have been before him who did it; of what is called human lineage, Polycrates was the first' (3. 122).
Golden Mask From A Tomb At Mycenae. When Schliemann excavated this he declared it the 'Mask of
Agamemnon'-a claim which would no doubt have been echoed by any Classical Greek who had come
upon it. Although much older than the assumed period of Agamemnon and the Trojan War it is an
example of a type of Bronze Age artefact which, with the great fortified citadels themselves, demonstrated
to Classical Greeks the wealth and power of their heroic forefathers, the kings of Mycenae 'rich in gold',
as Homer described it.
Myth could preserve certain things from the past: names, great events, historical places. Of course it
transformed and distorted them. Troy was once taken by storm, and there was a great king in Mycenae;
but we cannot know how much truth there is in the story of a great expedition against Troy, and Achilles
in his origins is clearly more akin to a saga-figure such as Siegfried than to a historical person such as
Augustus. But another sort of survival in the myths is no less interesting: that of customs, and indeed of a