Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/422

 390 HISTORY OF GREECE. still numbered by Aristotle among the essential points of th theory of tragedy. 1 The tendency then of Athenian tragedy powerfully mani- fested in JEschylus, and never wholly lost was to uphold an unquestioning faith and a reverential estimate of the general mythical world and its personages, but to treat the particular nar- ratives rather as matter for the emotions than as recitals of actual fact. The logographers worked along with them to the first of these two ends, but not to the second. Their grand object was, to cast the mythes into a continuous readable series, and they were in consequence compelled to make selection between inconsistent or contradictory narratives ; to reject some narra- tives as false, and to receive others as true. But their prefer- ence was determined more by their sentiments as to what was appropriate, than by any pretended historical test. Pherekydes, Akusilaus and Hellanikus 2 did not seek to banish miraculous or fantastic incidents from the mythical world ; they regarded it as peopled with loftier beings, and expected to find in it phenomena not paralleled in their own degenerate days. They reproduced the fables as they found them in the poets, rejecting little except the discrepancies, and producing ultimately what they believed to be not only a continuous but an exact and trustworthy history of the past wherein they carry indeed their precision to such a length, that Hellanicus gives the year, and even the day of the rapture of Troy. 3 Hekatasus of Miletus (500 B. c.), anterior to Pherekydes and Hellanikus, is the earliest writer in whom we can detect any dis- position to disallow the prerogative and specialty of the mythes, and to soften down their characteristic prodigies, some of which 1 Aristot. Poetic. 26-27. And in his Problemata also, in giving the reason why the Hypo-Dorian and Hypo-Phrygian musical modes were never as- signed to the Chorus, he says TavTa <5 ajifyu xopif) fiev avapfioara, rolf 6e <inrb aKrjvrjf oineiorepa. 'Eicelvoi fi.ev yap fjpuuv (i'.firirai ol 6e rjyefioves TUV apxaiuv fiovoi fjoav fypuec, ol 61 Aaoi avdpuiroi, uv karlv 6 #6pof. A^ ical appo&i airy rd yoepbv Kal ijavxiov fr'Jo? ical fietof av&puiriKb yap. 93. 3 Hellanic. Fragment. 143, ed. Didot
 * See Miiller, Prolegom m einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie, c. iii. p