CHAPTER X.

CONNECTION OF THE FIVE TOMBS WITH THE ROYAL HOUSE OF PELOPS; AND DATE OF THE AGORA.

Discussion of the identity of the five tombs with those mentioned by Pausanias as the tombs of Agamemnon and his companions--Opinions of scholars about the Trojan War--The ancients unanimous for its reality--The author's faith in the traditions led to his discovery of Troy and of the five Royal Tombs at Mycenæ--The civilisation of Mycenæ higher than that of Troy--The pottery of both very primitive--Alphabetic writing known at Troy, but not at Mycenæ--The different civilisations may have been contemporaneous--The appearances in the tombs prove the simultaneous death of those interred, certainly in each tomb, and probably in all the five--Traditional veneration for the sepulchres--Monuments repeatedly placed over them--No tombs between the two circular rows of slanting slabs which formed the enclosure of the Agora and its benches--Agora probably erected when the tombstones were renewed, and the altar built over the fourth tomb, under the influence of the enthusiasm created by the Rhapsodists--These monuments buried in the course of time, but the memory of the site was fresh by tradition long after the destruction of the new city of Mycenæ--Testimony of Pausanias--The enormous treasures prove the sepulchres to be _royal_, but royalty at Mycenæ ended with the Dorian invasion--This must have been much earlier than the received date, 1104 B.C.--An objection answered--Honours paid to the remains of murdered princes even by their murderers--Custom of burying the dead with their treasures--The sepulchral treasure of Palestrina--The sepulchre of Nitocris at Babylon--Case of Pyrrhus and the royal sepulchres at Ægeæ--The sepulchre at Corneto 333