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the return of the Grecian fleet. But," added he,

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you have just come from Venice; I think the best thing I could do would be to return thither."

I left this exile in Greece the following morning at day-break, and, with fresh horses and a fresh guide, took the road to Corinth. I really think that M. Avramiotti was not sorry to get rid of me though he received me with great politeness, it was easy to perceive that my visit was not perfectly agreeable.

After riding half an hour we crossed the Inachus, the father of Io, so celebrated for Juno's jealousy. In ancient times, the traveller, on leaving Argos, came to the gate Lucina, and the altar of the Sun, before he reached the river. Half a league on the other side of it stood the temple of the Mysian Ceres, and beyond that the tomb of Thyeste and the heroic monument of Perseus. We stopped nearly on the eminence where these latter monuments existed at the period when Pausanias travelled. We were going to leave the plain of Argos, on which we have an excellent memoir by M. Barbié du Bocage; and to enter among the mountains of Corinth, when we saw Naupli behind us. The place which we had reached is called Carvathi; and here you must turn out of the road to the right to look for the ruins of Mycena. Chandler missed them on his return from Argos, but they are well known from the researches made there by Lord Elgin, in his tour of Greece. M. Fauvel has described them

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in his Memoirs, and M. de Choiseul Gouffier possesses drawings of them: they had been previously spoken of by the Abbé Fourmont, and seen by Dumonceaux. We had to cross a heath: a nar

row path conducted us to these remains, which are nearly in the same state as in the time of Pausanias; for it is more than two thousand two hundred and eighty years since Mycena was destroyed. The Argives razed it to the ground, jealous of the glory which it had acquired by sending forty warriors to die with the Spartans at Thermopylæ.

We first examined the tomb to which has been assigned the appellation of the tomb of Agamemnon. It is a subterraneous edifice of a circular form, which receives light by a dome, and has nothing remarkable except the simplicity of its architecture. You enter by a trench, which leads to the door of the tomb: this door was adorned with pilasters of a very common species of bluish marble, procured from the neighbouring mountains. It was Lord Elgin who caused this monument to be opened, and the earth with which the interior was filled to be cleared away. A small elliptical door conducts from the principal apartment to another of less dimensions. After an attentive inspection, I am of opinion that the latter is merely an excavation made by the workmen beyond the tomb, for I could not perceive that it had any walls. The use of the little door would still remain to be accounted for; it was perhaps simply another entrance to the sepulchre. Has this building been always buried

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under the earth, like the rotunda of the Catacombs at Alexandria? Was it, on the contrary, erected upon the surface of the ground, like the tomb of Cecilia Metella at Rome? Had it any exterior decorations, and of what order were they? These are questions which yet remain to be resolved. Nothing has been found in the tomb, and we are not even certain that it is the sepulchre of Agamemnon, mentioned by Pausanias.*

On leaving this monument I crossed a sterile valley, and on the side of the opposite hill I beheld the ruins of Mycena. I particularly admired one of the gates of the city, composed of gigantic masses of stone, laid upon the solid rock of the hill, with which they seem to form but one whole. Two colossal lions on each side of this gate are its only ornament. They are represented in relievo, standing, and face to face, like the lions which supported the arms of our ancient chevaliers; but they have lost their heads. I never saw, even in Egypt itself, a more imposing specimen of architecture, and the desert in which it stands adds to its solemnity. It belongs to that species of buildings which Strabo and Pausanias ascribed to the Cyclops, and traces of which have been discovered in Italy. M. Petit Radel maintains that this kind of architecture preceded the invention of the orders: it indisputably belongs to the heroic ages. For the

*The Lacedæmonians also boasted that they possessed the ashes of Agamemnon.

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rest, it was a shepherd-boy, stark naked, who shewed me in this solitude the tomb of Agamemnon, and the ruins of Mycenæ.

At the foot of the door that I have spoken of is a fountain which shall be, if you please, the same that Perseus found under a mushroom, and which gave name to Mycenæ; for myces is the Greek term for a mushroom, or the hilt of a sword: this story is told by Pausanias. On returning towards the road to Corinth, I heard the ground under my horse's feet sound hollow: I alighted, and discovered the vault of another tomb.

Pausanias reckons up five tombs at Mycena: the tomb of Atreus, that of Agamemnon, that of Eurymedon, that of Teledamus and Pelops, and that of Electra. He adds, that Clytemnestra and Ægisthus were interred without the walls: might it not then be their tomb that I discovered? I have described the spot to M. Fauvel, who will examine it in his first excursion to Argos. How singular the destiny that brings me from Paris to fix the site of the ruins of Sparta, and to discover the ashes of Clytemnestra!

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Leaving Nemaa on our left, we pursued our We reached Corinth in good time, having crossed a kind of plain, intersected by streams of water, and broken by detached hills, resembling the Acro-Corinthus, with which they blend. The latter we perceived long before we arrived at it, like an irregular mass of reddish granite, with a winding line of wall upon its summit. All the travellers in

Greece have described Corinth. Spon and Wheeler explored the citadel, where they discovered the lost fountain of Pirene; but Chandler did not ascend to Acro-Corinth, and M. Fauvel informed us, that the Turks will not now permit any person. to see it. In fact, I could not obtain leave to walk round about it, notwithstanding the applications of my janissary to that effect. For the rest, Pausanias in his Corinth, and Plutarch in his Life of Aratus, have given a complete description of the monuments and localities of Acro-Corinth.

We alighted at a tolerably neat kan, situated in the centre of the village, and not far from the bazar. The janissary was dispatched for provisions; Joseph cooked the dinner, and while they were thus engaged, I took a stroll in the environs of the place.

Corinth stands at the foot of mountains in a plain which extends to the sea of Crissa, now the Gulf of Lepanto, the only modern name in Greece that vies in beauty with the ancient appellations. In clear weather, you discern, beyond this sea, the top of Helicon and Parnassus; but from the town itself the Saronic sea is not visible. To obtain a view of it, you must ascend to Acro-Corinth, when you not only overlook that sea, but the eye embraces even the citadel of Athens and Cape Colonna. "It is," says Spon, 66 one of the most delicious views in the world." I can easily believe him, for even from the foot of Acro-Corinth. the prospect is enchanting. The houses of the vil

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