Studies of Travel - Greece

We stand then before Tiryns. We are almost surprised at finding that we have so soon reached it from modern Nauplia. Itself as utterly forsaken as Mykênê, it does not stand in the same way as Mykênê, utterly cut off from all signs of modern life, from all signs of any date later than that of the primæval days of Greece. There is indeed something startling in finding a primæval city, and that a city so rich in mythical renown, standing at only a small distance from the roadside. More than seventeen hundred years back Pausanias lighted on it in the same way, and found it as desolate as it is now; then, as now, the wall remained, and nothing more. The site is not for a moment to be compared with that of either of the rival cities. The site of Mykênê would be striking indeed as a mere piece of scenery, even though Mykênê were not there. So would the site, if not of Argos itself, at least of its Larissa and its theatre. But the hill of Tiryns is simply one, and that the lowest, of several small isolated hills in the low ground between the gulf and the mountains. Had other hill-forts arisen on those other nearer hills, the group might have been fused together into one great city by the same process which girded the hills of Rome with a single wall. But this was not to be; Argos was to grow, but it was to grow only by the utter wiping out of Tiryns and Mykênê as inhabited cities. There then, wholly forsaken, not containing so much as a shepherd’s hut, stand the mighty walls, the walls which supplied Homer with a speaking epithet, the walls which in later days men deemed to be too great to be the work of mortal hands, and set down as having been wrought by the superhuman skill of the legendary Kyklôpes. The name marks a change in the idea which had come to attach to that name since the days of Homer. The Kyklôpes of later Grecian legend, always artists of one kind or another — sometimes builders of gigantic walls, sometimes forgers of the thunderbolts of Zeus — have no likeness but in name and strength to the solitary and savage Kyklôpes of the Odyssey. But when we see, not only a vast expenditure of mere force, but the display of real skill which is shown in these primitive works of defence — works, as we are tempted to think, of a rude age, when, if force was abundant, no great skill was to be looked for — it is not wonderful if men in later days looked on them as the work of more than mortal hands. For ornament, for polish or finish of any kind, we are not to look in the stage represented by Tiryns. Yet the way in which the rugged material is dealt with, the piling together of these vast unhewn rocks so as to fit them together and to bring to the front so many comparatively smooth surfaces, was, in the ages and under the circumstances of the builders, as true a work of artistic skill as the care which dictated the delicate curves, the minute differences in distance and direction, in the portico of the Parthenôn itself. Who those builders were it is in vain for us to guess. They belong to the primæval, the unrecorded, days of Hellas, to the days before even legendary history begins. Mykênê has a history — a history which different minds may set down as truth, as mere fable, as fable grounded upon truth, but which still is a history, which still is something different from that mere guessing at the names of founders which was prescribed by the supposed necessity of finding an eponymous hero for every land and city. The legends of Tiryns hardly get beyond this stage. Hêraklês indeed figures in its story, but Hêraklês is in his own nature ubiquitous. That Mykênê contains monuments marking a far higher stage of art than anything at Tiryns proves nothing as to the relative date of the two cities. For the works at Tiryns and the oldest work at Mykênê may well be of the same date. All that we can say is that these walls belong to an age before history, before tradition. If Homer had spoken of these walls as the works of Kyklôpes, we might have seen in it a dim tradition that they were the works of some race of men older than his own Achaians. As it is, we can only say that they are the works of the earliest inhabitants of Peloponnêsos of whom any works remain to us. Whatever we may guess from the analogy of other lands, we have no evidence of the existence of any inhabitants of Peloponnêsos earlier than the Achaians of Homer.

