The king-archon at Athens.
In the same way we have at Athens legends of kings, but all of such antiquity as to make us hesitate in believing them, had there not survived into historical days the king-archon, whose name and functions point clearly to their being a survival of those kingly functions which were thought indispensable on religious or moral grounds, even after the actual monarchs had passed away[35:1].
The legends, therefore, which tell of a gradual change from a monarchy to an aristocracy, and a gradual widening of the Government to embrace more members by making its offices terminable, are no mere plausible fictions, but an obscure, and perhaps inadequate, yet still real account of what did happen in Attica in the days before written records existed.
Legends of foreign immigrants.
Corroborative evidence of art, but not of language.
§ 18. Larger and more important is the great body of stories which agree in bringing Phœnician, Egyptian, and Asianic princes to settle in early Greece, where they found a primitive people, to whom they taught the arts and culture of the East. To deny the general truth of these accounts now would be to contradict facts scientifically ascertained; it is perfectly certain that the Greek alphabet is derived from the Phœnician, and it is equally certain that many of the artistic objects found at Orchomenos, in Attica, and at Mycenæ, reveal a
foreign and Oriental origin. At the same time Duruy, in the luminous discussion he has devoted to the subject[36:1], shows that, however certain the early contact with the East, there is hardly any trace in Greece of the language of any non-Hellenic conquerors, as there is, for example (he might have added), in the names of the letters, which mostly bear in Greece their Semitic names. He thinks, therefore, that although early Asianic Greeks were the real intermediaries of this culture, they merely stimulated the latent spark in the natives, which shows itself in certain original non-Asiatic features which mark pre-historic Greek remains. But those who in their enthusiasm for Greece go even further in rejecting any foreign parentage for the higher Greek art[36:2], will now no longer deny that the occurrence of amber, ostrich-eggs, and ivory, which surely were not all imported in a rude or unmanipulated condition, prove at least the lively traffic in luxuries which must have existed, and which cannot exist without many other far-reaching connections.
Corroboration of legends in architecture.
There are even lesser matters, where legends might seem only to set before us the difficulty of harmonizing conflicting statements; and yet archæology finds that there is something real implied. Thus the legend which asserts that the older Perseids were supplanted by the Pelopids in the dominion of Mycenæ is in striking agreement with the fact that there are two styles of wall-building in the extant remains, and that the ruder work has actually been re-faced with the square hewn blocks of the later builders[37:1].