s date.

And yet they used to tell in Greece a great number of legends about
this primitive period. These were especially the exploits of ancient
kings and of heroes who were adored as demi-gods. These stories were
so mingled with fable that it is impossible to know how much truth
they may contain. They said at Athens that the first king, Cecrops,
was half man and half serpent; at Thebes, that Cadmus, founder of the
city, had come from Phoenicia to seek his sister Europa who had been
stolen by a bull; that he had killed a dragon and had sowed his teeth,
from which was sprung a race of warriors, and that the noble families
of Thebes descended from these warriors. At Argos it was said that the
royal family was the issue of Pelops to whom Zeus had given a shoulder
of ivory to replace the one devoured by a goddess. Thus each country
had its legends and the Greeks continued to the end to relate them and
to offer worship to their ancient heroes--Perseus, Bellerophon,
Herakles, Theseus, Minos, Castor and Pollux, Meleager, OEdipus. The
majority of the Greeks, even among the better educated, admitted, at
least in part, the truth of these traditions. They accepted as
historical facts the war between the two sons of OEdipus, king of
Thebes, and the expedition of the Argonauts, sailing forth in quest of
the Golden Fleece, which was guarded by two brazen-footed bulls
vomiting flames.

=The Trojan War.=--Of all these legends the most fully developed and
the most celebrated was the legend of the Trojan War. It recounted
that about the twelfth century, Troy, a rich and powerful city, held
sway over the coast of Asia. Paris, a Trojan prince, having come to
Greece, had abducted Helen, wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta.
Agamemnon, king of Argos, made a league of the kings of Greece; a
Greek army went in a fleet of two hundred galleys to besiege Troy. The
siege endured ten years because the supreme god, Zeus, had taken the
side of the Trojans. All the Greek chiefs participated in this
adventure. Achilles, the bravest and the most beautiful of these,
killed Hector, the principal defender of Troy, and dragged his corpse
around the city; he fought clad in divine armor which had been
presented him by his mother, a goddess of the sea; in turn he died,
shot by an arrow in the heel. The Greeks, despairing of taking the
city by force, employed a trick: they pretended to depart, and left an
immense horse of wood in which were concealed the chiefs