Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/198

 166 HISTORY OF GREECE. to Mykenae than to Argos, we may with probability conclude that it originally belonged to the former, and that the increasing power of the latter enabled them to usurp to themselves a religious privilege which was always an object of envy and contention among the Grecian communities. The JEolic colonists doubtless took out with them in their emigration the divine and heroic legends, as well as the worship and ceremonial rites, of the He- raeon ; and in those legends the most exalted rank would be as signed to the close-adjoining and administering city. Mykenae maintained its independence even down to the Persian invasion. Eighty of its heavy-armed citizens, in the ranks of Leonidas at Thermopylae, and a number not inferior at Plataea, upheld the splendid heroic celebrity of their city during a season of peril, when the more powerful Argos disgraced itself by a treacherous neutrality. Very shortly afterwards Mykenae was enslaved and its inhabitants expelled by the Argeians. Though this city so long maintained a separate existence, its importance had latterly sunk to nothing, while that of the Dorian Argos was augmented very much, and that of the Dorian Sparta still more. The name of Mykenas is imperishably enthroned in the Iliad and Odyssey ; but all the subsequent fluctuations of the legend tend to exalt the glory of other cities at its expense. The recog nition of the Olympic games as the grand religious festival ol Peloponnesus gave vogue to that genealogy which connected Pe- lops with Pisa or Elis and withdrew him from Mykenae. More- ever, in the poems of the great Athenian tragedians, Mykenae is constantly confounded and treated as one with Argos. If any one of the citizens of the former, expelled at the time of its final subjugation by the Argeians, had witnessed at Athens a drama of -ZEschylus, Sophokles, or Euripides, or the recital of an ode of Pindar, he would have heard with grief and indignation the city of his oppressors made a partner in the heroic glories of his own. 1 But the great political ascendency acquired by Sparta contributed still farther to degrade Mykenae, by disposing subse- quent poets to treat the chief of the Grecian armament against Troy as having been a Spartan. It has been already mentioned that Stesichorus, Simonides and Pindar adopted this version of 1 See the preface of Dissen to the tenth Nem. of Pindar