to be peopled by the descendants of the Pelasgians. This was especially the case with Arcadia and Attica, which claimed to have been inhabited by the same tribes from time immemorial. The Pelasgians were spread over the Italian as well as the Grecian peninsula; and the Pelasgic language thus formed the basis of the Latin as well as of the Greek. It is true that Herodotus speaks of the Pelasgic as a foreign language, totally distinct from the Greek; but his testimony on such a subject is not entitled to any weight, since the ancients were lamentably deficient in philological knowledge, and had no notion of the affinity of languages.

Of the Pelasgians themselves our information is scanty. They were not mere barbarians. They are represented as tilling the ground and dwelling in walled cities.* Their religion appears to have been essentially the same as the religion of the Hellenes. Their great divinity was Zeus, the national Hellenic god, and the chief seat of his worship was Dodōna in Epirus. Hence Homer gives to the Dodonaan Jove the title of Pelasgic; and his oracle at Dodona was always regarded as the most ancient in Greece.

The Pelasgians were divided into several tribes, such as the Hellēnes, Leleges, Caucōnes, and others. In what respects the Hellenes were superior to the other Pelasgic tribes we do not know; but they appear at the first dawn of history as the dominant race in Greece. The rest of the Pelasgians disappeared before them or were incorporated with them; their dialect of the Pelasgic tongue became the language of Greece; and their worship of the Olympian Zeus gradually supplanted the more ancient worship of the Dodonæan god.

§ 6. The civilization of the Greeks and the development of their language bear all the marks of home growth, and probably were little affected by foreign influence. The traditions, however, of the Greeks would point to a contrary conclusion. It was a general belief among them, that the Pelasgians were reclaimed from barbarism by Oriental strangers, who settled in the country and introduced among the rude inhabitants the first elements of civilization. Many of these traditions, however, are not ancient legends, but owe their origin to the philosophical speculations of a later age, which loved to represent an imaginary progress of society, from the time when men fed on acorns and ran wild in woods, to the time when they became united into political communities and owned the supremacy of law and reason. The speculative Greeks who visited Egypt in the sixth and fifth centuries before the Christian era were profoundly impressed with the monuments of the old Egyptian monarchy, which even in that early age of the world indicated a gray and hoary antiquity. The Egyptian priests were not slow to avail themselves of the impression made upon their visitors, and told the latter many a wondrous tale to prove that

* A fortified town was called Larissa by the Pelasgians.

the civilization, the arts, and even the religion of the Greeks, all came from the land of the Nile. These tales found easy believers; they were carried back to Greece, and repeated with various modifications and embellishments; and thus, no doubt, arose the greater number of the traditions respecting Egyptian colonies in Greece.

§ 7. Although we may therefore reject with safety the traditions respecting these Egyptian colonies, two are of so much celebrity that they cannot be passed over entirely in an account of the early ages of Greece. Attica is said to have been indebted for the arts of civilized life to Cecrops, a native of Sais in Egypt. To him is ascribed the foundation of the city of Athens, the institution of marriage, and the introduction of religious rites and ceremonies. The Acropolis or citadel of Athens, to, which the original city was confined, continued to bear the name of Cecropia even in later times. Argos, in like manner, is said to have been founded by the Egyptian Danaus, who fled to Greece with his fifty daughters to escape from the persecution of their suitors, the fifty sons of his brother Ægyptus. The Egyptian stranger was elected king by the natives, and from him the tribe of the Danai derived their name, which Homer frequently uses as a general appellation for the Greeks. The only fact which lends any countenance to the existence of an Egyptian colony in Greece is the discovery of the remains of two pyramids at no great distance from Argos; but this form of building is not confined to Egypt. Pyramids are found in India, Babylonia, and Mexico, and may therefore have been erected by the early inhabitants of Greece independently of any connection with Egypt.

§ 8. Another colony, not less celebrated and not more credible than the two just mentioned, is the one led from Asia by Pelops, from whom the southern peninsula of Greece derived its name of Peloponnesus. Pelops is usually represented as a native of Sipylus in Phrygia, and the son of the wealthy King Tantalus. By means of his riches, which he brought with him into Greece, he became king of Mycena and the founder of a powerful dynasty, one of the most renowned in the Heroic Age of Greece. From him was descended Agamemnon, who led the Grecian host against Troy.

