A traveller’s guide to the monuments of Greece under Roman rule. Its pages on the Argolid gave the names still used for Bronze Age remains: the Cyclopean walls of Tiryns and Mycenae, the Lion Gate, and the “treasuries” of Atreus and his sons.
Pausanias walked through mainland Greece in the second century AD recording temples, statues, tombs and the stories told about them. By his day the Mycenaean citadels were already a thousand years in ruin. He describes the walls of Tiryns as built of unworked stones so huge that a pair of mules could not shift even the smallest, with little stones packed between them: work so far beyond ordinary men that it was credited to the one-eyed giants, the Cyclopes. From him comes the term cyclopean masonry.
At Mycenae he saw the gate with lions standing over it, also said to be the Cyclopes’ work, and underground buildings which, he was told, were the treasuries of Atreus and his sons. When Heinrich Schliemann excavated at Mycenae in 1876 he used Pausanias as his guide, and the great tholos tomb outside the citadel has been called the Treasury of Atreus ever since, though it is a tomb, not a treasury, and was built long before any Atreus of legend.
The book, part by part
I Book II, 16: Mycenae
The ruins of the citadel, the Lion Gate and the underground “treasuries” of Atreus and his sons.
Rules: Relieve the lintel with a triangle · The corbelled dome: rings stepping inward
II Book II, 25: Tiryns
The walls of Tiryns, built of huge unworked stones with small stones fitted between them, attributed to the Cyclopes.
Rules: Cyclopean walls