Below this and the adjoining room is a deep cistern cut out in the rock. Into it runs a Cyclopean water-conduit, which comes down the hill, and probably brought water from the spring _Perseia_, half a mile east of the Acropolis, which has a well-deserved celebrity in the plain of Argos for its purity and its salubrious properties. Pausanias (II. 16) saw this spring in the ruins of Mycenæ; but the city never extended so far east. I suppose, therefore, that what he saw of the water of the Perseia was nothing but the discharge of an artificial conduit from the natural source above the citadel. This would also perfectly agree with the word κρήνη, which he constantly employs with that meaning, in opposition to πηγή, a natural spring. [Sidenote: PROBABLE ROYAL PALACE.] Although there are no windows in the Cyclopean house--and although the scanty daylight through the doors must have been still further diminished by the Cyclopean circuit-wall, which is only separated from the west side of the house by a corridor 4 ft. broad--yet there can be no doubt that it served as a dwelling-house, and further as the dwelling house of the most prominent family of Mycenæ, for it is only such a house that we can imagine close to the Agora in the most imposing part of the Acropolis, within which the space was very scanty and therefore precious. Professor Paley thinks that the passage so often cited from Euripides (_Electra_, 710) proves beyond any doubt that it must be the Royal Palace, because the people of Mycenæ are there called to _the Agora to see the wonderful lamb with the golden fleece_. But this lamb (which was a portent symbolical of the monarchy) had been conveyed _to the palace_ by Aëropé, wife of Atreus. Thyestes then and there told the people that he _had it in his house_ (ἔχειν κατὰ δῶμα), consequently the palace was close to the Agora.