of the city of Athens, the
institution of marriage, and the introduction of religious rites and
ceremonies. 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
AEgyptus. 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. Another
colony was the one led from Asia by Pelops, from whom the southern
peninsula of Greece derived its name of Peloponnesus. Pelops is
represented as a Phrygian, and the son of the wealthy king Tantalus.
He became king of Mycenae, 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.

The tale of the Phoenician colony, conducted by Cadmus, and which
founded Thebes in Boeotia, rests upon a different basis. 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 it is certain
that the Greeks were indebted to the Phoenicians for the art of
writing; for both the names and the forms of the letters in the Greek
alphabet are evidently derived from the Phoenician. With this
exception the Oriental strangers left no permanent traces of their
settlements in Greece; and the population of the country continued to
be essentially Grecian, uncontaminated by any foreign elements.

The age of the heroes, from the first appearance of the Hellenes in
Thessaly to the return of the Greeks from Troy, was supposed to be a
period of about two hundred years. These heroes were believed to be 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.

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.

Hercules was the son of Zeus (Jupiter) and Alcmena; but the jealous
anger of Hera (Juno) raised up against him an opponent and a master in
the person of Eurystheus at whose bidding the greatest of all heroes
was to achieve those wonderful labours which f