Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/110

 The People. 89 the eastern side of the mass of Parnassus, fencing Lake Copai's to the westward. At the lower edge of the height, the Minyi built a city which they called Orchomenos, and an acropolis above it ; it had a long and prosperous existence of its own, until it succumbed to the jealousy of Thebes. A building which the ancients called the ** Treasury of Minyas " rises hard by the village of Skripu, and serves to mark the site of the old city ; its place is among the earliest and most curious monuments of Hellenic architecture. To the patient industry of the Minyi was also ascribed the honour of the execution of embankments of exceeding grandeur, which were to enclose the influx of the Copaeic waters, ever threatening to invade the plain. By carrying them to cavernous passages found eastward, they assured their outflow and the purification of these subterraneous conduits. If nothing remains of the walls and structures of Cadmic Thebes, it is because the earliest constructions were used as materials for building others over them. But the epic poems dealing with the two sieges sustained by seven-gated Thebes, attest its power and the admiration aroused by its strong bul- warks. Here too the inhabitants showed no less skill than the Minyi of Boeotia, in draining the lands of their surplus water, whether from mountain streams, such as the Ismenus and Asopos, or inland lakes. The early inhabitants of Attica have left but scanty traces of their activity ; in Argolis, however, a very fair notion may be gained of the kind of culture to which certain tracts of Greece had attained before the Doric invasion. The links which connected its several dynasties, the Praetidae, Perseidae, and Tantilidae, were all of a more or less intimate nature. At that time Argolis already counted many towns; some, like Nauplia, Asinae, and Hermione, were built on the sea, and had probably grown out of Phoenician factories ; but others, Tiryns, Argos, Mycenae, lay inland, and ruled both the plains and the gorges leading to them. The sites were well chosen, and the eye which had taken in every point testified to no mean art. Both in the skill with which the natural features of the ground were utilized, and the indestructible solidity and brave look im- parted to ramparts standing to this day, in despite of repeated onslaughts made upon them, as well as in the severe nobility of the tomb and wealth of its furniture, the explorer who makes the plan of these imposing ruins, or sounds the depths of a soil