We come then somewhat suddenly on the hill-fortress by the roadside. We are guided to the southern face of a hill much longer from north to south than from east to west, and we find ourselves before the main approach of Tiryns, or at least of its akropolis. The great gate has perished; there is nothing to set against the lions of Mykênê. But to the right of where it stood is one of the two main features which have given the walls of Tiryns their special fame. This is what the Greek antiquaries call the σύριγξ, what in English may be called the sally-port, the long passage with its roof made of the great stones of primæval masonry so placed together as to make the form, though not the construction, of the pointed arch. Of the many examples of striving after the archaic construction without ever actually reaching it which are to be found scattered through so many parts of the world, none is more instructive than this. In the history of architectural construction it fully deserves a place alongside of the Mykenaian treasuries. Here is a great military work of the earliest times, the builders of which were striving hard, though without perfect success, to form an arch. This fact at once puts a barrier between the primitive and the historical buildings of Greece. It is indeed strange that a people which had come so near to the greatest of mechanical discoveries should have failed of altogether reaching it, and should have developed its historical architecture from a principle altogether different. In Italy it was otherwise. We there see exactly the same strivings after the arch which we see in Greece; but here the strivings were rewarded with success at an early time. The attempt succeeded; the perfect arch was lighted on, and the historical architecture of Rome was developed from the principle of the arch. Thus, while Fæsulæ, Tusculum, Signia, a crowd of others have their Greek parallels, there is no Greek parallel to the cloaca maxima of Rome.

Then, again, as we have already hinted, these examples show that the pointed arch, simply as a constructive form, is as old as the round. Because the pointed arch happened to become the leading feature of an architectural style later than the round arch, we are apt to fancy that the form is later in its own nature, that it must have been developed out of the round, that he who built the first pointed arch must have seen round arches. Yet the pointed form is just as natural in itself, just as likely to occur to a primitive builder. Indeed we might almost say that it was more likely. The first step towards the arch would doubtless be setting two stones to lean against one another, and this would lead much more easily to the pointed arch than to the round. It so happened that the first Italian builders whose strivings after the arch were quite successful were led to the round and not to the pointed form. But had the Tusculan or the Tirynthian engineer actually reached the construction to which he came so near, an architectural style, with the pointed arch for its great constructive feature, might have arisen in Latium or Argolis a thousand years before it actually did arise under Saracenic hands.

Again, in considering these matters, we must carefully keep ourselves back from any tempting ethnological theories, above all from such ethnological theories as lurk in the dangerous word Pelasgian. No one doubts the near connexion of the old Italian and the old Greek races, a connexion nearer than that of common Aryan origin. But the same kind of analogies which may be seen in their earlier buildings may be seen also in the early buildings of races which are much further apart. If Tiryns finds its best parallel at Tusculum, Mykênê finds its best parallel at New Granga. Nearly just the same strivings after the arch may be found in more than one land altogether beyond the pale of European or Aryan fellowship, as for instance in the ruined cities of Central America. The analogies in the primæval architecture of remote nations exactly answer to the analogies in their weapons, dress, and customs. They belong to the domain of Mr. Tylor.

But, while the remains at Tiryns have this special interest for the student of architectural history, they show also how far the primitive engineers had advanced in the scientific study of the art of defence. Even the non-military observer can well take this in on the eastern side. There rises what, seen from within, seen in a direct view from without, the beholder is apt to call a tower. But it is merely that the wall is either better preserved at this point or else was higher from the beginning. Here was one chief approach to the fortress, and it was guarded by what, in the technical language of Colonel Leake, is called a ramp. The only approach to the gate was by going up an ascent formed by an advanced wall, made so that an assailant would expose his unshielded side to the defenders of the fort. This skilful piece of fortification, with the sally-port which is so nearly perfect, and another, traces of which remain on the other side, shows that the primitive engineers, call them Kyklôpes or anything else, had advanced a long way beyond mere mechanical piling together of stones.

The walls doubtless fence in only the akropolis, the primitive city, answering to the oldest Athens, to the oldest Rome on the Palatine. How far the town may have spread itself over the surrounding plain we have no means of judging. We cannot believe that Tiryns ever became a great city like Argos and Corinth. Its name vanishes from history too soon for that. But at Tiryns, as we shall also see at Mykênê, there was an upper and a lower city within the fortified enclosure itself. Greek antiquaries call the higher level a καταφύγιον, a place of refuge, but it is the strongly fortified part to which the approaches lead. Was this the royal citadel, and was the lower part the dwelling-place of the other original settlers before the town had spread at all beyond the present akropolis? The military objects of the two levels are gone into by Colonel Leake, but we must remember that these ancient strongholds were not, like modern forts, built simply to be attacked and defended. They were dwelling-places of man, fortified because they were dwelling-places of man. One would think that the whole of the first body of settlers would find shelter within the walls. There was the king on the higher level; the rest of the tribe was below. A δῆμος might or might not arise beyond their defences. At Rome and Athens such a δῆμος did arise, and made the history of Rome and Athens different from that of Tiryns.

