by parallel instances of Greek superstition; and it scarcely leaves room to doubt that it was from this religious belief of the people among whom the Argonautic legend sprang up that it derived its peculiar character, and that the expedition, so far as it was the adventure of the golden fleece, was equally unconnected with piracy, commerce, and discovery. It closely resembled some of the romantic enterprises celebrated in the poetry of the Middle Ages, the

tion uncertain. And so Pindar represents it as undertaken for the purpose of bringing back, with the golden fleece, the soul of Phrixus, which could not rest in the foreign land to which it had been banished.

poetical description of the process which they had observed, or, perhaps, had practised; an interpretation certainly more ingenious, or, at least, less absurd than those by which Diodorus transforms the fire-breathing bulls which Jason was said to have yoked at the bidding of Eetes, into a band of Taurians who guarded the fleece, and the sleepless dragon which watched over it into their commander Draco; but yet not more satisfactory, for it explains a casual, immaterial circumstance, while it leaves the es-object of which was imaginary, and the direcsential point in the legend wholly untouched. The epithet golden, to which it relates, is merely poetical and ornamental, and signified nothing more, as to the nature of the fleece, than the epithets white or purple, which were also applied to it by early poets.* According to the original and genuine tradition, the fleece was a sacred relic, and its importance arose entirely out of its connexion with the tragical story of Phrixus, the main feature of which is the human sacrifice which the gods had required from the house of Athamas. His son Phrixus either offered himself, or was selected through the artifices of his stepmother Ino, as the victim; but, at the critical moment, as he stood before the altar, the marvellous ram was sent for his deliverance, and transported him over the sea, according to the received account, to Colchis, where Phrixus, on his arrival, sacrificed the ram to Jupiter, as the god who had favoured his escape;t the fleece was nailed to an oak in the Grove of Mars, where it was kept by Eetes as a sacred treasure, or palladium.

But the tradition must also have had an historical foundation in some real voyages and adventures, without which it could scarcely have arisen at all, and could never have become so generally current as to be little inferior in celebrity to the tale of Troy itself. If, however, the fleece had no existence but in popular belief, the land where it was to be sought was a circumstance of no moment. In the earlier form of the legend, it might not have been named at all, but only have been described as the distant, the unknown land; and after it had been named, it might have been made to vary with the gradual enlargement of geographical information. But in this case the voyage of the Argonauts can no longer be considered as an insulated adventure, for which no adequate motive is left, but must be regarded, like the expedition of the Tyrian Hercules, as representing a succession of enterprises, which may have been the employment of several generations. And this is perfectly consistent with the

This legend was not a mere poetical fiction, but was grounded on a peculiar form of religion which prevailed in that part of Greece from which the Argonauts are said to have set out on their expedition, and which remained in vig-manner in which the adventurers are most propour even down to the Persian wars. Herodo- erly described. They are Minyans-a branch tus informs us that, when Xerxes, on his march of the Greek nation, whose attention was very to Greece, had come to Alus, a town of the early drawn, by their situation-not, perhaps, Thessalian Achaia, situate near the Gulf of without some influence from the example and Pagasæ, in a tract sometimes called the Atha- intercourse of the Phoenicians-to maritime purmantian Plain, his guides described to him the suits. The form which the legend assumed rites belonging to the temple of the Laphystian was probably determined by the course of Jupiter, an epithet equivalent to that under their earliest naval expeditions. They were which Phrixus is elsewhere said to have sacri- naturally attracted towards the northeast, first ficed the ram to the same god. The eldest among by the islands that lay before the entrance of the descendants of Phrixus was forbidden to en- the Hellespont, and then by the shores of the ter the council-house at Alus, though their an- Propontis and its two straits. Their succescestor Athamas was the founder of the city. If sive colonies, or spots signalized either by hosthe head of the family was detected on the for-tilities or peaceful transactions with the natives, bidden ground, he was led in solemn procession, covered with garlands, like an ordinary victim, and sacrificed. Many of the devoted race were said to have quitted their country to avoid this danger, and to have fallen into the snare when they returned after a long absence. The origin assigned to this rite was, that after the escape of Phrixus, the Achæans had been on the point of sacrificing Athamas himself to appease the anger of the gods, but that he was rescued by the timely interference of Cytissorus, son of Phrixus, who had returned from the Colchian Ea, the land of his father's exile; hence the curse, unfulfilled, was transmitted forever to the posterity of Phrixus. This story, strange as it may sound, not only rests on unquestionable authority, but might be confirmed

* Schol. Apoll. R., iv., 177.

