On a hilltop among hilltops on the Peloponnesian peninsula in Greece,
an ancient stillness pervades the poppy-strewn countryside and muffles
the bells of nearby sheep with their shepherds. And yet the tour buses
continuously rumble up to the ancient stone remnants of a great city.
Stone lions gaze upward even as round tombs huddle deeper into the
earth.
This is Mycenae, once the major power in the Bronze Age and Helladic
Greece, controlling most of southern Greece and communicating with other
trading centers as far away as Crete and Egypt, but no more than a
tourist attraction since Roman times. This is the home of larger than
life literary and mythological figures, from the hero Perseus to the
bloody dynasty of the house of Atreus. Mycenae was also the kingdom of
Agamemnon, who pursued his brother's wayward bride (and the riches she
hid among) to the far shores of Troy. Ill winds at the outset of the
Greek army's journey persuaded the king to sacrifice his own daughter to
gain godly favor, and precipitated an equally bloody chain of events
upon his return home 10 years later. His vengeful wife Clytemnestra and
her lover killed Agamemnon in the bath, the writer Aeschylus says in his
Oresteia trilogy, which in turn led Agamemnon and Clytemnestra's son
Orestes to seek revenge for his father.
When amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schleimann, fresh from his
excavations at Troy, came to Mycenae in 1874, he began a large,
systematic excavation and maintained his zeal for finding evidence of
his beloved Homeric epics. Excavations uncovered a plethora of shaft
graves, many of which contained a wealth of grave goods, including
weapons, jewels, and beaten gold death masks. Despite the date of these
tombs being quite a bit earlier than the layer of Troy he believed to be
in contact with the Mycenaeans, Schleimann famously said upon finding
the golden mask of a particularly serious bearded man, "I have gazed
upon the face of Agamemnon." The mask has retained this moniker and is
on view at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, along with
other finds from the site.
Perhaps the most famous feature of the site is the set of beehive
tombs (tholoi). The tholoi marked a transition in burial practices from
the earlier shaft graves and, while their grand nature implies the
presence of important individuals, their visibility also made them easy
prey for looters, and little was found within them.
Also of note are the slippery stone steps that lead down into the
hillside to the long-filled in remnants of an ancient cistern. Fed by a
spring outside the city walls, the secret cistern gave the Mycenaeans
access to water even if the city came under siege.
Although Schleimann harbored a romantic hope of finding his beloved
Homeric heroes in the remnants of Mycenae, the wealthy residents of the
shaft graves predate even the cyclopean walls of Mycenae's citadel.
However, if we allow that the characters in the works of Homer and other
poets are not rooted in a concrete timeline, but are echoes of earlier
figures and events that were so important that they were passed on
through the ages in the collective memory of the ancient Greeks, it is
easy to believe that we have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon as well.
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