Deceit and Amorous Propensity, Old Age and Contention; Contention in her turn giving birth to an abundant offspring, Suffering, Famine, Slaughter and Battle, Lawlessness and reckless Impulse, and Horkos, the ever-watchful sanctioner of oaths." (I. 9.) We are aware of the difficulty of drawing the line between personification and the belief in personality, especially among a people whose religion was personification; but before we can admit such abstractions among their real gods, we require more than poetical evidence; we ask for their temples, their hymns and their sacrifices. Independently of this, we doubt the expediency of prefixing so much of the minute history of the gods to the commencement of the legendary history. No doubt the influence of the national religion upon the national mind is here and every where a most important element; and we readily admit "that no one can understand the frantic terror of the Athenian public during the Peloponnesian war, on occasion of the mutilation of the statues called Hermæ, unless he enters into the way in which they connected their stability and security with the domiciliation of the gods in the soil;" but we do not see how the strength of this sentiment is illustrated by the Homeric hymn to Hermes, detailed in full by Mr. Grote (pp. 80, 82), and concluding, "Hermes does very little good: he avails himself of the darkness of night to cheat without measure the tribes of mortal men."

In regard to the mystical religions of the Greeks, Mr. Grote adopts the opinion of Voss, who attributes to them an origin subsequent to the Homeric times. They connect themselves chiefly with the worship of Demeter and Bacchus, deities not unknown to Homer, but neither taking an active part in the action of the Iliad, nor yet alluded to by him in their mystic character. Mr. Grote thinks that the mysteries and orgies were introduced in the sixth and seventh centuries before Christ, and by means of communication with Egypt (which only became fully open to the Greeks about 660 B.C.), as well as with Thrace, Phrygia and Lydia. Now with the last mentioned countries it is evident that the intercourse of the Greeks was no more obstructed a thousand years before Christ than six hundred. Nor can we believe that both the mythologists and the people could have agreed in referring the origin of these rites to the earliest mythic times, if it had really fallen, as Mr. Grote supposes, far within the historical. We place as little reliance as he can do upon the definite chronology of these obscure times, but we do not believe the earliest historians of Greece, or even the mind of the people itself, to have been so utterly obtuse and incapable of discriminating the things which differ, as to be in gross error respecting the relative chronology of their own customs. Men seek a mythic origin only for those things of which the historic origin is lost; and had the mysteries generally been introduced into Greece after 660 B.C., the circumstances under which this took place must have been known nearly as well as those of the expiations of Epimenides or the Pythagorean discipline. Herodotus refers certain of these rites and practices to Orpheus, Cadmus and Melampus. (II. 124, 48, 49.) The names are nothing to us; but they represented to the mind of the historian a period lying far beyond the age of Psammitichus in Egypt, or Lycurgus in Greece; and unless we deny him all historical sense, we must admit his feeling as an evidence of their much higher antiquity. Mr. Grote writes respecting Egypt, as if he were ignorant of all that

had been done to illustrate its history in the last twenty-five years.* Before that time, it was regarded as a country cut off by its position and the unsocial character of its institutions from all commerce with the Hellenic tribes till the 7th century before Christ, when it was opened to the Greeks of Asia; and the evidence of Egyptian colonies at Argos or Athens was certainly very slight and unsatisfactory. But we know now that the middle monarchy of Egypt, which was coincident, as far as coincidence can be predicated of mythic and historic times, with the heroic age of Greece, was not only powerful at home and in Africa, but made conquests in Mesopotamia, and at least touched the frontiers of Greece. We have found the memorials of the passage of Rameses and his hosts on the rocks of the Syrian coast; and if we have not yet been able to identify his monuments in Ionia,† the authority of Herodotus, so far confirmed, forbids us to doubt that they once existed there. The influence of Egypt, mediately or immediately, on Greece, in ages long anterior to that which Mr. Grote has fixed for its commencement, is therefore not only not improbable, but fairly to be presumed.

From the gods Mr. Grote descends to the heroes, and relates the legends of Argos and the rest of the Peloponnesus, of Arcadia, Attica, and the principal branches of the Hellenic nation, observing the same rule of giving their traditions as he finds them in the best authorities, discriminating, as far as a most comprehensive and accurate knowledge of the original sources enables him to do, the primitive tradition from the subsequent variations. The impossibility of doing this, however, to any great extent, often defeats his purpose of enabling the reader to judge what it was that the first Greeks believed respecting their own history. The earliest sources are of course the most scanty; but it would be an error to suppose that even by means of these we can ascend to the first conception of national character. We can never look into the cradle of a people, except by means of light reflected from some other, more advanced in intellectual development. As the geologist finds in the oldest strata of the earth, materials which had been rolled and polished in a primeval ocean, united with deposits of more recent origin, so the very earliest records of a nation's belief present a heterogeneous mixture of old tradition and contemporaneous invention. Having gone through the legendary history of Greece down to the War of Troy, Mr. Grote enters into an examination of the nature of the mythe, traces its history and that of the national belief in it, till it expired in scientific scepticism, and examines the allegorical and historical mode of treating it, shewing the unsatisfactory nature of both. The matter of these sections cannot be analyzed or abridged within our limits; they deserve to be studied and meditated by all who would judge correctly either of the legendary history of Greece, or the corresponding period of any other nation. The following passage is of wide application:

