' What proportion of
fact, if any, lay in the stories of Minos, the great lawgiver,
and his war fleet, and his Labyrinth, with its monstrous occupant;
of Theseus and Ariadne and the Minotaur; of Daedalus, the first
aeronaut, and his wonderful works of art and science; or of any
other of the thousand and one beautiful or tragic romances of ancient
Hellas, to attempt to determine this lay utterly beyond the sphere
of the serious historian. 'To analyze the fables,' says Grote, 'and
to elicit from them any trustworthy particular facts, appears to
me a fruitless attempt. The religious recollections, the romantic
inventions, and the items of matter of fact, _if any such there
be_, must for ever remain indissolubly amalgamated, as the poet
originally blended them, for the amusement or edification of his
auditors.... It was one of the agreeable dreams of the Grecian epic
that the man who travelled far enough northward beyond the Rhiphaean
Mountains would in time reach the delicious country and genial
climate of the virtuous Hyperboreans, the votaries and favourites of
Apollo, who dwelt in the extreme north, beyond the chilling blasts
of Boreas. Now, the hope that we may, by carrying our researches
up the stream of time, exhaust the limits of fiction, and land
ultimately upon some points of solid truth, appears to me no less
illusory than this northward journey in quest of the Hyperborean
elysium.
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