†Zevs Posios. Mueller, Orchomenos, p. 164.

would become the landing-places of the Argonauts. That such a colony existed at Lemnos seems unquestionable, though it does not follow that Euneus, the son of Jason, who is described in the Iliad as reigning there during the siege of Troy, was an historical personage. But the voyages of the Minyans appear to have been bounded by the mouth of the Euxine, or, if they extended farther, to have been confined to its European coast, where Salmydessus, and Cytea itself, were originally situated; afterward the former name was transferred to the coast of Asia, and the latter to Colchis, or Scythia. Herodotus mentions Ea (a word signifying a land or country), with the addition of the Colchian, as the term of the Argonautic expedition. And Homer also appears to have heard of Æa, as he had of Eetes, but to have placed his kingdom, as well as the Ewan Island, the abode of

gend seems to exhibit an opening intercourse between the opposite shores of the Ægean. If, however, it was begun by the northern Greeks, it was probably not long confined to them, but was early shared by those of Peloponnesus. It would be inconsistent with the piratical habits of the early navigators to suppose that this intercourse was always of a friendly nature, and it may, therefore, not have been without a real ground that the Argonautic expedition was sometimes represented as the occasion of the first conflict between the Greeks and Trojans. We therefore pass, by a natural transition, out of the mythical circle we have just been tracing, into that of the Trojan war; and the light in which we have viewed the one may serve to guide us in forming a judgment on the historical import of the other.*

his sister Circe, in the west.* At all events, | to the local legend, she had not murdered her it is very doubtful whether he had ever heard children; they had been killed by the Corinof Colchis, which he never mentions, though thians; and the public guilt was expiated by Greece must have rung with the name, if the annual sacrifices offered to Heré, in whose temArgonauts had really penetrated so far; and he ple fourteen boys, chosen every twelvemonth transports the moving rocks, between which from noble families, were appointed to spend a Here, for the sake of her favourite Jason, had year in all the ceremonies of solemn mourning. carried his ships, into the Sicilian Sea. The But we cannot here pursue this part of the subconclusion to which we are led by Homer's si-ject any farther. The historical side of the lelence, as well as by all the circumstances of the case, will be little shaken by the supposed monuments of Phrixus and Jason, which Strabo alleges as proofs of the actual presence of these heroes in the countries east of the Euxine, with any one who reflects how easily such monuments start up where a legend has once become current. It is not even necessary to suppose that the numerous chapels in honour of Jason, of which, however, the geographer speaks only from report, were all either fancied or founded by Greeks. When the wonderful tale had spread inland, the barbarians who adopted it would soon be able to produce vestiges of Jason's expedition among them, as at this day some of the Caucasian tribes are said to perform a kind of heathen worship at caverns in their valleys which they imagine to have been consecrated by the presence of the Prophet Elias, whom they hold in the highest reverence, and consult with sacrifices, as an oracular deity, without having the slightest notion of his character and history. Strabo himself believed that Jason had marched into Armenia, and that this country derived its name from his companion, the Thessalian Armenus; and he saw nothing improbable in the opinion that both Jason and Medea had reigned in Media, which was sup-theus pursued his orphan children from one posed to have been named after the heroine, or her son Medus: a specimen of credulity which at once marks the degree of deference due to the geographer's authority in such questions, and the tendency of the fable to widen its geo-himself slain by Hyllus, the eldest son of Hergraphical range.

If, however, it should be asked in what light the hero and heroine of the legend are to be viewed on this hypothesis, it must be answered that both are most probably purely ideal personages, connected with the religion of the people to whose poetry they belong. Jason was, perhaps, no other than the Samothracian god or hero Jasion, whose name was sometimes written in the same manner, the favourite of Demeter, as his namesake was of Heré, and the protector of mariners, as the Thessalian hero was the chief of the Argonauts. Medea seems to have been originally another form of Heré herself, and to have descended, by a common transition, from the rank of a goddess into that of a heroine, when an epithet had been mistaken for a distinct name. We have already seen that the Corinthian tradition claimed her as belonging properly to Corinth, one of the principal seats of the Minyan race. The tragical scenes which rendered her stay there so celebrated were commemorated by religious rites, which continued to be observed until the city was destroyed by the Romans. According

• The Fountain of Artacia, a scene so memorable in the Argonautic legend, which fixes it in the neighbourhood of Cyzicus, is, in the Odyssey (x., 108), together with the gi ants who dwell near it, placed on the coast of Italy. Kiagruth, Tubicau du Caucase, p. 99.