§ 9. The case is different with the Phoenician colony, which is said to have been founded by Cadmus at Thebes in Boeotia. We have decisive evidence that the Phoenicians planted colonies at an early period in the islands of Greece; and it is only natural to believe that they also settled upon the shores of the mainland. Whether there was such a person as the Phoenician Cadmus, and whether he built the town called Cadmea, which afterwards became the citadel of Thebes, as the ancient legends relate, cannot be determined; but, setting aside all tradition on the subject, there is one fact which proves indisputably an early intercourse between Phoenicia and Greece. It was to the Phoenicians that the Greeks were indebted for the art of writing; for both the names and the forms o

the letters in the Greek alphabet are evidently derived from the Phonician. With this exception the Oriental strangers left no permanent trace of their settlements in Greece; and the population of the country continued to be essentially Grecian, uncontaminated by any foreign ele

ments.

Paris, from the Æginetan Sculptures.#

In the Glyptothek at Munich. - ED.

Ajax, from the Æginetan Sculptures.*

CHAPTER II.

THE GRECIAN HEROES.

§ 1. Mythical Character o. the Heroic Age. § 2. Hercules. 3. Theseus. § 4. Minos. § 5. Voyage of the Argonauts. § 6. The Seven against Thebes and the Epigoni. § 7. The Trojan War as related in the Iliad. § 8. Later Additions. § 9. Return of the Grecian Heroes from Troy. § 10. Date of the Fall of Troy. 11. Whether the Heroic Legends contain any Historical Facts. § 12. The Homeric Poems present a Picture of a Real State of Society.

§ 1. It was universally believed by the Greeks, that their native land was in the earlier ages ruled by a noble race of beings, possessing a superhuman though not a divine nature, and superior to ordinary men in strength of body and greatness of soul. These are the Heroes of Grecian mythology, whose exploits and adventures form the great mine from which the Greeks derived inexhaustible materials for their poetry,

"Presenting Thebes or Pelops' line,

Or the tale of Troy divine"

According to mythical chronology the Heroic Age constitutes a period of about two hundred years, from the first appearance of the Hellenes in Thessaly to the return of the Greeks from Troy. Since the legends of this period belong to mythology and not to history, they find their proper

* In the Glyptothek at Munich. -- ED.

place in a work devoted to the former subject. But some of them are so closely interwoven with the historical traditions of Greece that it is impossible to pass them by entirely. Among the heroes three stand conspicuously forth Hercules, the national hero of Greece; Theseus, the hero of Attica; and Minos, king of Crete, the principal founder of Grecian law and civilization.

§ 2. Of all the Heroic families none was more celebrated than that of Danaus, king of Argos. In the fifth generation we find it personified in Danaë, the daughter of Acrisius, whom Zeus wooed in a shower of gold, and became by her the father of Perseus, the celebrated conqueror of Medusa. Perseus was the ancestor of Hercules, being the great-grandfather both of Alcmena and of her husband Amphitryon. According to the well-known legend, Zeus, enamored of Alcmena, assumed the form of Amphitryon in his absence, and became by her the father of Hercules. To the son thus begotten Zeus had destined the sovereignty of Argos; but the jealous anger of Hera (Juno) raised up against him an opponent and a master in the person of Eurystheus, another descendant of Perseus, at whose bidding the greatest of all heroes was to achieve those wonderful labors which filled the whole world with his fame. In these are realized, on a magnificent scale, the two great objects of ancient heroism, the destruction of physical and moral evil, and the acquisition of wealth and power. Such, for instance, are the labors in which he destroys the terrible Nemean lion and Lernean hydra, carries off the girdle of Ares from Hippolyte, queen of the Amazons, and seizes the golden apples of the Hesperides, guarded by a hundred-headed dragon. At the same time, however, we perceive, as is the case with all the Grecian heroes, that the extraordinary endowments of Hercules did not preserve him from human weakness and error, and the consequent expiation which they demanded. After slaying in his ungovernable rage his friend and companion, Iphitus, the son of Eurytus, he is seized with sickness, becomes the slave of the Lydian queen, Omphalé, devotes himself to effeminate occupations, and sinks into luxury and wantonness. At a subsequent period another crime produces his death. The rape of Iolé, the daughter of the same Eurytus whose son he had slain, incites his wife Deianira to send him the fatal shirt, poisoned with the blood of the centaur, Nessus. Unable to endure the torments it occasions, he repairs to Mount Eta, which becomes the scene of his apotheosis. As he lies on the funeral pile there erected for him by Hyllus, his eldest son by Deianira, a cloud descends and bears him off amidst thunder and lightning to Olympus, where he is received among the immortal gods, and, being reconciled to Hera, receives in marriage her daughter Hebé, the goddess of youth.

§ 3. Theseus was the son of Ægeus, king of Athens, and of Æthra, daughter of Pittheus, king of Trozen. On his return to Athens Ægeus left Æthra behind him at Trozen, enjoining her not to send their son to