Mycenae: From Myth to History

Tue 5 October 2021 - Fri 10 December 2021

Museum of Classical Archaeology

In the summer of 1955, a young Robert McCabe was given a simple assignment by Professor Alan John Banyard Wace: to create a visual record of Mycenae with his camera and Plus-X film.

Mycenae holds a special place in both Greek myth and Greek history. The stories of its people and its kings are woven through ancient storytelling, from Homer's Iliad to the tragedies of Aeschlyus and Sophocles, and beyond. Those stories tell of a distant past, of a city ruled by a family riven with discord and treachery: Agamemnon, who led the Greek forces against the city of Troy in defence of his brother Menelaus' honour, only to be killed upon his return home by his own wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover.

McCabe took some 200 photographs that year, a small number perhaps by modern digital standards but a sizeable and comprehensive record nonetheless. This exhibition features around fifty of those photographs, capturing a black and white archive of the site and its place in the broader landscape – a landscape peopled in McCabe's photographs by both archaeologists and locals alike, whose interactions and stories are remembered in the captions.

Cost: Free Admission