We have already seen in what manner Eurystheus, the son of Sthenelus, had usurped the inheritance which belonged of right to Hercules, as the legitimate representative of Perseus. Sthenelus had reserved Mycena and Tiryns for himself; but he had bestowed the neighbouring town of Midea on Atreus and Thyestes, the sons of Pelops, and uncles of Eurystheus. On the death of Hercules, Eurys

place of refuge to another, until they found an asylum in Attica. Theseus refused to surrender them, and Eurystheus then invaded Attica in person; but his army was routed, and he

cules, in his flight through the Isthmus. Atreus succeeded to the throne of his nephew, whose children had been all cut off in this disastrous expedition; and thus, when his sceptre descended to his son Agamemnon, it conveyed the sovereignty of an ample realm. While the house of Pelops was here enriched with the spoils of Hercules, it enjoyed the fruits of his

*In the account here given of the Argonautic expedition, unfolded, with a profusion of learning and ingenious combiwe have adopted the view of the subject which was first nations, by Mueller, in his Orchomenos, and which still appears to us, in its leading outlines, the only tenable hypothesis. No other with which we are acquainted either explains, or is reconcilable with, all parts of the legend. Weichert (who seems not to have seen Mueller's work, though his own was published a year later), in his book (Urber Apollonius von Rhodus), endeavours to give a more specious form to the common story, but with little success. He makes the fleece to signify the treasures of Phrixus, who flies with them (from some unknown motive), and, of all places in the world, to Colchis, where, according to the barbarous usage of the country, he is murdered by Eetes. Intelligence of this outrage reaches Greece by means of the commerce which, notwithstanding the ferocity of the Colchians, is kept up between them and the Eolids; and the the murder, and to recover the treasure. Plass (i., 315, heroes embark, not in a single ship, but in a fleet, to avenge 416) attempts to combine Mueller's hypothesis with one of his own, about a settlement of the Phoenicians at Orchoinenus. They are driven out of the country by the Minyans, and leave behind them a tradition of the riches which they have carried away (as Plass, following the steps of Boettiger, supposes) to the northeast; and the Minyans now undertake a series of voyages, in the hope of finding and plundering them. But why not rather make for Phænicia?

with the manners of the age-as if a popula tale, whether true or false, could be at variance with them. The feature in the narrative which strikes us as in the highest degree improbable, setting the character of the persons out of the question, is the intercourse implied in it between Troy and Sparta. As to the heroine, it would be sufficient to raise a strong suspicion of her fabulous nature, to observe that she is classed by Herodotus with Io, and Europa, and Medea, all of them persons who, on distinct grounds, must clearly be referred to the domain of mythology. This suspicion is confirmed by all the particulars of her legend; by her birth ;* by her relation to the divine Twins, whose worship seems to have been one of the most ancient forms of religion in Peloponnesus, and especial

triumphant valour in another quarter. He had bestowed Laconia on Tyndareus, the father of Helen; and when Agamemnon's brother, Menelaus, had been preferred to all the other suiters of this beautiful princess, Tyndareus resigned his dominions to his son-in-law. In the mean while a flourishing state had risen up on the eastern side of the Hellespont. Its capital, Troy, had been taken by Hercules, with the assistance of Telamon, son of Æacus, but had been restored to Priam, the son of its conquered king, Laomedon, who reigned there in peace and prosperity over a number of little tribes, until his son Paris, attracted to Laconia by the fame of Helen's beauty, abused the hospitality of Menelaus by carrying off his queen in his absence. All the chiefs of Greece combined their forces, under the command of Agamem-ly in Laconia; and by the divine honours paid non, to avenge this outrage, sailed with a great armament to Troy, and, after a siege of ten years, took and razed it to the ground (B.C. 1184).

to her at Sparta and elsewhere. But a still stronger reason for doubting the reality of the motive assigned by Homer for the Trojan war is, that the same incident recurs in another circle of fictions, and that, in the abduction of Helen, Paris only repeats an exploit also attributed to Theseus. This adventure of the Attic hero seems to have been known to Homer; for he introduces Ethra, the mother of Theseus, whom the Dioscuri were said to have carried off from Attica when they invaded it to recover their sister, in Helen's company at Troy. Theseus, when he came to bear her away, is said to have found her dancing in the temple of the goddess, whose image her daugh

home from Scythia; a feature in the legend which perhaps marks the branch of the Lacedæmonian worship to which she belonged. According to another tradition, Helen was carried off by Idas and Lynceus, the Messenian pair of heroes who answer to the Spartan Twins: variations which seem to show that her abduction was a theme for poetry originally independ

and naturally be associated with that event.

