Specious as is this assertion, it is quite unsupported by our experience of human nature, and indeed opposed to the ascertained history of the mind. The Persians believe the epic of Firdusi, as unhesitatingly as did the Greeks that of Homer: yet we happen to know, that not a particle of trustworthy historical information can be elicited from Firdusi. A similar unquestioning belief was for centuries given in England to the pretended dynasties of Britons derived from Brutus the Trojan, previous to the invasion of Julius Cæsar; and the very name of Britain was believed to testify to Brutus, our great eponymus. The Welsh and Irish antiquarians have scarcely yet shaken off similar delusions. In the middle ages the legends of the Saints were believed as devoutly as Tacitus's Histories are now; and the Chronicle of Turpin was not only accepted as genuine history, but was pronounced to be such by papal authority. In short, to call the belief of a nation concerning its ancient state traditionary, is begging the question: such belief undoubtedly may arise, and often does arise, without any 'tradition' at all. With the growth of the logical and historical faculty, a disposition arises in the educated to throw off first one, and then another, portion of the current belief, and they endeavour to 'rationalize' it by setting aside portents, and all that is evidently romantic and unreal; but it is long before they doubt of the whole, or discern how baseless is even the most plausible part. It is not at all wonderful that Thucydides or Demosthenes thought as they did concerning the testimony of their old poets: on the contrary, since they had not, as we, the experience of two ages of civilization, separated by a chasm of darkness slenderly bridged over, the wonder would be, if they had totally risen above the prejudices of their position. On the other hand, their opinion derives no weight from the age in which they lived. They had only the same sources of information as we, the poems themselves,-and far less collateral knowledge to direct their criticism aright.

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But on examining more closely, we find the authority of the Greek nation (if authority in such a matter can exist,) break down under the weight which it will have to bear. To confine ourselves to two pointed illustrations; they equally believed the Argonautic expedition and that of the Amazons against Athens, as strenuously as the war of Troy: yet no leading scholar of the present generation imagines either of these events to have been historical. We shall dwell upon each separately for a little. The ship Argo is first named in the Odyssey; likewise the island Ææa or Ea, which is represented as under the power of Circe, daughter of the Sun and brother of Eetes, and as situated in the Italian seas. The Iliad merely mentions a son of Jason, who supplied the Grecian army with wine from Lemnos

during the siege of Troy; which may imply that the poet had heard of the visit of the Argives to Lemnos, where the queen Hypsipyle became mother of Eunëus by Jason. The earliest forms of the legend are lost, with some of the Hesiodic poems and the Naupactian verses; yet in the accounts preserved we can distinctly see how the tale grew with time, and especially what violence was used, with the advance of knowledge, to reduce it within possibilities, and thereby make it credible. In its poetical garb, no one would any more imagine it was or pretended to be true, than the adventures of Sinbad the sailor: (though in passing we must add, that the Arabs at this day believe the stories of the Arabian Nights,' as devoutly as the old Greeks believed their heroic legends; which Mr. Grote does not neglect to enforce :) but the Argonautic expedition took hold on the Greek faith in an age when no amount of prodigies, no discords of chronology and geography, no manifest incongruity with human motives and action, no fusion of gods and heroes, could startle men's confidence. In the result, all Greece, and the world round Greece, abounded with imagined monuments of the voyage; as far east as the interior of Media and Armenia, in the time of Strabo,--(these must have been first fancied after Alexander the Great,)-as far west as Epirus and Corcyra, Posidonia, on the southern coast of Italy, and even (it is said) the island of Elba: finally as far south as Libya, with which the legend had a most intimate connexion.

Wherever the Grecian mariner sailed,' says Mr. Grote, vol. i. p. 333, he carried his religious and patriotic mythes along with him. His fancy and his faith were alike full of the long wanderings of Jason, Odysseus, Perseus, Heracles, Dionysus, Triptolemus, or Io. It was pleasing to him in success, and consoling to him in difficulty, to believe that their journeys had brought them over the ground which he was himself traversing. There was no tale amidst the wide range of the Grecian epic more calculated to be popular with the seaman, than the history of the primæval ship Argo and her distinguished crew, comprising heroes from all parts of Greece, and especially the Tyndarids, Castor and Pollux, the heavenly protectors invoked during storm and peril He localized the legend anew, wherever he went, often with some fresh circumstances suggested either by his own adventures or by the scene before him he took a sort of religious possession of the spot and connected it by a bond of faith with his native land, when he erected in it a temple or an altar, with appropriate commemorative solemnities. The Jasonium thus established, and indeed every visible object called after the name of the hero, not only served to keep alive the legend of the Argo in the minds of future comers, or inhabitants, but was accepted as an obvious and satisfactory proof that this marvellous vessel had actually touched there in her voyage.'

When geographical knowledge was extended, great pains was taken to identify the places visited by Jason, and others afterwards by Odysseus; as a, for which the ship Argo was bound, -the rocks that ran together, -the floating island of Eolus,the land of the Cyclopes, etc....: and then began the systematic effort to historicize the fable, by transmuting it as much as occasion might seem to require. The same process was performed upon the travels of Hercules and the voyages of Odysseus. Thus Ea was fixed to the land of the Colchians, as the most eastern point of the sea known to the Greeks; because Homer says it lies where is the house and dancing-ground of Aurora, and where the sun rises.' In order to bring the Argonauts into Libya and into the Italian and Spanish seas, new revisions of the story were needed; so that finally the miraculous ship, whose very timbers uttered a divine voice, was believed to have sailed up the Tanais, (Don), and to have been carried over the continent, until she reached the circumfluous Ocean-stream;' whence again she coasted along the whole north and west of Europe, and at last entered the Mediterranean from the Atlantic.-The absurdities of all this, and the impossibility of getting a grain of history out of such a bushel of chaff, in very early times pressed hard on thoughtful men; yet the ablest minds of the Greeks could not bear totally to abandon the attempt. Strabo endeavoured to resolve the tale into a sort of allegory; teaching that the golden fleece was typical of the wealth of Colchis, arising from gold-dust washed down by the rivers; and that the voyage of Jason was a plundering expedition at the head of an army, which made conquests in the interior of Asia. Even Thirlwall, though he fully agrees with Grote that the fable was grounded on the religious ceremonies connected with the name of Athamas, uses the phrase 'it must also have had a historical foundation in some real voyages and adventures:' but he seems to mean no more, than that all poetical invention must have been stimulated by reality. If ships had never been invented, poets would not have sung of sea voyages. Jason, (in Thirlwall's view) is probably the Samothracian god or hero Iasion, and Medea is another form of Juno; while the historical side of the legend' denotes no more than that nautical intercourse between the opposite shores of the Ægean' had already begun. In this sense, nearly every poem may be said to have a historical foundation; so that in fact it is confessed, that the Argonautic expedition is purely fictitious. Yet the most accomplished of the Greeks believed it to have a basis of fact, and the vulgar unhesitatingly received it in every detail.

Nearly the same may be said concerning the Amazonian expedition, although (as having been accomplished by a foreign

nation) it had not the same charms for Greek sympathies, and was therefore far less celebrated. The Amazons, we need hardly say, were a nation of warrior-women, among whom no males were allowed to reside. In popular belief, they cut off their right breast (and hence their name), to allow of their drawing the bow freely. The Argonautic heroes found them on the river Thermodon, on the southern coast of the Euxine; whither also Hercules went to attack them, when sent to get the girdle of their queen Hippolyte. Theseus likewise, the most amorous of all Grecian heroes, had the temerity soon after to carry off their queen Antiope; to revenge which insult, the whole nation invaded Attica. Having crossed the Crimean strait over the winter ice, and marched round the north of the Black Sea, they forced their way through Greece, and penetrated into Athens itself. The final battle by which Theseus crushed them, was fought in the heart of the city itself.

