General History for Colleges and High Schools

by P. V. N. Myers

CHARACTER OF THE LEGENDARY AGE.—The real history of the Greeks does not begin before the eighth century B.C. All that lies back of that date is an inseparable mixture of myth, legend, and fact. Yet this shadowy period forms the background of Grecian history, and we cannot understand the ideas and acts of the Greeks of historic times without at least some knowledge of what they believed their ancestors did and experienced in those prehistoric ages.

So, as a sort of prelude to the story we have to tell, we shall repeat some of the legends of the Greeks respecting their national heroes and their great labors and undertakings. But it must be carefully borne in mind that these legends are not history, though some of them may be confused remembrances of actual events.

THE HEROES: HERACLES, THESEUS, AND MINOS.—The Greeks believed that their ancestors were a race of heroes of divine or semi-divine lineage. Every tribe, district, city, and village even, preserved traditions of its heroes, whose wonderful exploits were commemorated in song and story. Many of these personages acquired national renown, and became the revered heroes of the whole Greek race.

Heracles was the greatest of the national heroes of the Greeks. He is represented as performing, besides various other exploits, twelve superhuman labors, and as being at last translated from a blazing pyre to a place among the immortal gods. The myth of Heracles, who was at first a solar divinity, is made up mainly of the very same fables that were told of the Chaldæan solar hero Izdubar (see p. 46). Through the Phoenicians, these stories found their way to the Greeks, who ascribed to their own Heracles the deeds of the Chaldæan sun-god.

Theseus, a descendant of Cecrops, was the favorite hero of the Athenians, being one of their legendary kings. Among his great exploits was the slaying of the Minotaur,—a monster which Minos, king of Crete, kept in a labyrinth, and fed upon youths and maidens sent from Athens as a forced tribute.

Minos, king of Crete, was one of the greatest tribal heroes of the Dorians. Legend makes him a legislator of divine wisdom, the suppressor of piracy in the Grecian seas, and the founder of the first great maritime state of Hellas.

THE ARGONAUTIC EXPEDITION.—Besides the labors and exploits of single heroes, the legends of the Greeks tell of several memorable enterprises conducted by bands of heroes. Among these were the Argonautic Expedition and the Siege of Troy.

The tale of the Argonautic Expedition is told with many variations in the legends of the Greeks. Jason, a prince of Thessaly, with fifty companion heroes, among whom were Heracles, Theseus, and Orpheus, the latter a musician of superhuman skill, the music of whose lyre moved brutes and stones, set sail in "a fifty-oared galley," called the Argo (hence the name Argonauts, given to the heroes), in search of a "golden fleece" which was fabled to be nailed to a tree and watched by a dragon, in the Grove of Ares, on the eastern shores of the Euxine, an inhospitable region of unknown terrors. The expedition is successful, and, after many wonderful adventures, the heroes return in triumph with the sacred relic.

Different meanings have been given to this tale. In its primitive form it was doubtless a pure myth of the rain-clouds; but in its later forms we may believe it to symbolize the maritime explorations in the eastern seas, of some of the tribes of Pelasgian Greece.

THE TROJAN WAR (legendary date 1194-1184 B.C.).—The Trojan War was an event about which gathered a great circle of tales and poems, all full of an undying interest and fascination.