SECTION I.—RETURN OF THE HERAKLEIDS INTO PELOPONNESUS

In one of the preceding chapters, we have traced the descending series of the two most distinguished mythical families in Peloponnêsus—the Perseids and the Pelopids: we have followed the former down to Hêraklês and his son Hyllus, and the latter down to Orestês son of Agamemnôn, who is left in possession of that ascendency in the peninsula which had procured for his father the chief command in the Trojan war. The Herakleids or sons of Hêraklês, on the other hand, are expelled fugitives, dependent upon foreign aid or protection: Hyllus had perished in single combat with Echemus of Tegea, (connected with the Pelopids by marriage with Timandra sister of Clytæmnêstra,) and a solemn compact had been made, as the preliminary condition of this duel, that no similar attempt at an invasion of the peninsula should be undertaken by his family for the space of 100 years. At the end of the stipulated period the attempt was renewed, and with complete success; but its success was owing not so much to the valour of the invaders as to a powerful body of new allies. The Herakleids re-appear as leaders and companions of the Dorians,—a northerly section of the Greek name, who now first come into importance,—poor indeed in mythical renown, since they are never noticed in the Iliad, and only once casually mentioned in the Odyssey, as a fraction among the many-tongued inhabitants of Crête—but destined to form one of the grand and predominant elements throughout all the career of historical Hellas.

We now pass from the northern members to the heart and head of Greece—Peloponnesus and Attica, taking the former first in order, and giving as much as can be ascertained respecting its early historical phænomena.

The traveller who entered Peloponnesus from Bœotia during the youthful days of Herodotus and Thucydides, found an array of powerful Doric cities conterminous to each other, and beginning at the Isthmus of Corinth. First came Megara, stretching across the isthmus from sea to sea, and occupying the high and rugged mountains called Oneia and Geraneia: next Corinth, with its strong and conspicuous acropolis, and its territory occupying the portion of the isthmus at once most level and narrowest, which divided its two harbours called Lechæum and Kenchreæ. Westward of Corinth, along the Corinthian Gulf, stood Sikyon, with a plain of uncommon fertility between the two towns: southward of Sikyon and Corinth were Phlius and Kleonse, both conterminous, as well as Corinth, with Argos and the Argolic peninsula. The inmost bend of the Argolic Gulf, including a considerable space of flat and marshy ground adjoining to the sea, was occupied by Argos; the Argolic peninsula was divided by Argos with the Doric cities of Epidaurus and Trœzen, and the Dryopian city of Hermionê, the latter possessing the south-western corner. Proceeding southward along the western coast of the gulf, and passing over the little river called Tanos, the traveller found himself in the dominion of Sparta, which comprised the entire southern region of the peninsula from its eastern to its western sea, where the river Neda flows into the latter.

At the head of those once abundant epical cotnpositions, most of them unfortunately lost, stand the Iliad and Odyssey, with the immortal name of Homer attached to each of them, embracing separate portions of the comprehensive legend of Troy. They form the type of what may be called the heroic epic of the Greeks, as distinguished from the genealogical, in which latter species some of Hesiodic poems—the Catalogue of Women, the Ecese, and the Naupactia—stood conspicuous. Poems of the Homeric character (if so it may be called, though the expression is very indefinite) were confined to one of the great events or great personages of Grecian legendary antiquity, comprised a limited number of characters all contemporaneous, and made some approach, more or less successful, to a certain poetical unity; while the Hesiodic poems, tamer in their spirit and unconfined both as to time and as to persons, strung together distinct events without any obvious view to concentration of interest—without legitimate beginning or end. Between these two extremes there were many gradations: biographical poems, such as the Herakleids and Theseids, recounting all the principal exploits performed by one single hero, present a character intermediate between the two, but bordering more closely on the Hesiodic. Even the hymns to the gods, which pass under the name of Homer, are epical fragments, narrating particular exploits or adventures of the god commemorated.

Both the didactic and the mystico-religious poetry of Greece, began in Hexameter verse—the characteristic and consecrated measure of the epic: but they belong to a different species, and burst out from a different vein in the Grecian mind.

I need not repeat, what has already been sufficiently set forth in the preceding pages, that the mass of Grecian incident anterior to 776 B.C. appears to me not reducible either to history or to chronology, and that any chronological system which may be applied to it must be essentially uncertified and illusory. It was however chronologised in ancient times, and has continued to be so in modern; and the various schemes employed for this purpose may be found stated and compared in the first volume (the last published) of Mr. Fynes Clinton's Fasti Hellenici. There were among the Greeks, and there still are among modern scholars, important differences as to the dates of the principal events: Eratosthenês dissented both from Herodotus and from Phanias and Callimachus, while Larcher and Raoul Rochette (who follow Herodotus) stand opposed to O. Müller and to Mr. Clinton. That the reader may have a general conception of the order in which these legendary events were disposed, I transcribe from the Fasti Hellenici a double chronological table, contained in p. 139, in which the dates are placed in series, from Phorôneus to the Olympiad of Corœbus in B.C. 776—in the first column according to the system of Eratosthenês, in the second according to that of Callimachus.

“The following table (says Mr. Clinton) offers a summary view of the leading periods from Phorôneus to the Olympiad of Corœbus, and exhibits a double series of dates; the one proceeding from the date of Eratosthenês, the other from a date founded on the reduced calculations of Phanias and Callimachus, which strike out fifty-six years from the amount of Eratosthenês.