of Professor Ridgeway’s work (The Early Age of Greece) that it has demonstrated, once and for all, that Mycenaean is not Homeric pure and simple. He insists upon differences as great as the resemblances. ”

“ They are only “Mycenaean” in the sense that they were found at Mycenae. Of the art of the gold vase maker in the Mycenaean period properly speaking (Late Minoan iii.) we obtain an idea from the pictures of golden Bügelkannen with incised designs of zigzags, &c., represented on the walls of the tomb of Rameses III. at Egyptian Thebes. The objects from the Mycenaean shaft-graves are much older than this, as are also those from the next treasure we shall mention, that from Aegina, now in the British Museum. ”

“ The bodies lay round the great mixing bowl of wine, and about the tables, and the floor ran with blood. Before Agamemnon died he saw Clytaemnestra herself stab Cassandra, the daughter of Priam, whom he had brought from Troy.
In the town of Agamemnon, Mycenae, deep down in the earth, have been found five graves, with bones of men and women, and these bones were all covered with beautiful ornaments of gold, hundreds of them, and swords and daggers inlaid with gold, and golden cups, and a sceptre of gold and crystal, and two gold breastplates. ”

“ These bones and ashes, too, Schliemann found. For a long, long time the people had not forgotten their dead chiefs. Every year they had sacrificed oxen to them. They had set up gravestones for them, and after a while they had heaped great mounds over their graves.
That was a wonderful old world at Mycenae. The king's palace sat on a hill. It was not one building, but many—a great hall where the warriors ate, the women's large room where they worked, two houses of many bedrooms, treasure vaults, a bath, storehouses. ”

“ Afterwards Mycenæ received a great increase of inhabitants in consequence of the migration thither of the Pelopidæ. For when everything had fallen under the power of the sons of Atreus, Agamemnon, the elder, assumed the sovereign authority, and by good fortune and valour annexed to his possessions a large tract of country. He also added the Laconian to the Mycenæan district.195 Menelaus had Laconia, and Agamemnon Mycenæ, and the country as far as Corinth, and Sicyon, and the territory which was then said to be the country of Iones and Ægialians, and afterwards of Achæi. ”

“ The prestige of Mycenae may have followed the decline of Cretan supremacy. At any rate, 2000 B.C. is not too early a date at which to place the most flourishing period of this civilization in Crete, for Mycenaean remains have been found in Thera buried under volcanic débris of an eruption of about 1800 B.C. [39] Legends of a vast Cretan empire are probably reminiscences of that mighty maritime nation, once supreme on Mediterranean waters.
↑ Schliemann, Mycenae and Tiryns; Schuchhardt-Sellers, Schliemann's Excavations; Tsountas and Manatt, The Mycenaean Age; Frazer, Pausanias, III, 97–230 ”

“ The inhabitants of ancient Mycenæ, one of the chief centres of prehistoric culture in Greece before the Homeric age. Recent excavations, at Mycenæ itself, at Cnossos in Crete, and other contemporary sites of government, have thrown light on the remarkable civilisation which then existed. The Mycenæans, Cretans, and their kindred peoples were probably a mixed Caucasic race, with affinities to the later Aryan Achæans and to the aboriginal Hamitic Pelasgians ”

“ See, also, DORIANS AND IONIANS; ACHAIA; ÆOLIANS; THESSALY; and BŒOTIA. GREECE: The Migrations to Asia Minor and the Islands of the Ægean. Æolian, Ionian and Dorian colonies. See ASIA MINOR: THE GREEK COLONIES. GREECE: Mycenæ and its kings. The unburied memorials. "Thucydides says that before the Dorian conquest, the date of which is traditionally fixed at B. C. 1104, Mycenae was the only city whence ruled a wealthy race of kings. Archaeology produces the bodies of kings ruling at Mycenae about the twelfth century and spreads their wealth under our eyes. ”

“ In the meantime Aletes, the son of Aegisthus, seized the throne of Mycenae. Her arrival at Delphi coincided with that of Orestes and Iphigeneia. The same messenger, who had already communicated the false report of the death of Orestes, informed her that he had been slain by Iphigeneia. Electra in her rage seized a burning brand from the altar, intending to blind her sister; but at the critical moment Orestes appeared, recognition took place, and the brother and sister returned to Mycenae. Aletes was slain by Orestes, and Electra became the wife of Pylades. ”

