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.

I have described in the last two chapters, as far as our imperfect evidence permits, how Sparta came into possession both of the southern portion of Laconia along the course of the Eurotas down to its mouth, and of the Messenian territory westward. Her progress towards Arcadia and Argolis is now to be sketched, so as to conduct her to that position which she occupied during the reign of Peisistratus at Athens, or about 560–540 B.C.,—a time when she had reached the maximum of her territorial possessions, and when she was confessedly the commanding state in Hellas.

The central region of Peloponnesus, called Arcadia, had never received any immigrants from without; its autochthonous inhabitants—a strong and hardy race of mountaineers, the most numerous Hellenic tribe in the peninsula, and the constant hive for mercenary troops—were among the rudest and poorest of Greeks, retaining for the longest period their original subdivision into a number of petty hill-villages, each independent of the other; and the union of all who bore the Arcadian name (though they had some common sacrifices, such as the festival of the Lykeean Zeus, of Despoina, daughter of Poseidôn and Dêmêtêr, and of Artemis Hyrania) was more loose and ineffective than that of Greeks generally, either in or out of Peloponnesus. The Arcadian villagers were usually denominated by the names of regions, coincident with certain ethnical subdivisions—the Azānes, the Parrhasii, the Mænalii (adjoining Mount Mænalus), the Eutrêsii, the Ægytse, the Skiritæ, &c.

Though the particular persons and events, chronicled in the legendary poems of Greece, are not to be regarded as belonging to the province of real history, those poems are nevertheless full of instruction as pictures of life and manners. And the very same circumstances, which divest their composers of all credibility as historians, render them so much the more valuable as unconscious expositors of their own contemporary society. While professedly describing an uncertified past, their combinations are involuntarily borrowed from the surrounding present: for among communities, such as those of the primitive Greeks, without books, without means of extended travel, without acquaintance with foreign languages and habits, the imagination even of highly gifted men was naturallv enslaved by the circumstances around them to a far greater degree than in the later days of Solôn or Herodotus; insomuch that the characters which they conceived and the scenes which they described would for that reason bear a stronger generic resemblance to the realities of their own time and locality. Nor was the poetry of that age addressed to lettered and critical auditors, watchful to detect plagiarism, sated with simple imagery, and requiring something of novelty or peculiarity in every fresh production. To captivate their emotions, it was sufficient to depict with genius and fervour the more obvious manifestations of human adventure or suffering, and to idealise that type of society, both private and public, with which the hearers around were familiar.