Customer Reviews

The Tomb of Agamemnon (Wonders of the World)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The author of this fascinating book has produced a brief yet wide-ranging history of Mycenae. Throughout the ages, Homer's Iliad is shown to have had a tremendous influence on both ancient and more recent thought on the origin of the Mycenaean ruins and the legendary inhabitants. The influence of Heinrich Schliemann - his excavations, his findings and his interpretation of those findings - in more recent times plays an extremely important role in this story. But ultimately, with the advent of modern archaeological techniques, the mythical aura surrounding Mycenae was gradually laid to rest, as explained particularly in the last chapter - although there is still debate about the ways of interpreting some of the physical evidence. The book also includes a chapter on the effects that Mycenae has had on culture and on the literary and performing arts. There is even a section (at the end) devoted to those intending on visiting the site. Although the subject matter of this book is absolutely captivating for a history buff like me, I must admit that I found the writing style to be a bit awkward and not as easy-flowing as I would have liked. But despite that, I could not bring myself to give this book anything less than five stars, mainly because of the wealth of spellbinding information that it contains. The ancient history in this book is quite gripping and can be enjoyed by anyone.

Mary Beard is a Professor of Classics at Cambridge University, and the editor of "The Wonders of the World" which is "a small series of books that will focus on some of the world's most famous sites or monuments."

Like the other books in the series, Beard writes that this book reveals the architectural and cultural implications of its subject. It is aimed at the general inquisitive reader ("the intelligent ignorant," as Beard often refers to herself). Cathy Gere's contribution may be the best of the lot, which includes Beard's The Parthenon (Wonders of the World), Beard's and Keith Hopkins' The Colosseum (Wonders of the World) and Keith Miller's St. Peter's (Wonders of the World).

Gere has written a book about something that doesn't actually exist. Heinrich Schliemann electrified the world in 1876 when he found the "tomb of Agamemnon" in Mycenae. 2500 years earlier people living on the Argive plain thought Mycenae was where Agamemnon gathered the Greeks to attack Troy. We now know that the tombs were created at least 300 years before the Trojan War.

Gere has written an account of the physical and cultural history of this place and especially "Agamemnon's" golden mask that graces the cover of the book. (She touches on the possibility that Schliemann salted the site with the mask.) She starts with Aeschylus's "Oresteia" and Pausanias's "Description of Greece", an 1800 year old travelouge, Schliemann's texts, and the texts of more careful archaeologists. She touches on the interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, the glorifications of the Nazis, and others. She also provides a short visitor's guide, a good list of further reading, and an excellent Index.

Gere's extract from her book is a bit hidden: click on the "See all Editorial Reviews" button on the Product Page. The URL appears just after the author's biography. One sample of her writing:

"This is a story about the power of stories: for twenty-eight centuries the Iliad has peopled the ruins of Bronze Age Mycenae with the ghosts of the House of Atreus. Agamemnon was Homer's Lord of Warlords, and the questions that were asked of him, century upon century, were always about the meaning of war, about hatred and anger and revenge, about murderous competitiveness for resources, about the human spilling of human blood"

Mary Beard reinforces Gere's theme: "Bronze Age Mycenae...was to classical Greece what classical Greece would eventually become to nineteenth-century Europe, a place whose ancient history, legendary reputation and symbolic importance stood in poignant contrast to its present political impotence, a place that sometimes seemed to belong to everyone except itself"

When I visited Mycenae, I was struck by the vistas of the plains, the immense olive groves, the nearby tholos tombs, the stony path, the Lion's Gate, the circle of tombs. But permeating everything I saw were my memories of other voices describing the place, not only Homer, Schliemann, Freud, the Nazis, but for me most of all T.S. Eliot:

The nightingales are singing near
The Convent of the Sacred Heart,

And sang within the bloody wood
When Agamemnon cried aloud,
And let their liquid siftings fall
To stain the stiff dishonoured shroud.

Read this excellent description of Mycenae, and see what memories Cathy Gere evokes for you.

Robert C. Ross 2008

Part of the Wonders of the World Series of small format books on famous sites.

"The Mask of Agamemnon is the Mona Lisa of prehistory." That is her beginning to an impressionistic essay about the site of Mycenae. So this is not a site guide, however, it is great background reading before you visit the site.

She describes the history of the site. But, she also describes the modern history of the site's recovery and how views of Mycenae have changed over time. And so her title, "Tomb of Agamemnon" is intentionally chosen. Of course, there is no tomb of Agamemnon, or so we now understand. But that was what launched a thousand fantasies including the reputation of the funeral mask mislabeled the "mask of Agamemnon."

So a good chunk of the book is about 19th and 20th centuries views of and uses of Mycenae. We get discussions of Schliemann (and his swastika adorned house in Athens), reactions of various other philhellenes, but also some Greek perspective. While this is not a picture book, it does reproduce some of the other grave masks found and provide a side profile shot of the Agamemnon mask - both things seldom seen. Nice bibliography.

Other reviewers have explained the book's thesis and intent. I wanted to add how much I enjoyed the quality of writing. Most nonfiction seldom reaches Gere's level of prosody without crossing the line to fancy. As a nonfiction author myself, I tip my chapeau at Gere for both her scholarship and communication skills.

For a layman, the author appears to know a great deal of the history and aftermath of the findings at Mycenae. This history is interesting and well written and provides many details on the great PR done by Schliemann on his findings - and she provides the history of why most of his conclusions have been proven wrong. I enjoyed looking at the many black and white photographs in the book. The problem I had was that I was interested mainly in the old Greek findings and history, but the author spends many pages off of "this target" and on more side and/or recent issues. For example, she spends a few pages in Chapter 5 on the swastika design found by Schliemann on some of the objects he uncovered, which was taken by some as an original symbol of the Aryan race. Fine. But later she spends most of a relatively long chapter (Chapter 7: The Swastika and the Butterfly) on this matter since it later became a symbol adopted by the Nazis. Thus, she goes into the history of the last century, even spending several pages discussing and quoting comments made by Henry Miller about this topic and noting the several important Nazis who visited the site. This chapter is not needed. If she needed to fill page and include this material at all, it should have been in an appendix and not in the main text. Here and there other "off target" issues are brought up, but she spends many fewer pages on them.