Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/405

 378 Primitive Greege : Mycenian Art. tunity of consulting Hellanicus, his favourite author in matters relating to the beginnings and traditions of Greek cities. This antiquarian had published two volumes on Argolis, entitled Phoronce and the Priestesses of Argian Hera. From Hellanicus was taken the piece of information respecting Electra's marriage and offspring ; but we are inclined to think that he not only borrowed this, but the whole passage relating to the graves of the Atridse, in order that he might clothe with a little flesh his meagre description of Mycenae. Do what he would he could not prevent its being dry and lifeless, a mere bag of bones when compared with the fullness of his account of Argos and other celebrated localities. Tradition places the birth of Hellanicus in the year of the battle of Salamina (480 r.c.);' his list, therefore, of the Mycenian graves may have been made on the spot. At any rate there can be no question that he wrote before Herodotus, and above all Thucydides, by whom he is somewhat severely handled.^ We may assume that his visit to Argolis and the temple of Hera, hard by Mycenae — during which he transcribed the catalogue of the eponym priestesses of the goddess — took place in the first half of the following century. Even then Mycenae was already a heap of ruins ; but too short a time had elapsed since the sack of the city (468 B.C.) to have wrought any perceptible change in the state of the monuments, or caused the inhabitants to forget names around which clustered so many associations. The royal burial-place was then not only visible, but mayhap with its ring of polished slabs and strange stelae almost intact. If our explanation be found inadmissible, the choice must rest either with Schliemann's or Schuchardt's hypothesis. Ac- cording to Schliemann, at the time of Pausanias' visit to Mycenae stelae and slabs had long lain buried under accumulated silt ; the traveller, however, was shown, if not the actual graves of the Atridae, the site where they were reputed to rest.^ But we submit that the words used by Pausanias do not lend themselves to be so interpreted. ** There is," he says, "the tomb of Atreus. . ." and so on, enumerating them one after another as ^ Life of Euripides, ' Denys of Haltcarnassus, I^ter to Pompey on the Greater Historians^ § 3. Thucydides. •^ Schliemann, Afycence,