Such is the brief outline of a story which the poems of Homer have made familiar to most readers long before they are tempted to inquire into its historical basis; and it is, consequently, difficult to enter upon the inquiry without some prepossessions unfavourable to an impartial judgment. Here, however, we must not be deterred from stating our view of the subject by the certainty that it will appear to some paradoxical, while others will think that it savours of excessive credulity. The reality of the siege of Troy has sometimes been ques-ter, Iphigenia, was believed to have brought tioned, we conceive, without sufficient ground, and against some strong evidence. According to the rules of sound criticism, very cogent arguments ought to be required to induce us to reject, as a mere fiction, a tradition so ancient, so universally received, so definite, and so interwoven with the whole mass of the national recollections, as that of the Trojan war. Even if unfounded, it must still have had some ade-ent of the Trojan war, but which might easily quate occasion and motive; and it is difficult to imagine what this could have been, unless it arose out of the Greek colonies in Asia; and in this case its universal reception in Greece itself is not easily explained. The leaders of the earliest among these colonies, which were planted in the neighbourhood of Troy, claimed Agamemnon as their ancestor; but if this had suggested the story of his victories in Asia, their scene would probably have been fixed in the very region occupied by his descendants, not in an adjacent land. On the other hand, the course taken by this first (Eolian) migration falls in naturally with a previous tradition of a conquest achieved by Greeks in this part of Asia. We therefore conceive it necessary to admit the reality of the Trojan war as a general fact; but beyond this we scarcely venture to proceed a single step. Its cause and its issue, the manner in which it was conducted, and the parties engaged in it, are all involved in an obscurity which we cannot pretend to penetrate. We find it impossible to adopt the poetical story of Helen, partly on account of its inherent improbability, and partly because we are convinced that Helen is a merely mythological person. The common account of the origin of the war has, indeed, been defended, on the ground that it is perfectly consistent with Plut., Thes., c. 20, 21.

If, however, we reject the traditional occasion of the Trojan war, we are driven to conjecture in order to explain the real connexion of the events; yet not so as to be wholly without traces to direct us. We have already observed that the Argonautic expedition was sometimes represented as connected with the first conflict between Greece and Troy. This was according to the legend which numbered Hercules among the Argonauts, and supposed him, on the voyage, to have rendered a service to the Trojan king, Laomedon, who afterward defrauded him of his recompense. The main fact, however, that Troy was taken and sacked by Hercules, is recognised by Homer; and thus we see it already provoking the enmity or

* Homer describes her as the daughter of Jupiter, but does not mention her mother Leda, the wife of Tyndareus, The fable, that she was the daughter of Nemesis (Paus., i., 33, 7). sounds to us, who are only familiar with the later idea of Nemesis, as an allegorical fiction; but it may be quite as ancient as the other, perhaps originally the same as Hesiod's (Schol. Pind., N., x., 150), that she was a daugh

ter of Oceanus and Tethys.

+ Herod.. vi., 61. At Rhodes she was worshipped under the epithet devepiris, and a legend was devised to account for it (Paus., iii, 19, 10). Compare also the accounts of 6), of the temple of Aphrodite at Trazea (Paus., 11., 32, 7), the temple which she dedicates to Ilithyia Paus., 11., 22,

can scarcely reconcile the imagination to the transition from the six ships of Hercules to the vast host of Agamemnon. On the other hand, there is no difficulty in believing that, whatever may have been the motives of the expedition, the spirit of adventure may have drawn warriors together from most parts of Greece, among whom the southern and northern Achæans, under Pelopid and acid princes, took the lead, and that it may thus have deserved the character, which is uniformly ascribed to it, of a national enterprise. The presence of several distinguished chiefs, each attended by a small band, would be sufficient both to explain the celebrity of the achievement and to account for the event. If it were not trespassing too far on the field of poetry, one might imagine that the plan of the Greeks was the same which we find frequently adopted in later times, by invaders whose force was comparatively weak: that they fortified themselves in a post, from which they continued to annoy and distress the enemy, till stratagem or treachery gave them possession of the town.

