Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/397

 370 Primitive Greece : Mycenian Art. with which to deal great blows and bring down the foundations so admirably adjusted by the Cyclopes^ with the pick and red ruler." Such touches as these may be reminiscent of the astonish- ment which the poet felt when faced by these stately ruins, or they may be due to his dilettantism, which prompted him to complete his picture with local colouring, in which his eminent competitors were woefully deficient. One is tempted to believe that Thucydides himself never saw Mycenae ; had he walked over these vast ruins and glanced up at the great domed-building with its spacious nave, had his eye rested on the citadel walls and their remarkable portal, he would not call Mycenae ** a small town like all those of that period.'*^ If in a far more ruinous state than they were in the day of Thucydides, the Mycenian monuments still conjure up the picture of a once populous centre, of wealthy and powerful rulers who were served in their great architectonic enterprises by a number of well-trained artisans, there is all the more reason why they should have suggested the like, nay even more forcible, notion on a sagacious observer such as the great Athenian undoubtedly was, ere more than twenty centuries of neglect and ill-usage had weighed on them. Pausanias would really seem to have been the first in antiquity who thought it worth while to break his journey by a ddtour of a couple of hours on his way to Corinth, that he might have a look at what had been the capital of Agamemnon. One is amazed to find in so diligent and well-informed a traveller as Strabo the following erroneous. entry : ** Mycense has been so entirely destroyed by the Argives that no trace of it remains at the present day."^ Having now gone over the ground formerly occupied by the Mycenians, and surveyed what still remains above ground of their buildings, as well as those that have been discovered during ^ Euripides, Hercules Furens — npog roc Mvk'f/rag AiC a{v<r6oi yj^tuiv fioxXovQ ^cK'cXXac 0 wf ra KvtcXbiirufy ftdOfm ^tvuci Kavovi Kol TVKOic iipfXotTfiiva orpiTTT^ vihiipif avyrpiaivwata rrdXiv. ^ Thucydides : Kai Sn fiiy MvKiivai fiiKpor iV, f; cV n rtiy tote noKurfia vvr fit) h^wj^piuv hoKtl tlyai ... ^ Strabo : XpovoiQ 5* vtrrtpoy ^'arcaca^iy^ar hir *A/iytiaii', wwrt yvv firjii* 'ixyor tvpiaKtoOai rfJQ MvKr/vaiwv voXiw^.