considerable part of the population of Crete. | been pared down into an historical form, and its We would only suggest that the age of Minos marvellous and poetical features have been all may not improbably be considered as represent- effaced, so that nothing is left but what may aping a period when the arts, introduced by Pho- pear to belong to its pith and substance, it benician settlers, had raised one of the Cretan comes, indeed, dry and meager enough, but not tribes, under an able and enterprising chief, to much more intelligible than before. It still rea temporary pre-eminence over its neighbours, lates an adventure, incomprehensible in its dewhich enabled it to establish a sort of maritime sign, astonishing in its execution, connected empire. This supposition may, perhaps, afford with no conceivable cause, and with no sensible the easiest explanation of the singular legend effect. The narrative, reduced to the shape in that Minos perished in Sicily, whither he had which it has often been thought worthy of a sailed in pursuit of Dædalus. This story seems place in history, runs as follows: In the generato have had its origin in the progress of the tion before the Trojan war, Jason, a young Phoenician settlements towards the west. Dæd- Thessalian prince, had incurred the jealousy of alus flies before Minos, first to Sicily, and then his kinsman Pelias, who reigned at Iolcos. The to Sardinia.* In Sicily he leaves wonderful crafty king encouraged the adventurous youth monuments of his art among the rude natives, to embark in a maritime expedition full of diffiand particularly exerts his skill in strengthen-culty and danger. It was to be directed to a ing and adorning the temple of Venus at Eryx,† point far beyond the most remote which Greek which was most probably founded by Phoeni- navigation had hitherto reached in the same cians. According to the Cretan tradition, the quarter; to the eastern corner of the sea, so disaster of Minos was attended with the total celebrated in ancient times for the ferocity of downfall of Crcte's maritime power; and the the barbarians inhabiting its coasts, that it was language of Herodotus seems to imply that it commonly supposed to have derived from them was only after this event that the island was the name of Axenus, the inhospitable, before it occupied by a Hellenic population; his silence, acquired the opposite name of the Euxine, from at all events, proves that he had never heard the civilization which was at length introduced of a migration of Dorians from Thessaly to by Greek settlers. Here, in the land of the Crete.‡ Colchians, lay the goal, because this contained the prize, from which the voyage has been frequently called the adventure of the golden fleece. Jason having built a vessel of uncommon size-in more precise terms, the first fiftyoared galley his country had ever launchedand having manned it with a band of heroes, who assembled from various parts of Greece to share the glory of the enterprise, sailed to Colchis, where he not only succeeded in the principal object of his expedition, whatever this may have been, but carried off Medea, the daughter of the Colchian king Eetes. Our plan obliges us to pass over a great number of wars, expeditions, and achievements of these ages, which were highly celebrated in heroic song, not because we deem them to contain less of historical reality than others which we mention, but because they appear not to have been attended with any important or lasting consequences. We might otherwise have been induced to notice the quarrel which divided the royal house of Thebes, and led to a series of wars between Thebes and Argos, which terminated in the destruction of the former city, and the temporary expulsion of the Cadmeans, its ancient inhabitants. Hercules and Theseus undertook their adventures either alone, or with the aid of a single comrade; but in these Theban wars we find a union of seven chiefs; and such confederacies appear to have become frequent in the latter part of the heroic age. So a numerous band of heroes was combined in the enterprise which, whatever may have been its real nature, became renowned as the chase of the Calydonian boar. We proceed to speak of two expeditions much more celebrated, conducted, like these, by a league of independent chieftains, but directed, not to any part of Greece, but against distant lands; we mean the voyage of the Argonauts, and the siege of Troy, which will conclude our review of the mythical period of Grecian history. The Argonautic expedition, when viewed in the light in which it has usually been considered, is an event which a critical historian, if he feels himself compelled to believe it, may think it his duty to notice, but which he is glad to pass rapidly over as a perplexing and unprofitable riddle. For even when the ancient legend has Though this is an artificial statement, framed to reconcile the main incidents of a wonderful story with nature and probability, it still contains many points which can scarcely be explained or believed. It carries us back to a period when navigation was in its infancy among the Greeks; yet their first essay at maritime discovery is supposed at once to have reached the extreme limit which was long after attained by the adventurers who gradually explored the same formidable sea, and gained a footing on its coasts. The success of the undertaking, however, is not so surprising as the project itself, for this implies a previous knowledge of the country to be explored, which it is very difficult to account for. But the end proposed is still more mysterious, and, indeed, can only be