It is a wonderful thing to stand beneath these mighty walls, raised out of the huge blocks which seem too great for mortal men to have piled. Nowhere else does the line of thought which they suggest come out so strongly. On the Athenian akropolis there are blocks ruder than those of Tiryns itself, but they are hidden by the great works of more polished days. At Mykênê the walls, mighty as they are, have almost yielded to tombs, gates, and treasuries. At Tiryns it is the walls and the walls alone which seem to speak of its days of power. Tiryns struck men as being τειχιόεσσα in the days of the Homeric Catalogue. It is as τειχιόεσσα and as τειχιόεσσα only, that it strikes us still.

Argos

A short drive — we are still within the region where driving is possible — takes us from Tiryns to Argos, from the destroyed city to the destroyers. The contrast is striking. Argos, through all changes, has always remained a dwelling-place of man, and not only a dwelling-place of man, but a town of some importance, according to the standard of its own age and place. Modern Athens is an artificial city. It is a town which might have stood anywhere else, built at the foot of the ancient akropolis and around the churches of Eirênê. Modern Argos is not an artificial town; it has come to be what it is by the gradual operation of ordinary historical causes. It shows us what an ancient Greek city, neither ruined nor forsaken nor artificially fostered, but left to the working of natural circumstances, finds itself after long ages of Roman, Venetian, Turkish, and restored Greek rule. The chief remark which the place suggests to a Western eye is how little there is to remark. In the modern town there is no remarkable building of any kind, old or new. The modern cathedral is large and is meant to be of some pretensions, but one would gladly exchange it for the tiny metropolitan church of Athens, or for any other church of genuine Byzantine style and date. The town itself covers a large space, and contains a considerable population. Setting apart the capital and the great seaports, Argos ranks high among the existing cities of Greece. Yet to a Western eye it has an unpleasing, almost a barbarous, look. It is dirty, irregular, with neither Western neatness nor Eastern picturesque effect. An old Venetian possession, one might have expected that St. Mark might have planted somewhat of his impress here, as he has done on so many of his subject cities. If Argos were even as Traü, no one would complain, but, since the Venetian, Argos has seen the Turk, and that is enough to account for the difference. Argos is not lacking in recent history. It was the scene of important events during the War of Independence, when it acted several times as the common meeting-place of Greece. It is still, we believe, a thriving place after its own standard, but that is not the standard of Western Europe, nor yet the standard of Syra and Patras. Yet it sets us thinking whether a town in Western Europe, five or six hundred years back, may not have looked much the same. In one point indeed there was a difference. No Western mediæval town of the same population as modern Argos would have spread over the same space. That is to say, the modern town lies scattered, doubtless because it represents an ancient city of far greater extent.

