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Nauplia The approach to the Greek mainland shows a succession of powdery white headlands, barren and shapely. Fertile plains and wooded hills are hidden away inland. Greece fronts the outer world with a classical severity. Her beauty is not the obvious, delicious loveliness of moister climates: it is joy of form rather than wealth of decoration. After the subtle modelling of a grey Greek mountain the Alps seem like nouveaux riches with their unrestrained purples, their noisy gorges, and dazzling heights. Nor would I exchange the beauty of Greece for the luxuriant draperies of Italy. Forgive me, Italy! The comparison was thrust upon me here by the very name of the bay to which our Greek steamer is heading, Nauplia, "Napoli di Romagna," as the Venetians called it. This little Greek Naples lies at the head of a long gulf almost land-locked by the eastern headlands of Argolis. The rocky island of Spetzia lies like another Capri at the entrance to the bay. Had Meredith seen Nauplia in a vision when he wrote those lines? They are all here: the bay, the citadel, the town, the rock. Behind the town rises the sharp beak of the citadel hill (Palamidi). Here on the Feast of St. Andrew we saw citizens climb at daybreak to celebrate their Panegyris. The fortress on the top is a prison where criminals are kept in barred cells round an open courtyard. Six or seven are shut up together and press for front places at the bars, that they may hold out for sale the bone knives and beads that they have carved. It is a black contrast to the crowd of virtuous citizens who dance on the hilltop a hundred paces away. The castle-crowned rock in the harbour (Itsh-kaleh) is also a place of grim association, the home of the public executioner. The town itself is a pleasant place where one can stay in comfort for some days, visiting Epidaurus (one of the most famous rest-cures of the ancient world) and the homes of Homer's heroes: Tiryns, Argos, Mycenae. Tiryns lies on a long, low ridge, rising abruptly from the flats by the shore. It is not a natural fortress, but its ancient masters once turned it into an impregnable stronghold. The outer walls are made of giant blocks of masonry, huge enough to give rise to the legend that they had been piled together by the hands of Cyclops. The main approach winds half round the fortress, so that though the chief gateway lies to the east a stranger entering the palace would find that the road had led him round the south angle of the building, so that he finally entered from the west, having passed three successive gates and three courtyards. The last court brought him opposite the hall of the ancient palace, the megaron, where the square of the central hearth is still marked by the bases of four columns that supported the roof. By this hearth the master of the house would have his seat, and often the lady also. When Odysseus reached the country of the Phæacians, the Princess Nausicaa directed him to her father's palace, and the brief words in which she described to him the home-scene make a picture that fits well the outline of Tiryns: "But when thou art within the shadow of the halls and the court, pass quickly through the great chamber, till thou comest to my mother, who sits at the hearth in the light of the fire weaving yarn of sea-purple stain, a wonder to behold. Her chair is leaned against a pillar and her maidens sit behind her. And there my father's throne leans close to hers, wherein he sits and drinks his wine like an immortal." But though the lady of the house might share her husband's hearthside seat, the women's apartments lay in another part of the palace, removed from the coming and going of the chief rooms. Here at Tiryns they are found behind and a little to the left of the men's megaron. The women's megaron is a smaller building, marked by the same square hearth in the centre. There seems no direct communication between the two, although but a single wall divides them. The women's rooms are reached by a side entrance from the open forecourt, and in order to go from the men's to the women's megaron it is necessary to pass right round at the back of the men's megaron through a number of small rooms, probably the household offices. The first of these is the bathroom, where the guests in Homeric story are conducted on first arrival. This must be the reason why it is placed so near to the main living-room. It is a small, square chamber, the floor composed of one huge stone slab, and on this was placed the bath of baked clay, an oblong tub perhaps decorated with brown paint, such as has been found in other Mycenaean houses. A stone pipe carried off the waste water from a square gutter in the floor. The walls seem to have been panelled with wood--altogether a noble bathroom and no doubt one of the most important places in the house. Beyond the women's apartments run dark galleries with sloping roofs; they are built in the thickness of the wall and may have served as magazines for storing provisions and household goods. The shepherds in later days have found them a welcome fold for their sheep, and the walls have been rubbed by soft, oily fleeces till they shine. Altogether a roomy, hospitable house, with large forecourts, where dependents could come and go, or petitioners wait; with ample accommodation for household and guests; and with these great store-chambers for the hoarded wealth of the kings. The walls of the chief living-rooms were probably gay with frescoes, their doors decorated with slabs of inlay, the floors in some instances ornamented with cobbles fixed in lime and perhaps coloured. The lower slope of the hill was no doubt devoted to the military needs of the settlement. There are so many points of obvious resemblance between this type of house and those described in the Odyssey and Iliad, that one would like to think of Tiryns as one of the very homes for which the Argive heroes sighed. At any rate, here is a type of house that lasted long and was known in many different parts of the Mycenæan world. At Mycenae, and at Gla in Bœotia, much the same ground-plan is found. Even the old house of Erechtheus on the Acropolis at Athens shows remains of the same central hearth with its four supporting pillars. The ground round Tiryns was, and is still, well suited for cultivation. It was, in fact, once chosen as the site for an agricultural college, and to that epoch belong the slender dark cypresses that become so familiar in the views of Nauplia. The palaces that Homer knew were surrounded not only with farmland, but also with what we should call a pleasure garden. I should like to fancy the goodly palace of Tiryns set round with a pleasaunce. This is a picture of Tiryns as it may have been in the day of Homer's heroes, and the site, as Schliemann left it after his excavations, gave a good impression of the typical Mycenæan palace. During the past few years the German Institute of Archaeology has carried on fresh excavations, and the results show that they were right in supposing that Schliemann had by no means exhausted the site. They have brought to light traces of a lower town surrounding the citadel, and beneath the Mycenaean palace they have found older buildings. In this earlier settlement there were frescoes allied in subject and in treatment to the frescoes found in the great palace at Knossos, and there were also two great halls with painted stucco floors. The mural paintings have been broken into innumerable fragments, and the labour of reconstruction is increased by the fact that it is very seldom that two fragments actually join. Blue and brown are the predominating colours, and there are bright touches of red. When this gigantic jig-saw puzzle has been put together with missing pieces indicated by the same clever artist who restored the frescoes at Knossos, it is hoped that the paintings from Tiryns will be another great feature for the National Museum at Athens. The reconstruction has already advanced sufficiently to show that in the earliest palace there was a life-size procession of warriors; from the Mycenæan palace comes a spirited boar-hunt, with women watching the scene from a safe distance in chariots. Once more one marvels at Time's trickery, which has taken from us every painting of the great classical age in Greece, and has left us these pictures of an earlier millennium. Home