e-existing sources for it. 'The fathering of the Greek on
the pre-existing profane cultures has been scouted by perfervid
Hellenists in terms which implied that they hold it little else
than impiety. Allowing no causation more earthly than vague local
influences of air and light, mountain and sea, they would have
Hellenism born into the world by a miracle of generation, like
its own Athena from the head of Zeus.'[*] But a great civilization
can never be accounted for in this miraculous fashion. The origins
of even Egyptian culture have begun to yield themselves to patient
research, and it is not permissible to believe that the Greek nation
was born in a day into its great inheritance, or that it derived
nothing from earlier ages and races.

[Footnote *: D. G. Hogarth, 'Ionia and the East,' p. 21.]

Indeed, the supreme monument of the matchless literature of Hellas
bore witness to the fact that, prior to the beginnings of Greek
history, there had existed on Greek soil a civilization of a very
high type, differing from, in some respects even superior to, that
which succeeded it, but manifestly refusing to be left out of
consideration in any attempt to describe the beginnings of Greek
culture. The Homeric poems shone like a beacon light across the
dark gulf which separated the Hellas of myth from the Hellas of
history, testifying to a splendour that had been before the darkness,
and prophesying of a splendour that should be when the darkness
had passed. But the very brilliance of their pictures and the
magnificence of the society with which they dealt only added to
the complication of the question, and emphasized the difficulty
of deriving the culture of historic Greece by legitimate filiation
from a past which seemed to have no connection and no community of
character with it. For the Homeric civilization was not a different
stage of development of that same civilization which appears when
the first beginnings of what we are accustomed to call Hellenism
are presented to us; it was totally diverse, and in many respects
more complex and more splendid.

From the eighth century onwards we are on moderately safe ground
when dealing with the history of Hellas and its culture. We know
something of the actual facts of its history, literary and political.
The chronicles of the more important cities are known with a
definiteness fairly comparable to what we might expect at such
a stage of development. But the Homeric poems take