Pausanias speaks of Agamemnon and others of the family as buried within the walls of Mycenæ, and places the tombs of Clytemnestra and her paramour without. The various attempts to identify with literary tradition the beehive tombs below or the shaft graves discovered by Schliemann on the acropolis above involve varying degrees of improbability or of contradiction, and from these ingenious attempts to reconcile facts it is a relief to turn to the realities of pure fiction. The “Agamemnon” of Æschylus, the greatest of extant Greek dramas, opens with a soldier posted on the palace roof at Argos continuing the ten years’ watch for the beacon signal[34] that is to flash across the Ægean the news of the capture of Troy, in order that the guilty Clytemnestra may not be taken unawares. Presently the beacon flashes out on Mount Arachneum, seen, as the watcher looks eastward across the plain, between the Heræum and Tiryns. The long chorals contain the kernel of the poet’s thought. The Argive elders enter chanting their anapæsts:— “Now this year is the tenth since ’gainst Priam of Troy, As antagonist great, Menelaus the lord, Agamemnon besides Holding power two-throned and two-sceptred from Zeus, Mighty yoke-pair, two sons they of Atreus their sire, Sped forth from this land in a thousand of ships Of our Argives a host As a warrior band bringing succour.” The old men even in the hour of victory are filled with strange foreboding of coming ill and with fear of a still unadjusted Nemesis. A curse is inbred in the royal house. “The fearsome wrath, recurrent, house-haunting, guileful, unforgetting, exacting vengeance for the children” more than hints at the grim story of Thyestes fed by Atreus on the flesh of his children. Iphigeneia’s sacrifice at Aulis by Agamemnon[35] is skilfully introduced to complicate the ethical situation by giving Clytemnestra a plausible justification for her unfaithfulness and for the secret plottings of which the chorus is not unaware. Footnote 34: See extract from _Agamemnon_ in chapter i, p. 11. Footnote 35: See extract from _Agamemnon_, chapter xiv, p. 308. Clytemnestra, intoxicated with the thought that Agamemnon is about to fall into her snare, tells the chorus how the beacons, her “racers with the torch,” have brought the news, and then breaks forth with a recital, swift and vivid, reminding them how, even while she speaks, the Argive warriors are stalking triumphant through the streets of Troy:— “Troy the Achæans have and hold this very day! Methinks I hear commingling outcries in the town.” The captive Trojan women “from throats no longer free” bewail their dead, while the Argives plunder as they shout or seat themselves at an impromptu breakfast:—