tempting the cupidity of the Greeks, in the generation before the celebrated war; and it may easily be conceived, that if its power and opulence revived after this blow, it might again excite the same feelings. The expedition of Hercules may indeed suggest a doubt whether it was not an earlier and simpler form of the same tradition which grew at length into the argument of the Iliad; for there is a striking resemblance between the two wars, not only in the events, but in the principal actors. As the prominent figures in the second siege are Agamemnon and Achilles, who represent the royal house of Mycena and that of the acids, so in the first the Argive Hercules is accompanied by the Eacid Telamon;* and even the quarrel and reconciliation of the allied chiefs are features common to both traditions. Nor, perhaps, should it be overlooked that, according to a legend which was early celebrated in the epic poetry of Greece,† the Greek fleet sailed twice from Aulis to the coast of Asia. In the first voyage it reached the mouth of the Caicus, where the army landed, and gained a victory over Telephus, king of Mysia; but on leaving the Mysian coast, the fleet was dispersed by a storm, and compelled to reassemble at Aulis. There seems to be no reason for treating this either as a fictitious episode, or as a fact really belonging to the history of the Trojan war. It may have been originally a distinct legend,lated that such a state was finally destroyed by grounded, like that of Hercules, on a series of attacks made by the Greeks on the coast of Asia, whether merely for the sake of plunder, or with a view to permanent settlements.

Though there can be no doubt that the expedition accomplished its immediate object, it seems to be also clear that a Trojan state survived for a time the fall of Ilion; for an historian of great authority on this subject, both from his age and his country, Xanthus, the Lydian, re

the invasion of the Phrygians, a Thracian tribe, which crossed over from Europe to Asia after the Trojan war.* And this is indirectly confirmed by the testimony of Homer, who introAs to the expedition which ended in the fall duces Poseidon predicting that the posterity of of Ilion, while the leading facts are so uncer-Eneas should long continue to reign over the tain, it must clearly be hopeless to form any Trojans, after the race of Priam should be exdistinct conception of its details. It seems tinct. To the conquerors the war is representscarcely necessary to observe that no more re-ed as no less disastrous in its remote conseliance can be placed on the enumeration of the quences, than it was glorious in its immediate Greek forces in the Iliad than on the other issue. The returns of the heroes formed a disparts of the poem, which have a more poetical tinct circle of epic poetry, of which the Odyssey aspect, especially as it appears to be a compila- includes only a small part, and they were gention adapted to a later state of things. That erally full of tragical adventures. This calamithe numbers of the armament are, as Thucydi- tous result of a successful enterprise seems to des observed, exaggerated by the poet, may have been an essential feature in the legend of easily be believed; and, perhaps, we may very Troy; for Hercules also, on his return, was well dispense with the historian's supposition, persecuted by the wrath of Heré, and driven that a detachment was employed in the culti-out of his course by a furious tempest. We vation of the Thracian Chersonesus. "My shall hereafter touch on the historical foundafather," says the son of Hercules in the Iliad, tion of this part of the story: for the present came hither with no more than six ships, and we will only remark, that if, as many traces infew men yet he laid lion waste, and made dicate, the legend grew up and spread among her streets desolate." A surprising contrast the Asiatic Greeks, when newly settled in the indeed to the efforts and the success of Aga- land where their forefathers, the heroes of a memnon, who, with his 1200 ships and 100,000 better generation, had won so many glorious men, headed by the flower of the Grecian chiv- fields, it would not be difficult to conceive how alry, lay ten years before the town, often ready it might take this melancholy turn. The siege to abandon the enterprise in despair, and at last of Troy was the last event to which the emiwas indebted for victory to an unexpected fa- grants could look back with joy and pride. But vourable turn of affairs. It has been conjec-it was a bright spot, seen through a long vista, tured that, after the first calamity, the city was more strongly fortified, and rose rapidly in power during the reign of Priam; but this supposition

checkered with manifold vicissitudes, laborious struggles, and fatal revolutions. They had come as exiles and outcasts to the shores which their ancestors had left as conquerors: it seemed as if the jealousy of the gods had been roused by the greatest achievement of the Achæans to afflict and humble them. The changes and sufferings of several generations were naturally crowded into a short period following the event • Strabo, xiv., 680; xii., 572.

