The Homeric poems shone like a beacon light across the
dark gulf which separated the Hellas of myth from the Hellas of
history, testifying to a splendour that had been before the darkness,
and prophesying of a splendour that should be when the darkness
had passed. But the very brilliance of their pictures and the
magnificence of the society with which they dealt only added to
the complication of the question, and emphasized the difficulty
of deriving the culture of historic Greece by legitimate filiation
from a past which seemed to have no connection and no community of
character with it. For the Homeric civilization was not a different
stage of development of that same civilization which appears when
the first beginnings of what we are accustomed to call Hellenism
are presented to us; it was totally diverse, and in many respects
more complex and more splendid.
From the eighth century onwards we are on moderately safe ground
when dealing with the history of Hellas and its culture. We know
something of the actual facts of its history, literary and political.
The chronicles of the more important cities are known with a
definiteness fairly comparable to what we might expect at such
a stage of development. But the Homeric poems take us away from
all that into a world in which a totally different state of things
prevails.
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