From this passage in Pindar we see that Battas, also called Aristoteles, the founder of Cyrene, 640 B.C., and its first king, descended from Hercules, and that his ancestors, the Heracleids or Dorians, had emigrated from Sparta to Thera. As Pindar saw his tomb, as well as those of other consecrated kings (probably the successors of Battas), in the Agora of Cyrene, Professor Paley thinks that it was an ancient Doric and not an Achæan custom to bury the kings in the Agora. But this is in contradiction with the above statement of Pausanias (I. 43, §§ 4, 8), that the Megarians had the sepulchres of Coroebus and other heroes in their Agora, because Coroebus was an Elian Olympic victor in the stadium (Ol. I.), and, according to tradition, he killed Ποινή, sent by Apollo to the Argives.[248] Besides the Megarians had nothing whatever to do with Doric customs. In like manner as at Megara and Cyrene, so in the Acropolis of Mycenæ, in honour of the illustrious personages who lie buried here, the Agora was erected in a circle around their tombs. Had the circle of slabs served only as an enclosure for the five royal tombs there would have been no necessity either to make it double and slanting and to cover it horizontally, or to build a huge wall for the sole purpose of sustaining it in the lower part of the Acropolis, and of raising it to the level of that part which rested on the rock in the higher part of the Acropolis; nay, one single circular enclosure, following the sinuosities of the rock, would in my opinion have done just as much honour to the five royal sepulchres as the artificially levelled and covered double row. [Illustration: No. 211. A fish of Wood. (3½ M.) Actual size.] [Illustration: No. 212. A curious Idol. (4 M.) Actual size.] [Sidenote: CURIOUS IDOLS.]