We enter. It needs some effort of faith to believe that this roof, so cunningly put together of stones which have all but reached the secret of the true cupola, was once covered with brazen plates--that we are, in fact, in what once was one of the brazen chambers of which the poets tell us. From one point of view we may be glad that they are gone, as otherwise we could not so well have studied this wonderful construction. It is as marked a moment in a course of constructive study when we stand in the treasury of Mykênê as when we stand in the peristyle of Spalato. Each marks a great step in the history of art. In one we see how nearly men could come to the arched construction without actually reaching it. In the other we see the perfect construction applied for the first time to its highest artistic use. But Spalato is the direct parent of all that came after it. Mykênê is the parent of nothing. It surely points to some great revolution, some overthrow of the more civilized people by the less civilized, that the art of primæval Greece should have stopped where it did. In all these early buildings we find the arched construction only not brought to perfection. In the artistic architecture of historical Greece the arch, or any approach to it, as an artistic feature, was utterly unknown. At the outside, it is barely used here and there, in works which did not claim to be works of art, where the merest constructive necessity called for it.
To any one who is familiar with Irish remains the treasury of Mykênê cannot fail to suggest New Grange. The essential construction of the two works is the same. But here again the ever needful warning comes in. All that the undoubted likeness really proves is that the same stage of constructive skill was reached, in times perhaps far removed from one another, in Ireland and in Peloponnêsos. It does not prove, it does not even suggest, any nearer connexion than this. Otherwise, no field could be more tempting for a mystic ethnologist. Were there not Danaoi in Argolis? And was there not in Ireland also a people with a name very like Danaoi, but which we will not attempt to spell without an Irish library at hand?
The treasuries are, as Pausanias says, underground, wrought in the hill-side. There is something very singular in a work of this kind, a work of real building as much as anything that ever was built above ground, a work which has nothing in common with rock-hewn tombs, temples, churches, or houses, hidden so that a wayfarer who was not on the look-out might pass by without notice. Was concealment or safety the object sought? Then why were they not made within the fortified akropolis, and not in the midst of the outer city? And, be they tombs, be they treasuries or anything else, why were they so many and so scattered? Five have been reckoned up in all. One, the best preserved after the great one, has been, if not actually discovered, at least brought more fully to light, during Dr. Schliemann's researches. The roof is broken through, so that it can be looked into from above; but the entrance is as perfect as that of the great treasury. Here it is that the quasi-Doric column is found, a sign perhaps of later date again than the great one. The others are partly pushed down, partly choked up. The great stone of the gateway thus brought near to the ground has much the air of a cromlech. We need hardly say that in mechanical construction a cromlech and the Parthenôn are exactly the same.