e, and about the
beautiful Ariadne who fell in love with him, and gave him the clue to the
labyrinth where her father, Minos, kept the monster hid. These things
about the classic little island have an especial interest for us now.

At this earliest period the people were called, not Greeks, but
Pelasgians. In the course of time the Hellenes, a more powerful Aryan
race, overpowered them, and after that their country was called Hellas,
and its people Hellenes, until a much later period, when they were known
as Greeks.

The Hellenes, like the ancient Pelasgians, had a system of religion which
we call mythology. They worshipped twelve principal deities and countless
smaller ones, who, they believed, ruled the lives and fortunes of men.
Jupiter was the chief of these, and his will and that of the other gods
were communicated to the people by priestesses, in the form of "Oracles."
These were mysterious utterances, the meaning of which had to be guessed
like riddles. But for centuries no war was undertaken nor a single
important thing done without first consulting the "Oracles."

The "Heroic Age" (as it is called) is all so vague and shadowy, we should
know nothing about it were it not for the great poet Homer. But, strangely
enough, about nine hundred years before Christ, Homer gathered all that
was then known about the early life and habits of the Hellenes into two
great poems, called the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey."

In describing an ancient war which took place between the Hellenes and the
Trojans--a people in Asia Minor--he so minutely pictured the people
engaged in the struggle, their habits of life, their thoughts and
feelings, with the minutest details of the circumstances in which they
lived, that it enables us to know what would otherwise be impossible.

This marvellous work, produced more than a thousand years before there was
a Germany, or an England, and almost a thousand before there was a Roman
Empire, is still the world's great masterpiece, and is to-day an
indispensable part of education.

At the close of the "Heroic Age" something happened, which had the same
effect upon Ancient Greece that many centuries later the descent of the
Goths and Vandals had upon Southern Europe. Greece, too, had its northern
barbarians. Some stronger and fiercer Aryan tribes poured down from
Epirus, and for a time upset everything, just as the Goths did in Europe.

The Dorians, a stern, unrelenting tribe, took possession of the