If we coast down the west side of the bay we come to Cynuria, whose autochthonous inhabitants would seem to have belonged, like their Arcadian neighbours, to the pre-Dorian “Pelasgic” stock. Herodotus gives a dramatic account of one of the contests for the possession of this territory between Spartans and Argives, in the sixth century, which might serve as a pendant for the Roman story of the Horatii and the Curiatii. Three hundred Spartans and three hundred Argives, chosen as champions, engaged while the main armies withdrew. Two Argives only survived, and they, thinking the Spartans all dead, ran off home to announce the victory. One half-dead Spartan, however, Othryades, was able to write with his blood his name upon a trophy which he erected of Argive armour. Each side claimed the victory, with the result that the full armies engaged and the Spartans conquered. Othryades, however, ashamed to survive his comrades, killed himself on the field. Nauplia, across the bay from Lerna, is full of suggestion for the prehistoric settlement of Argolis, and of associations with modern history. It has fewer direct points of contact with classic literature. Nauplius, the founder, according to tradition, was the son of Amymone and of Poseidon, who was here able to assert himself against the predominance of Hera further inland. Hera, indeed, had the Achæan Zeus to curb on the north and may have been glad to compromise with Poseidon for a safe-conduct permitting her to make her necessary annual visit to the baths of Kanathos, east of Nauplia. By way of Nauplia, as we have seen, the alphabet may have entered Greece, and here the less valuable but costly cargoes of Trojan spoils were landed, bringing one and another hint and pattern of trans-Ægean art. Here Menelaus, detained by storm long after his brother, finally landed:— “Back to the land has Menelaus come from Troy, At Nauplia in harbour moored, while near the beach The oar-blades fall, returned from his long wandering.” No more beautiful mooring-place for home-coming warriors could be found than the water-front of Nauplia, lying beneath the majestic rock of Palamidi, guard of the sea-entrance to the Argolid. On the low acropolis of Tiryns recent excavations have uncovered the “Lower Castle” to the north of the Middle and Upper fortresses already known. Pausanias attributed the founding of Tiryns to members of the Danaus family, Acrisius remaining in Argos and Prœtus taking as his share the Heræum, Midea, Tiryns, and the coast of Argolis. Acrisius, to forestall an oracle, according to which he was to be slain by a grandson, shut up Danaë, his daughter, in a tower of bronze. Zeus descended to her in a shower of gold, and when Perseus was born Acrisius committed to the sea mother and child in a chest. The translation by John Addington Symonds of a fragment from Simonides describing this event fully preserves the pathos for which Simonides was famous:—