Book Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1867 edition. Excerpt: ...and the remaining half volume does not carry us much beyond the first dawn of real history. The Legends of Greece Mr. Grote relates at greater length than has been thought necessary by any of his predecessors. This is incident to the design, which no one before him had seriously entertained, of making the history of Greece a picture of the Greek mind. There is no more important element in the mind of Greece than the legends. They constituted the belief of the Greeks of the historical period, concerning their own past. They formed also the Grecian religion; and the religion of an early people is the groundwork of its primitive system of thought on all subjects. Mr. Grote makes no distinction between the legends of the Gods and those of the Heroes. He relates the one and the other literally, as they were told by the poets, and believed by the general public, down to the time of the Roman empire. He makes no attempt to discriminate historical mqtter in the stories of heroes, no more than in those of the gods. Not doubting that some of them do contain such matter--that many of the tales of the heroic times are partially grounded on incidents which really happened--he thinks it useless to attempt to conjecture what these were. The siege of Troy is to him no more an historical fact than the births and amours of the gods, as recorded in Hesiod. The only thing which he deems historical in either is, that the Greeks believed them, and the poets sung them. Whether they were believed from the first, as they were afterwards, on the authority of poets, or the poets grounded their narratives on stories already current, we have no means of ascertaining; in some cases the one thing may have happened, in some the other; in Mr. Grote's view it is...