perhaps, be room for suspecting that he has unwittingly passed over some gradations in the advance of society; that he has sometimes transferred to the age of his heroes what belonged properly to his own; and still oftener, that he has heightened and embellished the ob

which was viewed as their cause, and were manners, and opinions. Of this kind of truth represented in the adverse fortune of the prin- the poet's contemporaries were competent and cipal chiefs of the nation. As the rising spirit unbiased judges. A picture which did not corof naval adventure blended itself with these pa- respond to a state of things familiar to them, triotic feelings and recollections, the marvellous they would have found unintelligible and uninregions of the East and West, long objects of teresting. We cannot ascribe either to them dim anticipation and of eager curiosity, were the power of comprehending, or to the poet the drawn into the pathetic picture; and the island ambition of affecting, a learned propriety in his of Alcinous reflected the familiar image of a descriptions, and still less can it be supposed maritime people, which combined a keen relish that he drew from any ideal model. It seems for social enjoyments with contempt of danger clear that the generation which he saw was not and hardship, and loved to fill up the intervals parted from that of which he sang by any wide of perilous voyages with the feast, the song, break in thoughts, feelings, or social relations. and the dance. Such a supposition would be not only groundIn discussing the historical reality of the Tro-less, but would be at variance with all that we jan war, we have abstained from touching on a know of the gradual progress of change in the question connected with it, which is still a sub-earliest period of Greek history. There may, ject of active controversy-the antiquity and original form of the poems which contain the earliest memorial of that event. We have thought it better to keep aloof for the present from this controversy; because, in whatever manner it may be decided, it does not seem to affect any of the opinions here advanced. How-jects which he touches; but there is no ground ever near the poet, if he is to be considered as for the opposite suspicion that he has anya single one, may be supposed to have lived to where endeavoured to revive an image of obsothe times of which he sings, it is clear that he lete simplicity, or, for the sake of dramatic cordid not suffer himself to be fettered by his knowl-rectness, has suppressed any advantage in edge of the facts. For aught we know, he may have been a contemporary of those who had fought under Achilles; but it is not the less true that he describes his principal hero as the son of a sea-goddess. He and his hearers most probably looked upon epic song as a vehicle of history, and therefore it required a popular tradition for its basis, without which it would have seemed hollow and insipid, its ornaments misplaced, and its catastrophe uninteresting. But The Homeric world is not a region of enit is equally manifest that the kind of history chantment, called into existence by the wand for which he invoked the aid of the Muses to of a magician; it is at once poetical and real. strengthen his memory, was not chiefly valued In confining our view to its real side, we do not as a recital of real events: that it was one in break the charm by which it captivates the imwhich the marvellous appeared natural, and that agination. The historian's aim, however, is form of the narrative most credible which tend- very different from the poet's: it is the proved most to exalt the glory of his heroes. If in ince of the former to collect what the latter detached passages the poet sometimes appears scatters carelessly and unconsciously over his to be relating with the naked simplicity of truth, way; to interpret and supply dark and imperwe cannot ascribe any higher authority to these fect hints. For the subjects on which the poet episodes than to the rest of the poem, and must dwells with delight are not always the most inattribute their seeming plainness and sobriety teresting and instructive to the historical into the brevity of the space allotted to them, rath-quirer, though there are few in which his cuer than to superior accuracy in the transmission of their contents. The campaigns of Nestor, the wars of Calydon, the expeditions of Achilles, probably appear less poetical than the battles before Troy, only because they stand in the background of the picture as subordinate groups, and were, perhaps, transferred into it from other legends, in which, occupying a different place, they were exhibited in a more marvellous and poetical shape.

But though, when we are inquiring into the reality of persons and events, we can allow very little weight to the authority of Homer, there is another more important kind of truth, which we attribute to his poetry with a conviction which would not be at all shaken, even if it could be shown that he was separated from the scenes which he describes by a longer interval than has yet been assumed in any hypothesis. The kind of truth we mean is that which relates to the general condition of society, to institutions,

knowledge or refinement which his contemporaries possessed. What he represents most truly is the state of Grecian society near to his effects of imperceptible changes and for poetown day; but if we make due allowance for the ical colouring, we are in no danger of falling into any material error in extending his descriptions to the whole period which we term the Heroic.

Homer is

riosity is absolutely disappointed. often minutely exact in describing artificial productions and technical processes, while the social institutions, the moral and religious sentiments of his age, as things universally understood, are never formally noticed, but only betrayed by accidental allusions. But the light which he affords is confined to the circle into which he draws us: it is only one period and wholly silent as to the steps which led to it. one stage of society that he exhibits, and he is When we desire to look back to an antecedent period, we are reduced to depend on traditions and indications, which are seldom so clear and authentic as his evidence with regard to his own age. They are not, however, on that account to be indiscriminately rejected; nor can his silence always be held conclusive as to things which, if they existed, must have come within his knowledge. From the materials furnished by the Homeric poems-examined, however, by