The Tomb of Agamemnon

February 27, 2006
When Heinrich Schliemann incorrectly identified in 1876 one of the shaft graves at Mycenae as the "tomb of Agamemnon," he revived a myth first created by the eighth-century B.C. inhabitants of the Argive plain who looked upon Mycenae's ruins as the place where Agamemnon gathered the Greek armies for an assault on Troy. It was not until the 20th century that archaeologists accurately dated the Mycenaean tombs to a period 300 to 400 years before any possible date of a Trojan War. This tangled history of remaking and unmaking the myths of Mycenae is the subject of Gere's fascinating book. It offers a compact and richly informative cultural history that ranges from Aeschylus's Oresteia and Pausanias's Description of Greece, a second-century A.D. travelogue, to the spectacular discoveries of Schliemann and the overturning of his conclusions by his more careful successors. Throughout, Mycenae emerges as a place "that seemed to belong to everyone except itself," serving the purposes of cultures far removed from its own. The arc is decidedly downward, as much of it involves the stripping away of Mycenae's affiliations with the Homeric epics. Gere concludes with an inspiring guide to the citadel of Mycenae and the Mycenaean treasures in Athens. Apart from an unnecessarily long detour into Schliemann's life, this book will be welcomed and consulted by all philhellenes. 24 halftones, 2 maps.