scarcity of water, in its lower parts from a too great abundance of it. At present there are but two towns of any size. One of these is Nauplia, or, as the Italian sailors have christened it, Napoli di Romania, not precisely in the plain, but upon a rocky promontory projecting into the bay on the south-eastern side of its head. The position of the town at the base and on the sides of the Palamede, its fortress, commends itself to the eye of a soldier as peculiarly capable of defense, especially under the old system of warfare. Accordingly, for ages it has been the key of this part of Greece, and Franks, Venetians, and Turks have successively prized its possession. We have ourselves seen the winged lion of St. Mark on several parts of the gates and fortifications. The city of Nauplia, we believe, still continues to be the most populous place in the modern government (dioikesis) of Argolis. Next to it comes the town of Argos, nestling at the foot of the hill known by its old Pelasgic name of Larissa.

In ancient times there were three principal cities of note: Argos, Tiryns, and Mycenae. Of these Mycenae, though according to tradition the latest founded, grew to be by far the most important, and especially about the time of the Trojan War had gained so distinct a pre-eminence that Diomede, king of Argos, figures in the Homeric poems in the light of a chief feudatory under Agamemnon, king of Mycena. The three cities formed the angles of an obtuse-angled triangle, with the obtuse angle at Argos. Of the three, Argos has left us (above-ground) by far the least interesting remains, for the reason chiefly, perhaps, that, having remained an inhabited city for many ages after the destruction of its rival, the massive Cyclopean constructions doubtless existing there at one time were destroyed, and the material either removed as rubbish, or broken up and employed in the erection of more recent works. Hence the only traces of the early period at Argos are found in some patches of the walls of the citadel, mixed up with Roman, Byzantine and later Medieval work; while the theater, etc., in the lower town are of an Hellenic or postHellenic origin, So much for the remains above ground. Yet we cannot doubt that judicious exploration would reveal much of interest buried for many centuries from the eye of man, of which even the inhabitants of the Hellenic Argos, five FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XXXI.-3

or six hundred years before Christ, were entirely ignorant. So late, however, as the time of Pausanias (in the second century of the Christian era) there was pointed out* a subterranean building, apparently the counterpart of the celebrated treasuries of Mycena. Dr. Schliemann does not appear to have made any attempt to explore this doubtless very rich site.

Tiryns, the fabled birthplace of Hercules, is the first of the cities whose exploration Dr. Schliemann describes in the volume before us. The site was found without hesitation on the ruin-covered eminence lying between two and three miles north of Nauplia, in the lower part of the plain. The hill, rising solitary in the midst of a very level district, has been compared to a ship riding on smooth water. What strikes the traveler as most remarkable in the remains is the wonderful solidity of the walls. The stones are themselves ponderous, being so great that, to use Pausanias' expression, a yoke of mules could not move even the smallest. These huge boulders, rough and apparently unwrought, are piled one upon another, without attempt to bind them together by mortar or clamp of metal, or to observe regularity in the laying of courses. It is characteristic of this style of masonry, (generally credited by antiquaries with being the most ancient of the so-called Cyclopean modes of construction,) that frequently small stones have been forced into the interstices between the large masses; whether with a view to ornament or stability it is, perhaps, not always easy to determine. The walls thus heaped up at Tiryns vary, according to Dr. Schliemann, from twenty-five to fifty feet in thickness, and were, doubtless, when standing at their full height, of proportionate loftiness, constituting a peculiarly commanding object in the lower Argolic plain. Next to the general circuit of the wall so remarkably well preserved, the most singular feature of the ruins was some galleries in the walls, of which one in the south-east part of the circuit is particularly interesting. It is not less than ninety feet in length, with a breadth of nearly eight feet, running

* He classes it among the vas užta, of his own day, (ii, 23, 7.) But the "brazen chamber," in which Danaë was confined by her father, Acrisius, when Jupiter visited her in a shower of gold, and which stood upon or by it, kπ' avrÿ, had been destroyed by Perilaus.

parallel with the length of the walls. The pointed top is not arched over, but is formed by causing the upper courses of stones to overlap until they nearly or quite touch. To add to the singularity, this passage has six side openings of similar form, toward the outside of the wall. Had they been in the opposite direction, the use of the gallery might have been supposed to be that of a store-house or armory. As it is, Dr. Schliemann suggests that the six niches may have been intended for arches, and the passage itself as a covered communication to guardhouses, towers, etc. The explanation, however, must still be regarded as obscure and unsatisfactory. Dr. Schliemann's excavations at Tiryns establish a few points of importance. To the walls, which he agrees with other observers in regarding as the most ancient in Greece, he ascribes an antiquity of sixteen hundred to eighteen hundred years before Christ. The only metals met with were bronze and lead. On the other hand, no stone implements were discovered. The archaic pottery, much resembling that subsequently found at Mycenæ, by no means establishes the existence of so low a civilization as the rude walls would lead us to expect; while the fact that pottery of a much later date was discovered outside of the citadel, induces our author to believe that here a new city arose, probably in the beginning of the fourth century before Christ. The majority of the houses of the more ancient city. Dr. Schliemann conjectures to have "consisted of unburned bricks, which still form the building material of most of the villages in the Argolid."-P. 9.

