For the briefest illustration we can call to mind of this philosophical ingenuity, we will refer the reader to Michelet's preface to his History of Rome. We see the absurdity none the worse for it being presented through the transparent medium of the French writer. He thus explains the discovery of the learned Germans whom he follows:—"Ce qu'il y a de plus original, c'est d'avoir prouvé que ces fictions historiques étaient une necéssité de notre nature. L'humanité d'abord matérielle et grossière, ne pouvait dans les langues encore toutes concrètes, exprimer la pensée abstraite, qu'en la réalisant, en lui donnant un corps, une personalité humaine, un nom propre. Le même besoin do simplification, si naturel à la faiblesse, fit aussi désigner une collection d'individus par un nom d'homme. Cet homme mythique, ce fils de la pensée populaire, exprima à la fois le peuple et l'idée du peuple. Romulus c'était la force, et le peuple de la force; Juda, l'élection divine et le peuple élu."
Having thus expounded the theory of the construction of a myth, he afterwards tries his hand upon the resolution of one into its constituent elements. The fourth chapter of his introduction commences thus:—"Circé, dit Hésiode, (Theog. v. 1111, 1115) eut d'Ulysse deux fils, Latinos et Agrios (le barbare,) qui au fond des saintes îles gouvenèrent la race célèbre des Tyrséniens. J'enterprèterais volontiers ce passage de la manière suivante: Des Pelasges, navigateurs et magiciens, (c'est-à-dire, industrieux) sortirent les deux grandes sociétés Italiennes—les Osci, (dont les Latins sont une tribu,) et les Tusci ou Etrusques. Circé, fille du soleil, a tous les caractères d'une Telchine Pélasgique. Le poete nous la montre près d'un grand feu, rarement utile dans un pays chaud, si ce n'est pour un but industriel; elle file la toile, ou prépare de puissants breuvages."
The theory and the application, it will be seen, are worthy of each other. All comment would be superfluous. We have preferred to retain the original language for this, amongst other reasons, that we should have found it difficult to represent in honest English the exact degree of affirmation to which the Frenchman pledges himself by his "j'enterpreterais volontiers." It is something less than conviction, and something more than guess;—it certainly should be, or it ought to have no place in history.
It is not by mangling the legend, or by predicating of it fantastic modes of construction, that the few grains of sober fact concealed about it are to be secured; but by studying honestly the laws of imagination under which all fabulous narratives are constructed. However wildly the fancy may range in the main events of a fable, there will be always a certain portion of the details gathered from real life; and the manners and morals of an age may be depicted in fictions, the substance of which is altogether supernatural. The heroes fight like gods, but they dine and dress like ordinary mortals. Achilles drags the body of Hector three times round the walls of Troy, both armies looking on the while. Such sight the earth never beheld. But the ear of the warrior and the harness of his steeds resembled such as had been seen or heard of. The poet invents a centaur, but not the bow and arrow he puts into his hands. His hero scales the sky, but carries with him the sandal on his foot which was made in the village below.
