authentic history, and that we can determine neither his
age nor his country with precision. We can only decide that he was a
Greek who lived at some time previous to the year 900 B.C.

Here, however, I must begin to part company with Mr. Gladstone, and
shall henceforth unfortunately have frequent occasion to differ from him
on points of fundamental importance. For Mr. Gladstone not only regards
the Homeric age as strictly within the limits of authentic history, but
he even goes much further than this. He would not only fix the date of
Homer positively in the twelfth century B. C., but he regards the
Trojan war as a purely historical event, of which Homer is the authentic
historian and the probable eye-witness. Nay, he even takes the word
of the poet as proof conclusive of the historical character of events
happening several generations before the Troika, according to the
legendary chronology. He not only regards Agamemnon, Achilleus,
and Paris as actual personages, but he ascribes the same reality to
characters like Danaos, Kadmos, and Perseus, and talks of the Pelopid
and Aiolid dynasties, and the empire of Minos, with as much confidence
as if he were dealing with Karlings or Capetians, or with the epoch of
the Crusades.

It is disheartening, at the present day, and after so much has been
finally settled by writers like Grote, Mommsen, and Sir G. C. Lewis,
to come upon such views in the work of a man of scholarship and
intelligence. One begins to wonder how many more times it will be
necessary to prove that dates and events are of no historical value,
unless attested by nearly contemporary evidence. Pausanias and Plutarch
were able men no doubt, and Thukydides was a profound historian; but
what these writers thought of the Herakleid invasion, the age of
Homer, and the war of Troy, can have no great weight with the critical
historian, since even in the time of Thukydides these events were
as completely obscured by lapse of time as they are now. There is no
literary Greek history before the age of Hekataios and Herodotos, three
centuries subsequent to the first recorded Olympiad. A portion of this
period is satisfactorily covered by inscriptions, but even these fail us
before we get within a century of this earliest ascertainable date.
Even the career of the lawgiver Lykourgos, which seems to belong to
the commencement of the eighth century B. C., presents us, from lack of
anything like contemporary records, with many