Browne, 'Homeric Study,' pp. 242, 243.]
Two lines of evidence, then, if given their fair weight, seemed
to point in the same direction. On the one hand, there were the
legends of a prehistoric age of heroes, with their travels and
expeditions and wars, legends with which Greek literature teemed,
and which, however inextricably blended with fancy, and with details
obviously monstrous and impossible, can scarcely be supposed to
have sprung into being without something behind them to account
for their existence. On the other hand, there was this strange,
wonderful, realistic world of the Homeric poems, no longer existing,
it is true, even at the earliest stage of Greek history, but almost
absolutely refusing to be dismissed as a mere figment of the
imagination. Was it, then, impossible to believe that in the bosom
of the great gulf which separated the Hellas of legend from the
Hellas of history there lay a civilization, real, and once living,
of which the legends and the Homeric pictures preserved but the
scanty surviving ruins and relics?
[Illustration IV: THE IRON GATE, MYCENAE (_p_. 42)]
Here we have to recall two facts of importance. First, that universal
Greek tradition affirmed that before the birth of historic Greece
there lay a Dark Age, its darkness caused by the descent from the
North of the rude, iron-using Dorian tribes, who found in the lands
which they invaded a civilization of the Bronze Age, far more advanced
than their own, and, by the help of their superior weapons, conquered
and indeed destroyed it.
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