In the Homeric poems it is Mycenæ, “rich in gold,” and “well-walled” Tiryns that are predominant in Argolis. The legendary kingdom of the Atreidæ extended over a large part of the Peloponnesus, and it was pleasing to Argive pride to reserve Mycenæ as headquarters for Agamemnon, king of men, and to parcel off Lacedæmon to Menelaus when he was not represented as also living in Argolis. Mycenæ commanded the mountain roads to the Corinthian Gulf and the Isthmus, and a prehistoric network of roadbeds that focus at Mycenæ lifts out of the realm of mere legend the controlling influence of the mighty fortress over the territory to the northward. To the south of the mountains it was connected with Tiryns and Argos in a varying sequence of leagues and rivalries. Mycenæ is now as familiar to the modern world as the Acropolis of Athens. Its resurrection within our own times has called forth manifold accounts and pictures of the “beehive tombs,” the Cyclopean walls, the Gate of the Lions (never, indeed, wholly buried), the circle of shaft graves on the acropolis and the treasure found within them. The three great dramatists all dealt with scenes from the family history of the Atreidæ or Pelopidæ, the illustrious but blood-stained dynasty that for a few generations only (if we allow the Heracleidæ their pedigree) broke in upon the continuity of the Perseid line, descended through Danaus from Inachus. When Eurystheus was slain, as Thucydides records, by the Heracleidæ in Attica, the kingdom passed to his mother’s half-brother Atreus, the son of Pelops. Agamemnon, his son, or his grandson, is described by the historian as “the greatest naval potentate of his time,” and he cites the Iliad which speaks of him as “lording it over many ships and over all Argos,” that is, over all the Argolid. Although Æschylus, by reason of a contemporary _rapprochement_ between the Athenians and the Argives, explicitly lays the scene of his “Agamemnon” at Argos, the traditional association with Mycenæ, handed down from Homer, has usually prevailed. Sophocles returned to it, and in his “Electra” assumes Mycenæ as the home of the royal pair, while Euripides, in his “Electra,” loosely refers to both cities, although in other plays Mycenæ is uppermost in his mind. Thus Iphigeneia at Aulis, about to be sacrificed, exclaims:— “O mother mine, Pelasgian land, O virgin’s home, Mycenæ!” And amongst the Taurians, overjoyed at her reunion with her brother, her thoughts likewise revert to Mycenæ:— “O home and hearth-stone mine, Built by Cyclopic hand, Mycenæ, fatherland, Our love is thine!”