Page:Genius, and other essays.djvu/243

TREASURE TOMBS AT MYKENÆ art, or song, leapt with wonder and something like delight, accepting the genuineness and importance of the results obtained and the promise given out. It was felt that here was something substantial. There is no dispute over the site of Mykenæ, as over that of Troy. The Cyclopean ruins, described by Pausanias 17 centuries ago, are still partly visible to the traveller. The oral and written tradition of his time assumed them to be the very walls and monuments of Agamemnon's city, and, if they were not, their vraisemblance was the image of reality itself. According to the chronology which scholars usually adopt, Mykenæ was at its prime B.C. 1184—the date of the fall of Troy. It was destroyed by the Argives B.C. 468, 2,344 years ago, and there is no historic evidence that a new city was built upon its ruins. All this rendered it the more probable that under the dust of centuries Schliemann might have found, in comparative preservation, the vaults and secret treasure-houses of the early chiefs of Argolis—possibly the once revered tomb of the King of Men himself. In a later dispatch we learn that Schliemann thinks the site was again peopled, and that an Argive city existed there for a long time, because the surface of the ground is full of the remains of a Greek age. On the 19th of November he had discovered enormous tombs, at the depth of 25 feet, surrounded by parallel Cyclopean walls; on the 24th he opened two more, which contained the bones of a man and a woman, and from these and adjoining vaults he obtained a vast amount of archælogical treasure—urns, vases, [229]