It may be noted that at Tiryns Dr. Schliemann began to discover those terra-cotta figures, to which he gives the name of "cow-headed." Just as he believes that the designation. glaukopis," applied to Athena or Minerva, can only be understood as an allusion to the fact that originally that goddess was worshiped with an owl's head, so he is confident that the designation "boöpis," belonging to Juno, arose from the circumstance that the wife of Jove was represented with the head and horns of a cow. We cannot say that in either case he has brought forward demonstrative evidence, and yet we see much probability in the supposition. As was shown in a previous article, when the views of Dr. Schliemann on this subject, propounded in his "Troy and its Remains," were

under consideration, early pagan mythology seems to point to an antecedent period of idolatry, in which animal forms were worshiped as the embodiment of mental faculties or moral principles. Next we find, by a natural revulsion against the grossness of these representations, the less degraded, but still repulsive, figures, in which, as in the eagle-headed Nisroch, only so much of the animal form is retained as is historically necessary in the worshiper's view. Last of all comes the entire rejection of the animal form, for which a perfect human body is substituted, while some accompanying emblemn serves the purpose of recalling the old significance. As the owl is on the later coins of Athens the constant accompaniment of Minerva's head, so the cow's head adorns the coins of Samos, an island where the cultus of Juno was more than usually important. However, we must refer the curious in such matters to the full discussion of Dr. Schliemann.* The terra cotta cows and cowheaded "idols" found and figured in the present volume are, it is true, not all of them well made out; some of those in colored plates A, B, C and D require the exercise of a pretty strong imagination to recognize them as cows rather than dogs or cats, and, we suspect, would not have been recognized at all save by a person with decided prepossessions in favor of their vaccine character. Yet the probability that they are meant for cows, and that, being such, they are not mere children's toys, but have a religious significance, is increased by the discovery of the really magnificent head of silver with golden horns, which could scarcely have had other than a symbolic import. It must not be forgotten that the whole region of which Mycenae was the center was closely connected with the worship of Juno, as the myths respecting Hercules sufficiently evidence, and, indeed, that the great Heræum, or grove and sanctuary of Juno, was only fifteen stadia, or less than two miles (south-east) of Mycena. There stood the great statue of the goddess represented in a sitting posture, made of gold *"Mycenæ," xix-xxii.

We were at first inclined to regard favorably the view set forth early last year in an Athenian journal by one of the professors in the university, namely, that the head (then somewhat covered with rust, etc.) was intended for a stag's rather than a cow's head, representing the stag of Cerynia, in Arcadia, the capture of which was the object of the third of the labors of Hercules. An inspection of the plates in Dr. Schlieman's work convinces us that this view is incorrect.

and ivory, the work of the celebrated sculptor, Polyclitus.* So deep-seated was the veneration of the inhabitants of the whole region for Juno, as here adored, that, after the destruction of Mycenae, her worship was maintained with no less devotion by the Argives, who even reckoned time by the years of the highpriestess of Juno.

The ruins of Mycenae, to which naturally Dr. Schliemann devoted most of his attention, had come down to us with little change from the time when that minute topographer, Pausanias, visited them, seventeen hundred years ago. The description he gives (ii, 16) might answer substantially for the present general aspect.

After stating that "the inhabitants of Argos destroyed Mycenæ out of envy, because, whereas the Argives remained passive during the invasion of the Mede, the Myceneans sent to Thermopylæ eighty men who took part with the Lacedæmonians in the engagement"-a patriotic act "which involved them in destruction, by exciting the resentment of the Argives -Pausanias adds:

Nevertheless, there still remains, together with other parts of the circuit, the gate, on which lions stand. It is said that these also are the work of the Cyclopes who built the wall at Tiryns for Protus. In the ruins of Mycenae is the fountain called Perseia, and the subterranean buildings of Atreus and his sons, where were the treasuries of their wealth. There is the tomb of Atreus, and the tombs of as many as Ægisthus slew at a feast when they had returned with Agamemnon from Troy. Respecting the genuineness of the monument of Cassandra the Lacedæmonians of Amycle dispute; but there is another of Agamemnon, and that of his charioteer Eurymedon, and the joint tomb of Teledamus and Pelops, twins borne by Cassandra, whom, while still in their infancy, Ægisthus is said to have butchered in addition to their parents. There is the tomb of Electra also, for she was married to Pylades, having been given in mariage to him by Orestes. Hellanicus adds that Medon and Strophius were children of Pylades born of Electra. Clytemnestra, also, and Ægisthus are buried rather far from the wall, and were not deemed worthy of burial within, where Agamemnon himself lay, and those slain with him.f

*Pausanias, ii, 17, 4.

+Pausanias, Descriptio Græciæ, ii, 16, 5-7. It ought to be remarked that the words kai 'Hλékтpaç are wanting in the MSS., and are omitted by Schubart, but are required by the connection.