If one were entering Argolis neither by the modern railway nor in company with one of these instalments of prehistoric Achæans that descended from the north, but were faring along the good highroad from Corinth in the days of Mycenæ’s glory, he would follow up the _Longopotamo_ River, which flows down west of Acrocorinth into the Corinthian Gulf. Before crossing the watershed that slopes to the Argolic plain he would have come to Homer’s “well-built” Cleonæ in a semi-circle of wooded mountains. Here the ancient roads part, one going east of Mount Treton more directly to Mycenæ, the other making a detour to the west to the Argive plain and then to Mycenæ, stationed like a huge spider at the centre of its web. When Lucian’s Charon, off on a day’s furlough from the Ferry, asks Hermes to point out the famous cities of antiquity, the latter shows him Babylon and then adds: “But Mycenæ and Cleonæ I am ashamed to point out to you, and Ilium above all. For when you go down home again you’ll certainly be throttling Homer for his big boasts. Long ago, to be sure, they were prosperous, but now they are dead and gone. For cities, Ferryman, die out just like people, and, queerest of all, whole rivers. For instance, there’s not so much as a ditch left of the Inachus in Argos now-a-days.” Lucian forgets his quasi sixth century perspective in this pessimistic outlook and descends to things as they were in his own time, when his contemporary Pausanias explained the “summer-dried” condition of the Inachus as due to Poseidon’s anger because Hera had been given the preference to himself in the Argive land. But not even the Lynceus vision, temporarily put at the disposal of Charon by an Homeric incantation, could have been expected to reveal, beneath the oblivious Argive soil of the second century of our era, the rich treasures of Mycenæ, to which the X-rays of the archæologists have now penetrated.