insoluble problems. The
Helleno-Dorian conquest, as we have seen, must have occurred at some
time or other; but it evidently did not occur within two centuries of
the earliest known inscription, and it is therefore folly to imagine
that we can determine its date or ascertain the circumstances which
attended it. Anterior to this event there is but one fact in Greek
antiquity directly known to us,--the existence of the Homeric poems. The
belief that there was a Trojan war rests exclusively upon the contents
of those poems: there is no other independent testimony to it whatever.
But the Homeric poems are of no value as testimony to the truth of the
statements contained in them, unless it can be proved that their author
was either contemporary with the Troika, or else derived his information
from contemporary witnesses. This can never be proved. To assume, as Mr.
Gladstone does, that Homer lived within fifty years after the Troika, is
to make a purely gratuitous assumption. For aught the wisest historian
can tell, the interval may have been five hundred years, or a thousand.
Indeed the Iliad itself expressly declares that it is dealing with an
ancient state of things which no longer exists. It is difficult to see
what else can be meant by the statement that the heroes of the Troika
belong to an order of men no longer seen upon the earth. (Iliad, V.
304.) Most assuredly Achilleus the son of Thetis, and Sarpedon the son
of Zeus, and Helena the daughter of Zeus, are no ordinary mortals, such
as might have been seen and conversed with by the poet's grandfather.
They belong to an inferior order of gods, according to the peculiar
anthropomorphism of the Greeks, in which deity and humanity are so
closely mingled that it is difficult to tell where the one begins and
the other ends. Diomedes, single-handed, vanquishes not only the gentle
Aphrodite, but even the god of battles himself, the terrible Ares.
Nestor quaffs lightly from a goblet which, we are told, not two men
among the poet's contemporaries could by their united exertions raise
and place upon a table. Aias and Hektor and Aineias hurl enormous masses
of rock as easily as an ordinary man would throw a pebble. All this
shows that the poet, in his naive way, conceiving of these heroes as
personages of a remote past, was endeavouring as far as possible to
ascribe to them the attributes of superior beings. If all that were
divine, marvellous, or superhuman were to be left out of