explained with the aid of a conjecture. Such an explanation was attempted by some of the later writers among the ancients, who perceived that the whole story turned on the golden fleece, the supposed motive of the voyage, and that this feature had not a sufficiently historical appearance. But the mountain torrents of Colchis were said to sweep down particles of gold, which the natives used to detain by fleeces dipped in the streams. This report suggested a mode of translating the fable into historical language. It was conjectured that the Argonauts had been attracted by the metallic treasures of the country, and that the golden fleece was a poetical description of the process which they | by parallel instances of Greek superstition; and 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 Æetes, 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 essential 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; the fleece was nailed to an oak in the Grove of Mars, where it was kept by Eetes as a sacred treasure, or palladium. 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 vigour even down to the Persian wars. Herodotus informs us that, when Xerxes, on his march to Greece, had come to Alus, a town of the Thessalian Achaia, situate near the Gulf of Pagasæ, in a tract sometimes called the Athamantian Plain, his guides described to him the rites belonging to the temple of the Laphystian Jupiter, an epithet equivalent to that under which Phrixus is elsewhere said to have sacrificed the ram to the same god. The eldest among the descendants of Phrixus was forbidden to enter the council-house at Alus, though their ancestor Athamas was the founder of the city. If the head of the family was detected on the forbidden 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 Æa, 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 Pocos. Mueller, Orchomenos, p. 164. 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 object of which was imaginary, and the direction 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. 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 be lief, 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 manner in which the adventurers are most properly described. They are Minyans-a branch of the Greek nation, whose attention was very early drawn, by their situation-not, perhaps, without some influence from the example and intercourse of the Phoenicians-to maritime pursuits. The form which the legend assumed was probably determined by the course of their earliest naval expeditions. They were naturally attracted towards the northeast, first by the islands that lay before the entrance of the Hellespont, and then by the shores of the Propontis and its two straits. Their successive colonies, or spots signalized either by hostilities or peaceful transactions with the natives, 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 Cytæa 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 a, as he had of Eetes, but to have placed his kingdom, as well as the Ææan Island, the abode of 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 Heré, 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 gend seems to exhibit an opening intercourse case, will be little shaken by the supposed mon-between the opposite shores of the Egean. If, uments of Phrixus and Jason, which Strabo al- however, it was begun by the northern Greeks, leges as proofs of the actual presence of these it was probably not long confined to them, but heroes in the countries east of the Euxine, with was early shared by those of Peloponnesus. It any one who reflects how easily such monu- would be inconsistent with the piratical habits ments start up where a legend has once become of the early navigators to suppose that this incurrent. It is not even necessary to suppose tercourse was always of a friendly nature, and that the numerous chapels in honour of Jason, it may, therefore, not have been without a real of which, however, the geographer speaks only ground that the Argonautic expedition was from report, were all either fancied or founded sometimes represented as the occasion of the by Greeks. When the wonderful tale had spread first conflict between the Greeks and Trojans. inland, the barbarians who adopted it would soon We therefore pass, by a natural transition, out be able to produce vestiges of Jason's expedi- of the mythical circle we have just been tracing, tion among them, as at this day some of the into that of the Trojan war; and the light in Caucasian tribes are said to perform a kind of which we have viewed the one may serve to heathen worship at caverns in their valleys guide us in forming a judgment on the historiwhich they imagine to have been consecrated cal import of the other.* 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 supposed 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. 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 Mycenæ 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, Eurystheus pursued his orphan children from one 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 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 al-He makes the fleece to signify the treasures of Phrixus, ready 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 giants who dwell near it, placed on the coast of Italy. Klaproth, Tableau du Caucase, p. 99. *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 hyexplains, or is reconcilable with, all parts of the legend. pothesis. No other with which we are acquainted either Weichert (who seems not to have seen Mueller's work, though his own was published a year later), in his book specious form to the common story, but with little success. (Urber Apollonius von Rhodus), endeavours to give a more 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 Aetes Intelligence of this outrage reaches Greece by means of the commerce which, notwithstanding the ferocity of the Col chians, 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 Orchomenus. 