"It is a presumption far too largely and indiscriminately applied, even in our own advanced age, that where much is believed, something must neces

It is by a mere oversight, we presume, that (II. 425) he speaks of the Egyptian money scale corresponding with the Babylonian and Phoenician. † Classical Museum, I. pp. 82, 231.

sarily be true-that accredited fiction is always traceable to some basis of historical truth. The influence of imagination and feeling is not confined simply to the process of retouching, transforming or magnifying narratives originally founded on fact; it will often create new narratives of its own, without any such preliminary basis. Where there is any general body of sentiment pervading men living in society, whether it be religious or political -love, admiration or antipathy-all incidents tending to illustrate that sentiment are eagerly welcomed, rapidly circulated, and as a general rule easily accredited. If real incidents are not at hand, impressive fictions will be provided to satisfy the demand; the perfect harmony of such fictions with the prevalent feeling stands in the place of certifying testimony, and causes men to hear them not only with credence, but even with delight: to call them in question and require proof is a task which cannot be undertaken without incurring obloquy. Of such tendencies in the human mind, abundant evidence is furnished by the innumerable religious legends which have acquired currency in various parts of the world, and of which no country was more fertile than Greece-legends which derived their origin not from special facts, misreported and exaggerated, but from pious feelings pervading the society, and translated into narrative by forward and imaginative minds-legends, in which not merely the incidents, but often even the personages are unreal, yet in which the generating sentiment is conspicuously discernible, providing its own matter, as well as its own form. Other sentiments also, as well as the religious, provided they be fervent and widely diffused, will find expression in current narrative and become portions of the general public belief: every celebrated and notorious character is the source of a thousand fictions exemplifying his peculiarities. And if it be true, as I think present observation may shew us, that such creative agencies are even now visible and effective, when the materials of genuine history are copious and critically studied, much more are we warranted in concluding that in ages destitute of records, strangers to historical testimony and full of belief in divine inspiration, both as to the future and as to the past, narratives purely fictitious will acquire ready and uninquiring credence, provided only they be plausible and in harmony with the preconceptions of the auditors."

II. We have shewn how Mr. Grote deals with the Grecian mythes, in their supposed relation to history. The next portion of his work is devoted to the state of society and manners in legendary Greece, as represented in the Homeric poems, which leads to an inquiry into the much debated question of the original constitution and authorship of these poems. Mr. Grote supports with great acuteness the opinion that the original conception of the Iliad was only an Achilleid, and included only the first, eighth and eleventh books, and thenceforward to the twenty-second. We prefer, however, to give a specimen of his mode of treating subjects properly historical,-the Dorian settlement in the Peloponnesus and the legislation of Lycurgus,-that our readers may be able to form a prospective judgment of the future volumes of his work. His title promises in these a Grecian history to the reign of Peisistratus at Athens; it contains in fact only the Peloponnesian history, with fragments (nothing else is to be had) of that of Northern Greece.

III. What the Greeks called the return of the Heraclidæ, modern writers have agreed to denominate the Dorian Conquest, regarding the legend of descent from Hercules as a device to connect the conquerors with the old heroic rulers of the Peloponnesus, and substitute an hereditary claim for that of successful invasion. Mr. Grote, like Müller and the German mythologists generally, refers this and similar fictions

of which Grecian history is full, to that easy faith in mythic narrative which he has already described, rather than to a conscious purpose of bolstering up an insufficient title. We are not such firm believers in the simple honesty of these good old times, and rather apprehend that the same political craft which in our ink-and-parchment days has slipped false treaties, charters and grants, among genuine documents, has corrupted legendary evidence by the interpolation of fables devised. for a political purpose. Other portions of the same story bear the stamp of wilful forgery. In the division of the Peloponnesus, Cresphontes was said to have obtained for himself Messene, the most fertile portion, by fraud, putting into the urn filled with water from which the lots were drawn, a lump of clay, instead of a pebble, so that his brothers' lots came forth while his remained, and he thus acquired the priority of choice. How palpable is here the motive of justifying the Spartan aggression, by alleging fraud as the foundation of the Messenian title! It is the custom of the advocates of the mythic principle of interpretation to represent the production of myths as in all cases the result of a pious enthusiasm, an exalted imagination, or a simple credulity characteristic of an age full of faith and devoid of criticism; and hence they seem to acquire the right to impute the invention and circulation of most portentous fictions to men whom they yet profess to regard as honest and single-minded. We make these remarks with a special view to the application of the mythic system to the life of Jesus. It is an affront to common sense to suppose that the narrative of the Resurrection can have been the product of a mind, or the joint product of many minds, deeply penetrated with an idea, and innocently and unconsciously evolving and embodying this idea in a tale, which others, in equal innocence and unconsciousness, received and propagated as a fact. The unbelief of the last age was more intelligible and rational, and boldly imputed a fraudulent design to those by whom the story of their Master's re-appearance was devised and circulated.

