Lion Gate of Mycenae
About
The Lion Gate stood as the monumental entrance to a citadel already abandoned for over a thousand years by 117 CE, its two lionesses flanking a column above a lintel weighing roughly 20 tons. Roman-era travelers came specifically to marvel at it as a relic, believing only the mythical Cyclopes could have set such stones. No Roman structure occupied the site; visitors found only silent Bronze Age ruins reached by a shepherd's path.
What happened here
The gate is where a town shows itself and where it counts what comes in. Traffic is funnelled between towers into arched passages — the wide ones for carts, the narrow ones for people — and closed at night with timber leaves shod in iron. A customs post takes duty on goods; a clerk records what passes. The outward face is the decorated one, with an inscription naming the emperor and the town, because this is the first thing a visitor reads. Guards are usually the town's own watchmen rather than soldiers. Just outside, the tombs begin; just inside, the shops. In a town whose walls have long stopped mattering militarily, the gate is kept up anyway, for the look of the thing.
In ancient writing
- Pausanias, Description of Greece 2.16
Describes the Lion Gate and remaining wall circuit as the work of the Cyclopes, among the ruins of Mycenae; mentions being led to the site by local shepherds.
Sources
Nearby
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →