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A History of Greece From the Earliest Times to the Roman Conquest With Supplementary Chapters
A History of Greece From the Earliest Times to the Roman Conquest With Supplementary Chapters Author:William Smith Subtitle: On the History of Literature and Art. Illustrated by Numerous Engraring on Wood, Twentieth Thousand General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1860 Original Publisher: John Murray Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When ... more »you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: Ajax, from the /Eginetan Sculptures. CHAPTER II. THE GRECIAN HEROES. § 1. Mythical character of the Heroic Age. § 2. Hercules. § 3. Theseus. § 4. Minos. § 5. Voyage of the Argonauts. § 6. The Seven against Thebes and the Epigoni. § 7. The Trojan War as related in the Iliad. § 8. Later additions. § 9. Return of the Grecian heroes from Troy. § 10. Date of the fall of Troy. § 11. Whether the Heroic legends contain any historical facts. § 12. The Homeric poems present a picture of a real state of society. § 1. It was universally believed by the Greeks that their native land was in the earlier ages ruled by a noble race of beings, possessing a superhuman though not a divine nature, and superior to ordinary men in strength of body and greatness of soul. These are the Heroes of Grecian mythology, whose exploits and adventures form the great mine from which the Greeks derived inexhaustible materials for their poetry -- " Presenting Thebes or Pelops' line, Or the tale of Troy divine." According to mythical chronology the Heroic age constitutes a period of about two hundred years, from the first appearance of the Hellenes in Thessaly to the return of the Greeks from Troy. Since the legends of this period belong to mythology and not to history, they find their proper place in a work devoted to the former subject. But some of them are so closely interwoven with the historical traditions of Greece that it is impossible to pass them by entirely. Among the heroes t...« less