MYCENvE. 491 
they had thus lost of signalizing themselves, CHAP. 
VIII. 
and unable to endure the superior fame of y - 
their neighbour, made war against Mycence, and 
destroyed the city 4 : this happened in the first 
year of the seventy-eighth Olympiad*, nearly five 
centuries before the birth of Christ. " In that 
region," says Pausanias, " which is called j4rgolis, 
nothing is remembered of greater antiquity 
than this circumstance 6 ." It is not merely the 
circumstance of seeing the architecture and the 
sculpture of the heroic ages, which renders a 
view of Mycenae one of the highest gratifications 
a literary traveller can experience : the con- 
sideration of its remaining, at this time, exactly state of the 
as Pausanias saw it in the second century, and 
in such a state of preservation that an alto- 
relievo described by him yet exists in the 
identical position he has assigned for it, adds 
greatly to the interest excited by these re- 
markable Ruins: indeed, so singularly does the 
whole scene correspond with his account of 
the place, that, in comparing them together, 
(4) M.UWK; Ss ' ' Aj>yi~<>i xaAii)*ti life ^n^irvrias PauSan. ibid. 
(5) B. C. 466. See Chandler's Trav. in Greece, p. 230. Oxf. 1776. 
(6) *E> yap <rrt wi 'AoyaX/S; onfiK^iftitri TK pli in ea.\itit>Tt>a. au fttrftt 
vfuffn. Pausnn. ut supra, c. 15. p. 144. 