66

To return to Mr. Grote's History. The gravest historians of Greece, Thucydides for example, regarded the Return of the Heraclidæ as giving the Dorians possession, by a single battle, of the whole of the Peloponnesus. Abandoning the attempt to enter it by the Isthmus, which had been unsuccessful before, they crossed the narrow strait of the Corinthian Gulf, where the promontories of Rhium and Antirrhium approach each other, in a fleet built at the port of Naupactus, and defeated Tisamenus, the son of Orestes and representative of the family of the Pelopidæ. The circumstances of the conquest, as commonly related, have all an explanatory bearing on Dorian institutions-on the triple division of tribes, characteristic of the Dorians, on the origin of the great festival of the Carneia at Sparta, upon the different temper and character of the Dorian states among themselves, upon the early alliance of the Dorians with Elis which contributed to give ascendancy and vogue to the Olympic games, and lastly upon the etymology of the name Naupactus." This explanatory bearing was to the Greeks, and has been till very recently to the moderns, a decisive reason for believing the narrative to be true. But such a multitude of instances present themselves, in which the legendary past has been moulded and coloured, so as to afford an explanation of the historical present, that it has grown into a canon of criticism, that a narrative relating to times

which left no written records of themselves, is suspicious, exactly in proportion as it offered a solution of those historical problems which interested the curiosity of after-ages. Mr. Grote gives some special reasons for doubting whether the Dorian conquest of the Peloponnesus took place all at once, or in the mode which the common story describes. Both at Argos and at Corinth there were hills (the Temeneion in the former place, Solygeius in the latter) close to the sea-shore, on which, according to tradition, the invading Dorians first established themselves; and their position seems to point to settlements made by sea, rather than by an army coming by a land march from the point at which they are represented to have crossed into the Peloponnesus. However this may have been, it certainly appears that at the commencement of the really historical period, or about 776 B. C., Argos, and not Sparta, was the predominant power in the Peloponnesus. The latter country Mr. Grote supposes not to have owed its Dorian population, like Argos, to a maritime invasion, but to a body of adventurers from the N.W., who, marching from Elis up the valley of the Alpheus, reached the head of the Eurotas, and so descended upon Sparta by the only route which, from the disposition of the mountains, would be practicable; a similar body from the same quarter took possession of Stenuclerus; and one of these grew into the stately, stubborn and victorious Spartans; the other, into the short-lived, trampled and struggling Messenians. The common account represents Sparta as speedily making conquests which placed all Laconia at her feet, but the glimpses of real history which we gain through the obscurity of these remote times shews her original dominion to have been extremely limited.

The enormous discrepancies in the ancient accounts of Lycurgus, which render his descent, his birth, his travels, his death, the course of his legislative proceedings and the century in which he lived uncertain, are generally known; and Mr. Grote leaves them as he finds them, wisely abstaining from endeavouring to settle, by gratuitous assumptions and arbitrary corrections, points which were doubtful in the age of Herodotus and Thucydides. But he has an important remark in reference to his institutions, intended as a caution to those who may have been led by Müller's Dorians to consider the Lycurgean system as the type of Dorian principles, tendencies and sentiments, wherever they existed. So far is this from being the case, that the institutions of Sparta distinguished her as much from Argos, Corinth or Cnidus (all Dorian states), as from Athens and Thebes. No doubt a general analogy connected all the tribes of Dorian blood, distinguishing them, in later times hostilely, from the Ionians; but the two circumstances which gave its peculiar character and effect to Spartan legislation, military discipline and rigorous private training, were peculiar to the system of Lycurgus. Various have been the opinions of authors as to the degree of originality which this system can claim. One represents it as only a revival of the usages of the heroic ages; another, as a perpetuation of those of the primitive Dorians. Both are to a certain extent in the right; the greatest innovator builds upon an existing foundation, and the Dorian institutions must have resembled those described in the Homeric poems, which is what we mean when we talk of the heroic times. If, however, we believe Herodotus (I. 65), who tells us that the Spartans had been nearly the worst governed