voyage to Crete. In the husband’s absence, Paris succeeds—not without some degree of violence, according to some of the legends—in carrying off the wife, loading his ships at the same time (to give emphatic baseness to the exploit) with a rich freight of gold and treasures, the spoils of his absent host. So Venus’s promise is made good, and Priam weakly receives into his palace the fatal beauty who is to prove the ruin of the Trojan fortunes.
The outrage rouses all Greece to arms. Menelaus appeals to his brother Agamemnon, king of Argos and Mycenae, who held some sort of suzerainty over the whole of Greece. The brother-kings were the sons of Atreus, of the great house of Pelops, who gave his name to the peninsula known as the Peloponnesus, and now the Morea. It was a house eminent for wealth and splendour and influence. According to an old proverb, valour and wisdom were given by the gods to other names in larger measure, but wealth and power belonged of divine right to the Atridæ. This power must not be hastily pronounced fabulous. There yet remain traces of the mural and sepulchral architecture of Agamemnon’s capital, Mycenæ, which are strongly significant of a pre-historical civilisation—an “iron age” of massive strength and no mean resources.[1] Agamemnon, in Homer’s poem, carries a sceptre which had literally, not metaphorically, come down to him as an heirloom from the king of the gods. Vulcan
- ↑ “Standing before the castle portal of Mycenæ, even he who knows nothing of Homer must imagine to himself a king like the Homeric Agamemnon, a warlike lord with army and fleet, who maintained relations with Asia, and her wealth of gold and arts.”—Curtius’s Hist. of Greece, i. 145.
