Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/114

 82 HISTORY Of GREECE. divided had each its ancestral god and heroes, just as much a* the great Athens herself. Even among the villages of Phokis, which Pausanias will hardly permit himself to call towns, deduc- tions of legendary antiquity were not wanting. And it is impor- tant to bear in mind, when we are reading the legendary geneal- ogies of Argos, or Sparta, or Thebes, that these are merely samples amidst an extensive class, all perfectly analogous, and all exhibiting the religious and patriotic retrospect of some frac- tion of the Hellenic world. They are no more matter of his- torical tradition than any of the thousand other legendary genealo- gies which men delighted to recall to memory at the periodical festivals of their gens, their dome, or their village. With these few prefatory remarks, I proceed to notice the most conspicuous of the Grecian heroic pedigrees, and first, that of Argos. The earliest name in Argeian antiquity is that of Inachus, the son of Oceanus and Tethys, who gave his name to the river flow- ing under the walls of the town. According to the chronological computations of those who regarded the mythical genealogies as substantive history, and who allotted a given number of years to each generation, the reign of Inachus was placed 1986 B. c., or about 1100 years prior to the commencement of the recorded Olympiads. 1 The sons of Inachus were Phoroneus and ^Egialeus ; both of whom however were sometimes represented as autochthonous men, the one in the territory of Argos, the other in that of Sik- yen. .ZEgialeus gave his name to the north-western region of the Peloponnesus, on the southern coast of the Corinthian Gulf. 2 The name of Phoroneus was of great celebrity in the Argeian mythical genealogies, and furnished both the title and the sub- ject of the ancient poem called Phoronis, in which he is styled " the father of mortal men." 3 He is said to have imparted to 1 Apollodor. ii. 1. Mr. Fynes Clinton docs not admit the historical reality of Inachus ; but he places Phoroneus seventeen generations, or 570 years prior to the Trojan war, 978 years earlier than the first recorded Olympiad See Fasti Hellenici, vol. iii. c. 1. p. 19. 3 See Duntzer, Fragm. Epic. Grsec. p. 57. The Argeian author Akusilarw treated Phoroneus as the first of men, Fragm. 14. Didot an. Clem. Alex
 * Pausan. ii. 5, 4.