which separated the Hellas of legend from the
Hellas of history there lay a civilization, real, and once living,
of which the legends and the Homeric pictures preserved but the
scanty surviving ruins and relics?

[Illustration IV: THE IRON GATE, MYCENAE (_p_. 42)]

Here we have to recall two facts of importance. First, that universal
Greek tradition affirmed that before the birth of historic Greece
there lay a Dark Age, its darkness caused by the descent from the
North of the rude, iron-using Dorian tribes, who found in the lands
which they invaded a civilization of the Bronze Age, far more advanced
than their own, and, by the help of their superior weapons, conquered
and indeed destroyed it. And second, that even in the gorgeous
picture given by the Homeric poems of the period with which they
deal, there is a constant tendency to regard that period as being
only the decadent and inferior heir of a civilization which had
preceded it. Nothing is plainer in Homer than the suggestion that
the men of the age before the Trojan Wars were greater, stronger,
wiser, better in every respect than even the heroes who fought on
'the ringing plains of windy Troy,' even as these were greater
than the men of the poet's own degenerate days. Does it not seem
as though we were being led towards the conclusion that the Homeric
civilization is itself the representation of a very real fact of
history, the picture of a state of things which was submerged and
swept away by the coming of the Dorians, or by whatever inrush of
wild northern tribes the Greeks may have called by that general
title, but which was itself only the last decadent stage of an
antecedent culture, still greater and more highly developed--that
of the legendary period? The answer to this question has come in
the most surprising and romantic fashion from the archaeological
discoveries of the last forty years.

CHAPTER III

SCHLIEMANN AND HIS WORK

The man whose labours were to give a new impetus to the study of
Greek origins, and to be the beginning of the revelation of an
unknown world of ancient days, was born on January 6, 1822, at
Neu Buckow in Mecklenburg-Schwerin. He was the son of a clergyman
who himself had a deep love for the great tales of antiquity, for
his son has told how his father used often vividly to narrate the
stories of the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and of the
Trojan War. When Schliemann was barely seven years old he received
a