"Three-fourths of the two volumes now presented to the public," continues Mr Grote in his preface, "are destined to elucidate this age of historical faith as distinguished from the later age of historical reason: to exhibit its basis in the human mind—an omnipresent religious and personal interpretation of nature; to illustrate it by comparison with the like mental habit in early modern Europe; to show its immense abundance and variety of narrative matter, with little care for consistency between one story and another; lastly, to set forth the causes which overgrew, and partially supplanted the old epical sentiment, and introduced, in the room of literal faith, a variety of compromises and interpretations." This is the just application of the legends of Greece, forming, as they do, the very best description of the people whose exploits and career the author is about to narrate. This is a truer commencement of the history than that which appears at first sight more strictly historical—namely, an investigation into the obscure tribes which inhabited the same country prior to that people who are known to us as Greeks—an investigation that is to be carried on by strained interpretations of these very legends. We congratulate both author and reader on this escape from the fruitless entanglement of the Pelasgian controversy. Mr Grote seems to have taken due warning from the difficulties and embarrassments in which his predecessor has here involved himself. Dr Thirlwall is a judicious, a succinct, and lucid writer, and yet a more tedious, confused, and utterly unsatisfactory piece of history no man can read than the account he gives us, in his opening volume, of the Pelasgians. The subject is clearly hopeless. From the first sentence to the last of that account, a painful confusion attends upon the reader—not the fault, we are ready to believe, of the historian, unless it be a fault to attempt a statement of facts where the materials for such a statement do not exist. "The people"—Dr Thirlwall thus commences—"whom we call Greeks—the Hellenes—were not, at least under this name, the first inhabitants of Greece. Many names have been recorded of races that preceded them there, which they in later times considered barbarous, or foreign in language and manners to themselves." Here the very first sentence proclaims a doubt how far the change was one of race or only of name, and this doubt pursues us throughout the whole inquiry. It is never solved by the author, but is sometimes forgotten by him; for he occasionally proceeds with the discussion as if he had left no such doubt behind him undetermined. At one time he states distinctly, "we find that though in early times Thessaly, and the north of Greece in general, was the scene of frequent migrations and revolutions so that its ancient inhabitants may here and there have been completely displaced by new tribes, Attica appears never to have undergone such a change; and Peloponnesus lost no considerable part of its original population till long after the whole had become Hellenic." (P. 54.) Herodotus had said that certain Pelasgians living in his time spoke a language different from the Greeks. Dr Thirlwall puts the passage of Herodotus upon the rack to extract from it a confession that the difference was not greater than between one dialect of Greek from another. Yet, as the narrative proceeds—if narrative it can be called—we have the Pelasgians and the Greeks represented as essentially distinct people; and we hear of the difficulty of determining "the precise point of civilisation to which the Pelasgians had advanced, before the Greeks overtook and outstripped them." The whole treatise, notwithstanding the air of decision now and then assumed, is but an amplification of the doubt implied in the very first sentence of it.
The legends which fill up the dark space with eponymous heroes, as they have been called—heroes who take the name of a tribe in order to bestow it back upon the tribe; for it was the Greek mode of thinking at these early periods to presume that every tribe, or gens, had a common progenitor from whom it took its title and origin,—these legends are at one time treated with the due suspicion which should attend upon them; yet, at another, if a fortunate congruity, some lucky "dovetailing," can be observed amongst them, they are raised into the rank of historical evidence. The mode of interpretation which we have described as characterising the first and undisciplined age of critical inquiry, is not laid aside. Such personages as Danaus and Æolus are still referred to on emergency; and Dr Thirlwall still speaks of the Centaurs as "a fabulous race, which, however, may be supposed to represent the earlier and ruder inhabitants of the land." If we must call in the Centaurs to our assistance, we may safely conclude with Mr Grote that the ancient Pelasgians are "not knowable."
"Whoever," writes our author, when the course of his narrative brings him to speak of the anti-Hellenic tribes—"Whoever has examined the many conflicting systems respecting the Pelasgi—from the literal belief of Clavier, Larcher, and Raoul Rochette, (which appears to me at least the most consistent way of proceeding,) to the interpretative and half-incredulous processes applied by abler men—such as Niebuhr, or O. Müller, or Dr Thirlwall—will not be displeased with my resolution to decline so insoluble a problem. No attested facts are now present to us—none were present to Herodotus and Thucydides even in their age, on which to build trustworthy affirmations respecting the anti-Hellenic Pelasgians; and where such is the case we may without impropriety apply the remark of Herodotus respecting one of the theories which he had heard for explaining the inundation of the Nile by a supposed connexion with the ocean—that the man who carries up his story into the invisible world, passes out of the range of criticism."[2] And he adds the following pithy note:—"Niebuhr puts together all the mythical and genealogical traces, many of them in the highest degree vague and equivocal, of the existence of Pelasgi in various localities; and then, summing up their cumulative effect, asserts, 'not as an hypothesis, but with full historical conviction, that there was a time when the Pelasgians, perhaps the most extended people in all Europe, were spread from the Po and the Arno to the Rhyndakus,' (near Cyzicus,) with only an interruption in Thrace. What is perhaps the most remarkable of all, is the contrast between his feeling of disgust, despair, and aversion to the subject when he begins the inquiry:—'the name Pelasgi,' he says, 'is odious to the historian, who hates the spurious philology out of which the pretences to knowledge on the subject of such extinct people arise;' and the full confidence and satisfaction with which he concludes it."