The Attic antiquaries pointed out the exact position of the two contending armies: the left wing of the Amazons rested on the spot occupied by the commemorative monument called the Amazoneion: the right wing touched the Pnyx, the place in which the public assemblies of the Athenian democracy were afterwards held: the details and fluctuations of the combat, as well as the first triumph and consequent truce, were recounted by these authors with as much confidence and as much circumstantiality as those of the battle of Platea by Herodotus. The sepulchral edifice called the Amazoneion, the tomb or pillar of Antiope near the western gate of the city-the spot called the Horkômosion, near the temple of Theseus— even the hill of Areiopagus itself, and the sacrifices which it was customary to offer to the Amazons at the periodical festival of the Theseia-were all so many religious mementos of this victory, which was moreover a favourite subject of art both with the sculptor and painter, at Athens as well as in other parts of Greece '-vol. i. p. 289.

Mr. Grote farther urges, that Herodotus and Lysias refer to the wide extent of the Amazonian rule, as a notorious fact; that Plato, in the Menexenus, and still more distinctly in his 'Laws,' declares his belief in the invasion of Attica by the Amazons; that Xenophon, in his Anabasis, refers to them in terms which show that he regarded them as a real race of female warriors; that Isocrates endeavours to settle the date of the decisive battle; and Pausanias, in late and critical times, betrays a full belief in the story. The inroad and defeat of the Amazons was a familiar topic with the popular orators, along with Marathon and Salamis, in the catalogue of antique exploits of which their countrymen might be proud. Nor were the Athenians alone in this credulity. At Megara, at Trozen, at Cape Tænarus in Laconia, at Charonea of Boeotia, at more than one part of

Thessaly, sepulchres of the Amazons or monuments of their march were preserved. Still more numerous were the marks of them in Asia, where their empire was held to have reached from their native Thermodon over a large part of the continent limited only by the sea on the west. Some, indeed, placed them in Lybia or Ethiopia; and when the warlike heroism of the Sarmatian and Caucasian maidens was known, the Amazons appear to have been looked on as near neighbours of Caucasus, and the Sarmatians were supposed to be descended from a vagrant colony of them. Mr. Grote pursues the subject into still later times, in which even the judicious and accomplished Arrian, while struggling against the portentous tale, and rejecting as fictitious the visit of the Amazonian queen Thalestris to Alexander the Great in Hyrcania, still avows his inability to reject the belief in this wonderful female nation, testified as it was by such evidence.

In a recent work of much learning, Guhl endeavours to ac count for the Amazonian fable, as a distortion of a religious phenomenon; the (supposed) progress of a certain worship, in which the god had a troop of sacred women (hierodula). But the fact is not clear, and the conjecture is too refined. Indeed, an easier explanation presents itself on the surface, and has been embraced by some eminent writers; viz., that the idea of such a race of women was propagated among the Greeks from the reports concerning the ferocity and warlike deeds of Caucasian females-which are undoubtedly historical-who also, according to the positive declaration of Hippocrates, from infancy checked the growth of the right bosom, in order to strengthen the right arm we may add, that the inroads of Scythians into Asia Minor, (one of which, as early as the seventh century before Christ, is historically certain), suggested the notion of the extensive conquests made by these women: Mr. Grote completes the chain of causation, by the love which the Greek sculptors and painters conceived for representing these martial females, of whom indeed Pallas Athene was herself a type. Out of this must have grown the pretended monuments of their presence, and the popular persuasion of the battle which they fought in Athens. The Amazons are twice named in the Iliad, as a formidable and numerous people of Asia Minor, but in books which Mr. Grote holds to be a later addition.

We have selected these two main topics, the Argonautic expedition and Amazonian invasion, to exhibit the power with which Mr. Grote contends that popular belief in such cases must go for nothing, even when shared by the learned. In numberless details also he shows that the fables concerning old times become fuller and fuller, as they get farther from the