Why
Mycenae in Greece
is special

The ancient city of Mycenae in southern Greece is enveloped in a fascinating combination of myth and historical facts.

Mycenae
tips and insights

Homer

His famous 2900-year-old epic the Iliad spins the story of the Trojan War. One key character was Agamemnon, King of Mycenae on the Peloponnesus Peninsula of Greece.

Classical Greek
mythology

It tells us of a tragic King Agamemnon tale that takes place mainly in Mycenae. It goes like this:

Thyestes (Agamemnon's uncle) seduces Agamemnon's mother.

To get even, Atreus (Agamemnon's father) tricks Thyestes into eating his own children.

Thyestes retaliates by cursing Atreus and his family.

Years later, Helen (the wife of Agamemnon's brother Menelaus) is abducted to Troy, triggering the Trojan War.

When Agamemnon returns to Mycenae from that long confrontation, he is murdered by his unfaithful wife Clytemnestra.

Her son Orestes takes revenge of his father's slaying by killing her.

That deed of taking the life of his own mother persuades the mythical furies to try to assassinate Orestes.

This juicy, complex drama has the earmarks of a soap opera

Heinrich Schliemann

Until 1874, most historians thought that Agamemnon and his Mycenae never existed. That was the year when the excavations by Heinrich Schliemann proved that both were real. He is the same amateur archaeologist whose earlier excavations showed that Troy was not a myth.

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