But the objects which give Argos its main interest in the eyes of the historical inquirer, the objects which bear witness to the existence of Argos in the days of its greatness, lie outside the modern town. One, the chief of all, proclaims its presence from afar. The akropolis of Argos, the famous Larissa, the soaring height crowned by the stronghold which from a primæval fortress grew into a modern castle, is an akropolis in quite another sense than the lowlier hill of Tiryns, or even than that of Athens. The name leads to a long train of thought. It is the Larissa of Argos. How many spots bear the name of Larissa? How many lands and cities bear the name of Argos? He who has a taste for Pelasgian speculation has a wide field opened to him. He who keeps himself within the range of recorded history and of such tradition as may be said to prove itself, may perhaps be led to think how largely the fame of Argos is a borrowed fame. Argos and the Argeians meet us in every page of the Homeric tale; they seem to be the most familiar names for Greece and the Greeks before Greece and the Greeks had as yet an acknowledged common name. A little thought will, however, show that in most of the places where they are named there is no immediate reference to the local city of Argos. The Bretwalda of Hellas ruled over many islands and over all Argos. Whatever this means, it can hardly mean anything short of all Peloponnêsos; at least it cannot mean the local Argos, which did not come within his immediate kingdom. To suppose any reference to the local Argos would be like quartering a Karling at Paris or a West-Saxon at York. But the local Argos dealt with Mykênê like the savage who swallows the eye of his slain enemy in order to take to himself his strength, courage, and glory. Only a few years after Mykênê fell we find the Attic dramatists transferring the whole tale of Pelops’ line from its own place to the destroying city. The confusion has become hopeless. Argos becomes surrounded by a mythical glory to which it has no claim. The name of Argos brings up a crowd of associations, most of which it is our first duty to drive back. We must remember that Agamemnôn — we take the personal name to express the fact of the Mykênaian empire — was lord of the local Argos only in the sense in which he was lord of any other spot in Peloponnêsos. The two neighbouring cities were the heads, as the Catalogue shows us, of two kingdoms of strangely irregular shape, but whose very shape is the sign that the geography is genuine. No inventor could have hit on anything so unlike the arrangements of historic Greece. Argos destroyed Mykênê and took its glories to itself. If we can conceive Paris and Laon — or, by a still bolder flight, Paris and Aachen — within sight of one another, and if we can further conceive the elder seat of rule not only robbed of its history, but actually rased to the ground, by the younger seat, we shall get a fair illustration of what really happened in the case of Argos and Mykênê.

Yet Argos has a history of its own, and that a long and stirring history, though it is a history which can seldom be called honourable, and one which never, in the days of contemporary record, places the city in the first rank, along with Sparta, Athens, and, for a moment, Thebes. In contemporary history Argos seems chiefly to live on the memory of earlier days when she did hold such a place. And it is one of Mr. Grote’s services to those parts of Grecian history which lie rather out of the range of his main strength that he has brought out clearly that there was a time when Argos did hold the first place in Peloponnêsos. In the Iliad she is one of the three cities which Hêrê best loved, but which she could endure to see overthrown as the price of seeing the overthrow of hated Ilios. Argos there ranks with Sparta and Mykênê. When the day of overthrow came, when Achaian rule gave way to Dorian, when Argos in the wider sense became Peloponnêsos, the local Argos appears as first of three chief Dorian powers, with Sparta and, no longer Mykênê, but Messênê — the land and not the later city — as her secondary yokefellows. Prima inter pares among these, she gradually loses the first place to Sparta, and spends the rest of her days as a Greek city in feeble assertion of the place which she had lost. In every age of Greek history, in the days of Persian, Peloponnesian, Corinthian, Macedonian, and Achaian warfare, the name of Argos meets us at every page, but the annals of the city are nowhere adorned by any great strokes of heroism or wisdom. Her policy is often isolated, often cowardly, almost always dictated by jealousy of Sparta. In her last age Pyrrhos dies beneath her walls, and she joins the League under a reclaimed tyrant. But the distance between Aristomachos and Lydiadas may mark the distance between Argos and the first of Grecian cities, when that name had passed away from Argos, Sparta, Athens, and Thebes to Megalopolis, mother of Achaian statesmen.