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 Phoenicia ? 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 Eacus, 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). 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 especialto 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 Æthra, 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- · 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, home from Scythia; a feature in the legend and against some strong evidence. According which perhaps marks the branch of the Laceto the rules of sound criticism, very cogent ar- dæmonian worship to which she belonged. Acguments ought to be required to induce us to cording to another tradition, Helen was carried reject, as a mere fiction, a tradition so ancient, off by Idas and Lynceus, the Messenian pair so universally received, so definite, and so in- of heroes who answer to the Spartan Twins: terwoven with the whole mass of the national variations which seem to show that her abducrecollections, as that of the Trojan war. Even tion was a theme for poetry originally independif 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 and naturally be associated with that event. 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 (Æolian) 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 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., idea of Nemesis, as an allegorical fiction; but it may be i., 33, 7), sounds to us, who are only familiar with the later quite as ancient as the other, perhaps originally the same as Hesiod's (Schol. Pind., N., x., 150), that she was a daughter of Oceanus and Tethys. + Herod., vi., 61. At Rhodes she was worshipped under the epithet devopiris, 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 Træezea (Paus., ii., 32, 7), the temple which she dedicates to Ilithyia (Paus., ii., 22, with Plut., Thes., c. 20, 21. 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 acid 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, 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. 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, un der Pelopid and acid princes, took the lead, and that it may thus have deserved the charac ter, 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. 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|lated that such a state was finally destroyed by 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 Greek forces in the Iliad than on the other parts of the poem, which have a more poetical aspect, especially as it appears to be a compilation adapted to a later state of things. That the numbers of the armament are, as Thucydides observed, exaggerated by the poet, may easily be believed; and, perhaps, we may very well dispense with the historian's supposition, that a detachment was employed in the cultivation of the Thracian Chersonesus. "My father," says the son of Hercules in the Iliad, came hither with no more than six ships, and few men yet he laid Ilion waste, and made her streets desolate." A surprising contrast indeed to the efforts and the success of Agamemnon, who, with his 1200 ships and 100,000 men, headed by the flower of the Grecian chivalry, lay ten years before the town, often ready to abandon the enterprise in despair, and at last was indebted for victory to an unexpected favourable turn of affairs. It has been conjectured that, after the first calamity, the city was more strongly fortified, and rose rapidly in power during the reign of Priam; but this supposition quences, than it was glorious in its immediate issue. The returns of the heroes formed a distinct circle of epic poetry, of which the Odyssey includes only a small part, and they were generally full of tragical adventures. This calamitous result of a successful enterprise seems to have been an essential feature in the legend of Troy; for Hercules also, on his return, was persecuted by the wrath of Heré, and driven out of his course by a furious tempest. We shall hereafter touch on the historical foundation of this part of the story: for the present we will only remark, that if, as many traces indicate, the legend grew up and spread among the Asiatic Greeks, when newly settled in the land where their forefathers, the heroes of a better generation, had won so many glorious fields, it would not be difficult to conceive how it might take this melancholy turn. The siege of Troy was the last event to which the emigrants could look back with joy and pride. But it was a bright spot, seen through a long vista, 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 Welcker, however (in an essay on the Ajax of Sopho- if the jealousy of the gods had been roused by cles, in the Rh. Mus.), thinks that the genealogy by which the greatest achievement of the Achæans to Telamon was connected with the line of Eacus was invent-afflict and humble them. The changes and ed after Homer. It was rejected by Pherecydes (Apollod., iii., 12, 6, 8), who represented Telamon as the friend only, sufferings of several generations were naturally not the brother, of Peleus. crowded into a short period following the event From which it passed into the Cypria of Stasinus, who is probably not later than the eighth century B.C. VOL. I.-L * Strabo, xiv., 680; xii., 572. |