severities which encompassed the lower classes while the courts may have revelled in luxury and splendour.

Yet even his wisdom, as we have it, is not without suspicion from a very different cause, for his works have suffered more than most Greek poems from interpolations and additions. Their moral and didactic tone, as well as their fragmentary character, made them at an early period a favourite handbook of education, especially as the moral advices of later Gnomic poets could be foisted in, and taught under the venerable name of the older Hesiod. Though I am not here concerned with critical questions, it were not right to begin a sketch of the times based upon such evidence, without at once telling the reader the nature and the imperfections of that evidence. More especially when I intend making considerable use of Mr. Grote's remarkable chapter on the Manners of the Heroic Age,' it is necessary to warn the reader against the too ready faith here shown by a great writer, elsewhere imbued with a very sceptical spirit. Other points of difference will disclose themselves in the sequel.

But I cannot pass on without supplementing briefly a large defect in the attitude of Grote and other English authors on the Homeric age. They lay aside all inquiry into the previous conditions of Greece as impossible and useless. The very civilised life of the Greek and Trojan heroes is assumed as a starting point, having developed itself, we know not how, from the rude barbarism which Thucydides rightly considers to have been the really primitive state, the

their patrons, they describe the glorious ages of the past as the days when the assembled people would not question the superior wisdom of their betters, but merely assembled to be taught and to applaud? I cannot, therefore, as Mr. Grote does, accept the political condition of things in the Homeric poems, especially in the Iliad, as a safe guide to the political life of Greece in the poet's own day. The figure of Thersites seems drawn with special' spite and venom, as a satire upon the first critics that rose up among the assembled people, to question the Divine right of kings to do wrong. We may be sure the real Thersites, from whom the poet drew his picture, was a very different and a far more serious power in debate, than the misshapen buffoon of the Iliad. But the king who had been thwarted and exposed by him in the day would over his cups in the evening enjoy the poet's travestie, and long for the good old times, when he could put down all impertinent criticism by the stroke of his knotty sceptre. The Homeric agora could hardly have existed had it been so idle a form as the poets represent. But as the lower classes were carefully marshalled on the battlefield, from a full sense of the importance which the poet denies them, so they were marshalled in the public assembly, where we may be sure their weight told with equal effect, though the poet neglected it for the greater glory of the counselling chiefs. Would that we had fuller sketches from the tamer Hesiod! He, at least, does not sing in the interest of courts and kings, and he moreover gives us a glimpse into the sorrows and

severities which encompassed the lower classes while the courts may have revelled in luxury and splendour.

Yet even his wisdom, as we have it, is not without suspicion from a very different cause, for his works have suffered more than most Greek poems from interpolations and additions. Their moral and didactic tone, as well as their fragmentary character, made them at an early period a favourite handbook of education, especially as the moral advices of later Gnomic poets could be foisted in, and taught under the venerable name of the older Hesiod. Though I am not here concerned with critical questions, it were not right to begin a sketch of the times based upon such evidence, without at once telling the reader the nature and the imperfections of that evidence. More especially when I intend making considerable use of Mr. Grote's remarkable chapter on the Manners of the Heroic Age,' it is necessary to warn the reader against the too ready faith here shown by a great writer, elsewhere imbued with a very sceptical spirit. Other points of difference will disclose themselves in the sequel.

But I cannot pass on without supplementing briefly a large defect in the attitude of Grote and other English authors on the Homeric age. They lay aside all inquiry into the previous conditions of Greece as impossible and useless. The very civilised life of the Greek and Trojan heroes is assumed as a starting point, having developed itself, we know not how, from the rude barbarism which Thucydides rightly considers to have been the really primitive state, the

veritable juventus of Hellenism. Yet surely the wonder of Aristotle is justified, when he expresses himself at a loss to explain how a monarchy such as that of Agamemnon could spring from such conditions.

I cannot but think that the consistent voice of the older Greek legends, coupled with what we know of early Phoenician and Egyptian history, wellnigh solves the difficulty. The remains of the stone age found lately under the lava at Therasia', are too remote and isolated to admit of any safe inferences. But the older Semitic histories, the Egyptian inscriptions, and the traditions of the Greeks themselves, agree that the Phoenicians certainly, and perhaps the Egyptians, sailed with powerful fleets through the Ægean, and traded at enormous advantage with the rude inhabitants of the coasts and islands, by means of their imposing wealth and culture. They settled also in the Greek waters, partly for commercial and mining purposes, as for example at Thasos,—where Herodotus saw a whole mountain disembowelled by their operations2,

1 Cp. Revue Archéologique, vol. xvi. pp. 141-7. The islands of Santorin and Therasia in the Ægean Sea are the sides of a gigantic volcano, of which the crater is now a deep sea basin, surrounded by precipitous cliffs, which slope gradually outward to the open sea. Deep under these lava slopes there have been found buried the remains of what the French call an ante-historic Pompeii. Stone implements, some rude gold ornaments, pottery with ornamental patterns, a rude house, and some skeletons have been disinterred. Our oldest Greek authorities on Thera, such as Pindar, make no allusion to its having been a volcano, so that even the tradition of this great irruption had died away in historical Greece. I mention these facts here, as not sufficiently known, to discuss them would be irrelevant.

2 οὖρος μέγα ἀνατετραμμένον ἐν τῇ ζητήσει, vi. 47.

but partly also from the desire of forming new empires. Just as distinguished Athenians, like Miltiades or Iphicrates, became great princes among the buttereating Thracians,' so we may suspect that the legends of Minos, of Cadmus, and of Danaus indicate sovereignties set up by these civilised foreigners in prehistoric days among the Greeks. They possessed the requisites which Aristotle sought in vain among the chiefs of his own nation, and gained their power by introducing great public benefits to the ruder Greeks, as well as by the splendour of their circumstances, and the superior arms of their followers. The legend of Minos1 seems to us the echo of the most important of these sovereignties, but the prehistoric ruins at Argos, Mycenæ, and Orchomenus, show that Crete was not the only seat of culture.

Gradually the national spirit was roused against these foreigners. As the legends tell us of Theseus conquering the Amazon worshippers of Astarte, and refusing his tribute to the servants of Moloch, so I suppose Greek, perhaps at first semi-Greek, chiefs, the offspring of connections between the invaders and the natives, began gradually to dispossess and supplant the Semitic forerunners of Greek culture. But the splendour of their rule was too attractive to be abolished. The native chiefs seem therefore to have succeeded to

1 I agree rather with Duncker, who considers Minos to represent a purely Phoenician power, than with E. Curtius, who thinks it was an Hellenic, or semi-Hellenic power. All the legends point to Phoenician sources, and to Phoenician mythology, in connection with this king, nor do I see any Greek feature in his rule, so far as we know it.