this seems most likely, for almost as many
Greeks lived in the borders of Asia Minor as lived in Greece itself, and
there were many stories of the hills, cities, and rivers there, but I
have only told you what is most needful to be known--not, of course, to
be believed, but to be known.

[Picture: Decorative chapter heading]

CHAP. XII.--AFTER THE HEROIC AGE.

All these heroes of whom we have been telling lived, if they lived at
all, about the time of the Judges of Israel. Troy is thought to have
been taken at the time that Saul was reigning in Israel, and there is no
doubt that there once was a city between Mount Ida and the AEgean Sea,
for quantities of remains have been dug up, and among them many rude
earthenware images of an owl, the emblem of Pallas Athene, likenesses
perhaps of the Palladium. Hardly anything is told either false or true
of Greece for three hundred years after this time, and when something
more like history begins we find that all Greece, small as it is, was
divided into very small states, each of which had a chief city and a
government of its own, and was generally shut in from its neighbours by
mountains or by sea. There were the three tribes, Ionian, Dorian, and
AEolian, dwelling in these little states, and, though they often
quarrelled among themselves, all thinking themselves one nation, together
with their kindred in the islands of the AEgean, on the coasts of Asia,
and also in Sicily and Southern Italy, which was sometimes called Greater
Greece.

Some time between the heroic age and the historical time, there had been
a great number of songs and verses composed telling of the gods and
heroes. Singers and poets used to be entertained by the kings, and
sometimes to wander from one place to another, welcomed by all, as they
chanted to the harp or the lyre the story of the great forefathers of
their hosts, especially when they had all joined together, as in the hunt
of the great boar of Calydon, in the voyage for the Golden Fleece, and,
above all, in the siege of Troy. The greatest of all these singers was
the blind poet Homer, whose songs of the wrath of Achilles and the
wanderings of Ulysses were loved and learnt by everyone. Seven different
cities claimed to be his birth-place, but no one knows more about him
than that he was blind--not even exactly when he lived--but his poems did
much to make the Greeks hold together.

And so did their religion. Every