Still with all this, Argos is a great name. A continuous being, a continuous history, from the Homeric Catalogue to the War of Independence, is something which Megalopolis and even Sparta cannot boast of. Sparta —Lakedaimonia in later phrase — gave way to Misthra; modern Sparta is a new and artificial creation. But Argos, the Argos that we now see, with its queer-looking streets and shops and open spaces, is, by unbroken succession, the city of Diomêdês, the city of Kleobis and Bitôn. We look in vain for the temple which witnessed the filial piety of Kleobis and Bitôn, but the Larissa of Diomêdês, the Aspis— the shield of Argos — which was stormed by the last Kleomenês, is there still. The huge hill with the ruined buildings at the base, with the castle containing remains of almost every age on its crest, with the signs of human occupation covering almost every step of its steep sides, all are now utterly desolate, but they bear witness to the lesson that the modern town over which they soar is the unbroken successor of the dwelling-place of man in præ-historic times. The Larissa of Argos is an akropolis indeed, utterly dwarfing, as far as the works of nature go, the far lowlier height of primæval Athens. No Parthenôn, no Propylaia, crowned the hill of Argos. The nature of the site could hardly have allowed them to stand there, and, if it could, they would have seemed out of place on that mountain-top. The fortress however is there, shattered and forsaken as it is; the walls of the mediæval castle are propped on the walls of unrecorded days with their vast Kyklopean masonry. Other parts rest on masonry of later date, but still masonry of early Hellenic times, stones which were there before Argos thought it her interest in the greatest national peril of Greece, to find out that her hero Perseus was the forefather of the invading barbarian. We look down from the height on the modern city, on the plain, on the gulf which parts the Argolic Aktê from the main mass of Peloponnêsos; we mark the coast stretching away towards the hostile Lakonian land; we gaze on the mountain heights of the central land of the peninsula, fencing in the home of that old Arkadian race which boasted that alone among Greeks it had never changed its dwelling. There rises Artemision, there rises the hoary peak of Kronion, its snow-capped crest seeming no unfit dwelling-place of the aged god who reigned before Zeus and his children. At the foot of the hill lie a number of buildings, all forsaken and shattered, witnessing to the many changes which Argos has seen, to the many masters who have ruled over her. There is one piece of mighty ancient walling strangely brought together with sculpture of Roman times. There is the theatre with its ranges of seats cut deep in the hill-side, a theatre looking out on the wide expanse of city, plain, sea, and mountains. Almost at its foot stands a ruin of the days when Argos formed part of the subject lands of the city by the Tiber, a ruin which bespeaks its kindred with the baths of Antoninus, and shows us in all its boldness the great constructive invention after which men strove at Tiryns, but which Greece, in all other things the mother of arts, had to learn from her Roman masters. We look at the broken brick vault of the Roman building, but if our eye turns a little to the right, we soon see how it was the lands east of the Hadriatic which first learned how to give the great constructive invention of Italy its noblest form and to apply it to its highest use. At no great distance from the Roman ruin stands a church of Byzantine days, which fitly finishes the series. The forms to which men were feeling their way in the sally-port of Tiryns and in the treasure-house of Mykênê reached their perfection when the architects of the East taught the cupola, soaring or spreading as it might be, to rise on its supporting columns over the centre of the churches of Eastern Christendom. Primæval Greece strove after the arch; historic Greece, if she knew its constructive use, confined it to a few purposes of constructive usefulness. Primæval Italy strove, and strove with more success, in the same path, and made the form which Greece used so timidly the life of her national architecture. On Roman ground the arch grew into the cupola, but it was on the ground that was Greek and Roman alike, on the ground of the Eastern peninsula, that the cupola took its noblest form. On the Larissa of Argos a few traces have been found of galleries like those of Tiryns. Pausanias bears witness that Argos once had her subterranean chamber like those of Mykênê, and doubtless following the same construction. At Tiryns and Mykênê the series goes no further; the destroying hand of Argos decreed that it should go no further. The long life of Argos allowed every form to stand there side by side, from the gallery and the treasury to the Roman bath and the Byzantine church. Yet it is not in Argos itself that the series can be really studied. In the life of cities nothing preserves like early overthrow, nothing destroys like continuous life. Of the members of the Argive series the latest alone is perfect. The vault of the Roman bath is broken down; the gallery can scarcely be traced; for the existence of the treasury we have only the witness of a traveller seventeen hundred years back. It is among the victims of Argos that early overthrow has preserved to us the works of the earliest times. In forsaken Tiryns and Mykênê we learn more of the earliest days of Greece than we can learn in the city which has survived them by three-and-twenty centuries. We have mused over the walls, the guarded gate, the sally-port of Tiryns; we must go on to muse on the walls, the mightier gate, the treasuries, the rifled tombs, of Mykênê, Imperial city of Hellas in her earliest day.