he Twelve Labours, who had been
cheated of the divine mares for which he had bargained, and had mere
earthly mares given to him, and who therefore, in revenge, had sacked
the town of Troy, is, in the first place, so interpreted as to show
"that the opulence of that city had in former times tempted the cupidity
of the Greeks;" and then this interpretation is made a ground for
supposing that a similar motive had led to the expedition of Agamemnon
and his chiefs. As well, surely, have said at once of the second war,
what is said of the first, that it was an ordinary case of plunder and
violence. It is hard to understand how the earlier legend can assist in
giving an historical character to the later.

But the elder legend may assist in explaining how a siege of Troy became
the great subject of the Homeric poems; and thus, whatever there was of
actual siege may be carried altogether into that remote anterior epoch
which is shadowed forth, if you will, under the exploits of Hercules.
For with that charming candour by which he often contrives to neutralise
the errors of his conjectural method of writing history, Dr Thirlwall
himself adds:--"This expedition of Hercules may indeed suggest a doubt
_whether it was not an earlier and simpler form of the same tradition,
which grew at length into the argument of the Iliad_; for there is a
striking resemblance between the two wars, not only in the events, but
in the principal actors. As the prominent figures in the second siege
are Agamemnon and Achilles, who represent the royal house of Mycenae, and
that of the Aeacids; so in the first the Argive Hercules is accompanied
by the Aeacid Telamon; and even the quarrel and reconciliation of the
allied chiefs are features common to both traditions."[6]

The disquisition on the legend of Troy naturally leads the historian,
and will naturally suggest to our own readers, the mooted question of
the authorship of the Homeric poems. Some of them be happy to learn that
the opinion of Mr Grote is not of so sceptical a nature as they may
have been prepared to expect. The Wolfian hypothesis he by no means
adopts--namely, that before the time of Pisistratus, there was no such
thing in existence as an extended and entire epic, but that the two
great epics we now possess were then constructed by stringing together a
number of detached poems, the separate chants of the old Greek bards or
rhapsodists. Mr Grote sees in the _Odyssey_ all the marks of unity