nd by that of Evans and the other explorers--Italian,
British, and American--in Crete. The Mesopotamian and Egyptian
discoveries traced back a little farther streams which had already
been followed far up their course; those of Schliemann and Evans
revealed the reality of one which, so to speak, had hitherto been
believed to flow only through the dreamland of legend. It was obvious
that mighty men must have existed before Agamemnon, but what manner
of men they were, and in what manner of world they lived, were
matters absolutely unknown, and, to all appearance, likely to remain
so. An abundant wealth of legend told of great Kings and heroes,
of stately palaces, and mighty armies, and powerful fleets, and
the whole material of an advanced civilization. But the legends
were manifestly largely imaginative--deities and demi-gods, men
and fabulous monsters, were mingled in them on the same plane--and
it seemed impossible that we should ever get back to the solid
ground, if solid ground had ever existed, on which these ancient
stories first rested.

For the historian of the middle of the nineteenth century Greek
history began with the First Olympiad in 776 B.C. Before that the
story of the return of the Herakleids and the Dorian conquest of
the men of the Bronze Age might very probably embody, in a fanciful
form, a genuine historical fact; the Homeric poems were to be treated
with respect, not only on account of their supreme poetical merit,
but as possibly representing a credible tradition, though, of course,
their pictures of advanced civilization were more or less imaginative
projections upon the past of the culture of the writer's own period
or periods. Beyond that lay the great waste land of legend, in
which gods and godlike heroes moved and enacted their romances
among 'Gorgons and Hydras and Chimeras dire.' What proportion of
fact, if any, lay in the stories of Minos, the great lawgiver,
and his war fleet, and his Labyrinth, with its monstrous occupant;
of Theseus and Ariadne and the Minotaur; of Daedalus, the first
aeronaut, and his wonderful works of art and science; or of any
other of the thousand and one beautiful or tragic romances of ancient
Hellas, to attempt to determine this lay utterly beyond the sphere
of the serious historian. 'To analyze the fables,' says Grote, 'and
to elicit from them any trustworthy particular facts, appears to
me a fruitless attempt. The religious recollections, the romantic
inventio