DISSERTATION II.

ON THE FUNDAMENTAL FACT OF THE ILIAD: THE TROJAN WAR.

THE presumption in favour of the historical reality of early popular tradition being thus established, there will now be little difficulty in applying the general principle to the special facts of early Hellenic history set forth in the Iliad; provided always we use the Aristotelian canon, of applying to every question no more subtle sort of reasoning than its nature demands,' and do not insist, as some people fondly will, on cutting logs with razors, and examining mountains with microscopes. We shall therefore attempt, in the first place, to mount up by an independent prose route to the poetical tableland of Homer, and see whether there are distinct traces of human footsteps up to that elevation, or if we are wandering, as on some broad moor of the West Highlands, through seas of blinding mist and leagues of feetconfounding bog. Our safest starting-point will be from Thucydides, the first critical historian of Greece, who lived in an age of intense literary and philosophical activity, and who examined the early traditions of his country with the affectionate sympathy which belongs to the warmth of patriotism tempered by the cool judgment of exact science. Now, he tells us that from the time when he wrote, that is, towards

1 Aristot. Ethic. Nicom. 1. 3.

the end of the Peloponnesian war, counting upwards,-the Spartan constitution had stood stable amid the oscillations and revolutions of all other Greek states for a period of four hundred years. If we assume, as we are entitled to do, that the form of the Spartan constitution, of which the permanence is here lauded, was none other than that imprinted on it by the regulative genius of Lycurgus, we shall have, in round numbers, 800 B.C. as the date of the great Spartan legislator. As Sparta was the oldest state in Greece, its history ran down into the existing state of things in the time of Thucydides without a break. We are, by following this line, ascending, in the most direct and firm way, to the era of the Trojan war. Now, from Lycurgus backwards we find that the tradition of Lacedæmon shows a list of about half a dozen kings up to the date of the institution of the Spartan monarchy by the Doric invaders of the Peloponnesus. We shall therefore say, in round numbers, that the Dorians and their Etolian allies crossed the narrow strait of Rhion, and established themselves in the Peloponnesus, driving out the original occupants, about the year 1000 B.C., that is, precisely at the time when the Jewish monarchy made its early culmination in the person of Solomon. So far we appear on safe ground; unless, indeed, a man will be so unreasonable as to suppose that even the public registers of the chief magistrates of a great state would be deliberately forged and imposed on a sober-minded, sensible people, as the Spartans certainly were, in an age, not of barbarism, but of curious social culture and political organization, as the legislation of Lycurgus distinctly indicates. After the foundation of the Spartan kingdom we have but three steps to the Trojan war. For, the grandson of Agamemnon, king of

1 Thucyd. 1. 18.

Mycena, sat on his father's throne, according to the Greek tradition, at the time of the Dorian invasion; and he, along with the other Achæan inhabitants, was dispossessed by the invaders, and forced to seek settlements in other quarters. A capital fact of this description could not be forgotten by the Greeks, any more than. the Norman invasion in this country by us Britons. As to the exact number of generations that elapsed between the two events, had it been twice or thrice the number, it would have been quite within the firm grasp of a people, with whom, as we see from Homer himself, family genealogies were a matter of special study, as, indeed, is the case with all nations in their earliest stages. We shall not therefore find any difficulty in believing that there was an Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, three generations before the Doric invasion, that is, in round numbers again, 1100 years before the birth of Christ, at the time when Samuel, the last of the Judges, anointed Saul to be king of Israel; and that, if the poem of the Iliad is founded on fact, the city of Priam fell about that period. I have stated all these dates in round numbers, both because the first Greek authorities, as is well known,2 differed as to the exact year, and even the century, in which Troy was taken, and because popular tradition, on which I at present take my stand, has nothing to do with chronology in a strictly scientific sense. The chronology which is now generally used in this country, and which places the taking of Troy in the year 1184 B.C., is an artificial system constructed by Eratosthenes, no doubt one of the greatest scholars and

In the schools of the Celtic bards, which abounded in Scotland and Ire

studied.-Dean of Lismore's Book, p. 139.

land before the Reformation, poetry 2 Clinton's Fasti Hellenici, vol. i. and genealogy were the chief branches p. 123.

scientific men of the Alexandrian school, but who certainly was not possessed of materials which could enable him, otherwise than in the way of approximation, to lay down a minute chronology of those early times. But though popular tradition takes no account of strict scientific chronology, it by no means follows that distances of time in those early periods are altogether untrustworthy. It is with measures of time as with measures of space: they may often be generally true, or true within certain limits, without being scientifically exact. A peasant may tell you that certain mountains are about thirty miles to the west of where you are now standing; there are no milestones; no mathematical triangle ever squared the country; and yet, within three or four miles, if he be an intelligent peasant, or within ten miles, if he be of the duller sort, you will find your informer is correct. So with history. Though the best-informed men we can find differ as to the exact date of a fact which happened six or seven hundred years ago, you need not therefore apprehend that you know nothing at all about the date; much less are you under any logical compulsion to believe that not only is the date altogether uncertain, but the event a pure figment. The date of the event is by no means altogether uncertain. It certainly did not take place yesterday; it did not take place four hundred years ago; and you may confidently say that it did not take place so long ago as a thousand years; because, had it stretched so far back, there would, as in the case of land distances, have been a misty and mythological air about it, which, in such instances as we are now concerned with, is not the case. Independently of the testimony of Homer, no man, looking at the figure of Agamemnon, as we now have it in the connected chain of Hellenic tradition, and at the figure of Cadmus, could conclude that these two

personages were contemporary. There is a more and a less ancient look about traditional figures, which to an eye of common discrimination at once decides their relative eras without the assistance of an exact chronology. I conclude therefore that we have found Agamemnon and the Trojan expedition by a trustworthy route of direct historical ascent, altogether independent of the Iliad.

But the truth or falsehood of any story, old or new, depends not only on the external units of testimony by which we trace it to its original source, but on its own internal consistency and verisimilitude. No sane man would believe such a story as is told in Ariosto's Orlando,' or in Lucian's 'Vera Historia,' however well attested. Is there anything, therefore, in the character and attitude of the famous tale of Troy, that should render its reality a matter of suspicion to a man of sense and sound judgment? In the general outline of the story, at least, I confess I see nothing. That neighbours are given to quarrel, and that a common boundary is oftener a bone of contention than a bond of peace, is a political principle which history teaches by a thousand examples. That the coasts of Europe and Asia, separated by the small breadth of the Ægean Sea, and that breadth bridged over by scores of islands placed at easy intervals, were peopled by races which naturally came into hostile collision, the names of Marathon, Eurymedon, and the Granicus loudly declare. And if Agamemnon, from the eastern coast of Greece, sailed with a vast armament against a famous empire of Asia, some eleven hundred years before Christ, he only performed the natural overture to the great drama enacted afterwards on the same stage, successively by the Macedonians, the Romans, and the Crusaders. Of the existence of a powerful sovereign, such as the Iliad repre