“ Occasionally one sees traces of the ancient Mycenaean influence, or perhaps rather of the young Ionian art which had now arisen out of the ashes of that of Mycenae. These Phoenician imitative designs are still good imitations. But a century or so later we meet with them again on the silver bowls and dishes from Cyprus, in which the imitations have become bad. The same mixture of subjects was still in vogue, but confusion has been superadded to mixture, and we find kings in Assyrian robes and Egyptian wigs slaying Syrian dragons with Egyptian wings, and so on. ”

“ But the great Mycenean deposit, if Schliemann be right in his view, was made before the time of any sack or depopulation of the city. Upon such an issue of life and death, as that offered to the Trojans, the best objects would naturally be parted with, as the most effective for their purpose (see Il. XXIV. 234-7) ; and accordingly, if we are comparing Troy and Mycenæ at all, we are comparing Troy in its exhaustion with Mycenæ in its prosperity.
We have among the remains in the precious metals from Hissarlik, I believe, no representation of an animal, either chased or in the round. ”

“ We shall see that when a truly Greek art came into being, figures of goddesses and women were decorously clothed.
Excavations on Mycenaean sites have yielded quantities of small figures, chiefly of painted terra-cotta (cf. Fig. 43) , but also of bronze or lead. 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. ”

“ Schliemann unearthed the treasures from the royal graves at Mycenae and gave the world the first glimpse of that ancient civilization which has since been shown to have extended over the mainland of Hellas and the isles of the south Aegean—a civilization whose type is the same, however widely distant the localities where remains are found, whether in Crete or Thessaly, in Rhodes or Argolis, in Cyprus or Boeotia. ”

“ Mycenae was the city of the Pelopidae, whom Greek tradition unhesitatingly declares to be Phrygian immigrants. A study of the topography of the Argive plain suggests the conclusion that Mycenae, Midea and Tiryns form a group of cities founded by an immigrant people in opposition to Argos, the natural capital of the plain and the stronghold of the native race. Midea appears to be the city of Midas, and the name is one more link in the chain that binds Mycenae to Phrygia. ”

“ These are beyond contradiction the most ancient types of idols which have been found in Greece. All of them are discovered down as far as the surface of beds of archaic débris; it is therefore very certain that they were still in use at the time of the taking of Mycenæ. But it seems to us quite impossible that here the tutelary divinity of Mycenæ should have been represented as late as the fifth century B.C., under the form of a cow or of an idol showing the characteristic features of a cow.
It is evident that in the Homeric poems Hera is a woman, without any of the attributes of a cow ”

“ In fact, the worship of the moon-goddess under the form of a cow could not have been brought from Egypt to Mycenæ, but necessarily must have been introduced from Mycenæ into Egypt, since Io was distinctly a Pelasgian goddess; she had a celebrated temple at Byzantium, and the legend even attributes the foundation of that city to her daughter Keroessa, also called "she who wears horns." The worship of Io seems to have been brought from Asia by the Pelasgians; at all events they introduced it at a very remote epoch into Argolis. ”

“ The golden treasure of the Mycenae graves, these critics urge, is not more splendid than would have been found at Cnossus had royal burials been spared by plunderers, or been happened upon intact by modern explorers. It is not impossible to combine these views, and place the seat of power still in Crete, but ascribe the Renascence there to an influx of new blood from the north, large enough to instil fresh vigour, but too small to change the civilization in its essential character. ”

“ No ancient writer mentions the fact that Mycenæ was reinhabited after its capture by the Argives and the expulsion of its inhabitants. On the contrary, Diodorus Siculus, who lived at the time of Julius Cæsar and Augustus, after having described the tragic fate of Mycenæ, adds: "This city, which was in ancient times blessed with wealth and power, which produced such great men and accomplished [63] such important actions, was thus destroyed and remained uninhabited till the present time." ”

“ They close with a pathetic lament over the dead children.
Exode.—A messenger hurries out of the palace, and describes the dreadful scenes that have just been enacted there. Hercules was offering sacrifices of purification before Jove's altar, with his three sons and Megara beside him. All was propitious, when suddenly a madness seized on Hercules. He ceased his present sacrifice, declaring that he must first go to Mycenae and kill Eurystheus and his sons, and so make an end of all his enemies at once. In fancy he mounted a chariot and speedily arrived at Mycenae. ”

“ Turning to the mainland of Greece we see that the astonishing remains of a highly developed prehistoric civilization, which Schliemann first brought to light in 1876 at Mycenae, and which from those discoveries received the general name of “Mycenaean,” in the main represent a transmarine Minoan influence on mainland of Greece. offshoot from the Minoan stock. The earlier remains both at Mycenae and Tiryns, still imperfectly investigated, show that this Cretan influence goes back to the Middle Minoan age, with its characteristic style of polychrome vase decoration. ”