GENIUS AND OTHER ESSAYS
during the winter months, and read the texts not only of the purest and most famous authors but of the minor relics of the Greek tongue. Doubtless some of these gentlemen, if we seek no further, will be able to enjoy and study intelligently the coming Cyprian antiquities, and doubtless there are others of their breed, even in our frontier towns, who take a lively interest in the researches of Curtius and Schliemann. It was a citizen of New Hampshire who assisted Di Cesnola, at the most trying period of his undertaking, with friendship, presence, and material aid. If any country has a better right than our own to the purchase of treasures unearthed by an American consul, who depended largely on America for his resources, let its learned representatives now speak or else hereafter forever hold their peace.
We come to the dramatic suggestiveness of Schliemann's discoveries, in their bearing upon the history and literature of ancient Greece. Agamemnon, the King of Men, son of Atreus, brother of Menelaös of Sparta, lord of Mykenæ, and called by Homer the "ruler of many islands and of all Argos," is the heroic central figure—or figurehead—of the Homeric poems, as the leader of all Greece against Troy. In the Iliad he acts as a presiding genius, towering above the host as Saul above the people, the emblem of sovereignty and justice. The entire epos of that poem grows out of the dispute between him and Achilles as to the possession of Briseis. After the fall of Troy, the prophetess Kassandra, daughter of Priam, became the
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