Amongst these legends which Mr Grote thus relates for the simple purpose of showing what filled the minds of the Greek people when we first become historically acquainted with them, is one conspicuous above all others, and to which most men still cling tenaciously, finding it impossible to resign all of it to the region of fable—we mean "the divine tale of Troy." Many who relinquish without effort the Argonautic expedition, and as an historical problem are glad to be rid of it,—who resign all attempt to extract a prosaic truth out of the exploits of Theseus or the labours of Hercules, and who smile at mention of the race of Amazons—a race so well accredited in ancient times that neither the sceptical Arrian nor Julius Cæsar himself ventured to doubt of their existence—would yet shrink from surrendering the tale of Troy, with all its military details, and all its hosts, and all its kings and chieftains, entirely to the domain of fiction. What! No part of it true?—no Agamemnon?—no Ulysses?—no Troy taken?—no battles on that plain where the traveller still traces the position of the hostile forces? "Those old kings," they might exclaim in the language of Milton, when writing in his history of that fabulous line of English monarchs which sprang from Brute the Trojan—in his time still lingering in men's faith, now suffered to sleep unvexed by the keenest historical research,—"Those old and inborn kings, never any to have been real persons, or done in their lives at least some part of what so long hath been remembered—it cannot be thought, without too strict incredulity."[3]
Nevertheless the whole narrative, were it not for the familiarity we early acquire with the persons and exploits of this famous legend, would be seen at once to have all the characteristics of poetic fiction. And it is curious to trace, with our author, how, after having long stood its ground as veritable history amongst the people of Greece, it sustained attack after attack, first from ancient then from modern criticism, and has been gradually denuded of all its glorious circumstance, till now, even for those who are most willing to believe, there remains the driest, scantiest residue imaginable of what may be pronounced to be probable fact. Herodotus, with all his veneration for Homer, could not assent to attribute the Trojan war to the cause popularly assigned: he seems to have been of the opinion of our Payne Knight, that the Greeks and Trojans could not have been so mad as to incur so dire calamities "for one little woman." We confess that, for ourselves, this is not the part of the story which would have first staggered us. The immediate cause may be very trifling that brings two angry rivals into conflict, and, the war once commenced, they fight on for victory; the first object of the strife is forgotten in the strife itself, and each opponent thinks only how to destroy his enemy. Herodotus, however, had heard another account from the priests of Egypt, which made him still more disposed to dispute the popular tradition. According to this account, Helen was in fact detained in Egypt during the whole term of the siege. Paris, it seems, in sailing from Sparta, had been driven thither by a storm; and the king of Egypt, hearing of the wrong he had committed towards Menelaus, had sent him out of the country, and detained Helen till her lawful husband should appear to claim her. The misfortune was, that when the Greeks before Troy demanded Helen, and were told that she neither was, nor had been in the town, they would not believe the story, but continued to thunder at the gates. "For if Helen had really been in Troy," says Herodotus, "she would certainly have been given up, even if she had been mistress of Priam himself instead of Paris: the Trojan king, with all his family and all his subjects, would never knowingly have incurred utter and irretrievable destruction for the purpose of retaining her; their misfortune was, that while they did not possess, and therefore could not restore her, they yet found it impossible to convince the Greeks that such was the fact."
Pausanias, a reasoning man, starts at the Trojan horse: he converts it into a battering-ram, as he cannot believe the Trojans to have been deceived by so childish a trick.