Argolis was the outpost of the Peloponnesus, and even of the whole Greek mainland, for the prehistoric invaders and traders from Crete, the southern Ægean or Phœnicia. The rugged eastern peninsula of Laconia, indeed, extends southward nearly a whole degree of latitude further than Argolis, but the dangerous promontory, Malea, did not so often entice mariners to double it as it served for a beacon to direct their course northward into the deep shelter of the beautiful Gulf of Argos. It is easy to understand how naturally the early captains of commerce or conquest would be guided up the long coast until they beached their boats under the impregnable rock of Nauplia and the low hill of Tiryns levelled, as it seemed, by the footprint of some god at whose bidding the “Cyclopes” reared its prehistoric and superhuman walls. [Illustration: A GALLERY OF THE ACROPOLIS OF TIRYNS] But the southward-facing gulf was not the only approach to Argolis. The earth’s crust, pushed up into a ridged peninsula between the Saronic and Argolic gulfs, falls away also at the north to the Corinthian Gulf and the Isthmus. From this direction migrating bands of Achæans came overland to mingle with the more numerous “Pelasgians” and to dominate them by their intellectual power and by their rich and conquering Greek speech. When, after the lapse of long years, Achæan imagination, combined with the highly developed “Pelasgian” skill in building, had reared or developed a fortress on the acropolis of Mycenæ, robber barons could control the mountain gateway. And with the probably earlier Larisa, the acropolis of Argos, and with the fortresses of Tiryns and of Midea, they could take their toll of all who would enter the Argive plain from the north or the south. The masters of these palace castles, as their wealth and their wants increased, could afford to be hospitable to Cretan art or to the contributions from the Ægean or Asia. They may, perhaps, as time went on, have visualized the spoken word in the new characters of the alphabet, whatever its provenance, whether brought over seas to Nauplia by some Palamedes, who might pose as its inventor, or by the Phœnician traders, middlemen between the Greeks and the men of Crete and the Ægean who, centuries before, had developed writing from their picture script.