“When in the carven chest, The winds that blew and waves in wild unrest Smote her with fear, she, not with cheeks unwet, Her arms of love round Perseus set, And said: ‘O child, what grief is mine! But thou dost slumber, and thy baby breast Is sunk in rest, Here in the cheerless brass-bound bark, Tossed amid starless night and pitchy dark. Nor dost thou heed the scudding brine Of waves that wash above thy curls so deep, Nor the shrill winds that sweep,— Lapped in thy purple robe’s embrace, Fair little face! But if this dread were dreadful too to thee, Then wouldst thou lend thy listening ear to me; Therefore I cry,—Sleep babe, and sea be still, And slumber our unmeasured ill!’” The Nereids, charmed with the beauty of the child, guided the chest safely into the net of the fishermen of the little island of Seriphos. Perseus, on his return to Argos, went up to Larisa, to which Acrisius had retired, and while displaying his skill with the quoit accidentally killed his grandfather. Thus was fulfilled the doom to avoid which Acrisius had shut up Danaë in the bronze tower at Argos. Perseus, ashamed at this homicide, and perhaps disliking Argos by reason of his mother’s ill-treatment, persuaded the son of Prœtus to change kingdoms with him, and so he came to live at Tiryns, and from there went up the plain and founded Mycenæ where a mushroom (_mykes_) that he pulled up when thirsty gave him a draught of water. The greater antiquity of Tiryns implied in this legend is not inconsistent with archæological evidence, and the fable that Prœtus, the first king of Tiryns, imported from Lycia seven Cyclopes as builders is a vague record of the foreign contribution made to this ancient centre. The Cyclopean walls in Argolis, often alluded to in the fifth century, were at least as conspicuous at Tiryns as elsewhere, and this acropolis near the sea would fit the situation in the “Trojan Women” of Euripides where the captive, lamenting her dead husband deprived of burial rites, anticipates with dread the landing at Nauplia:— “Belovèd, O my husband dear, Thou’rt wandering, a spectral fear, Unburied and unlaved. But me the hull that cleaves the sea Shall bear with spread wings far from thee To Argos, nurse of steeds, Where Cyclopēan walls rear high Their giant stones to flaunt the sky.” To-day, in the spring, the hill of Tiryns is covered with slender stalks of asphodel, while amidst flowers delicate and shadowy as these, along the pathways of the “asphodel meadows” below, steal the ghosts of the ancient masters of these Cyclopean walls and galleries.