Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/478

 446 HISTORY OF GREECE. haps have accounted it an overweening impiety in any living man to claim a god for his immediate father. The whole chronology of Greece, anterior to 776 u. c., consists of calculations founded upon these mythical genealogies, espe- cially upon that of the Spartan kings and their descent from Herakles, thirty years being commonly taken as the equiva- lent of a generation, or about three generations to a century. This process of computation was altogether illusory, as applying historical and chronological conditions to a case on which they had no bearing. Though the domain of history was seemingly enlarged, the religious element was tacitly set aside : when the heroes and gods were chronologized, they became insensibly ap- proximated to the limits of humanity, and the process indirectly gave encouragement to the theory of Euemerus. Personages originally legendary and poetical were erected into definite land- marks for measuring the duration of the foretime, thus gaining in respect to historical distinctness, but not without loss on the score of religious association. Both Euemerus and the subsequent Christian writers, who denied the original and inherent divinity of the pagan gods, had a great advantage in carrying their chro- nological researches strictly and consistently upwards for all chronology fails as soon as we suppose a race superior to common humanity. Moreover, it is to be remarked that the pedigree of the Spartan kings, which Apollodorus and Eratosthenes selected as the basis of their estimate of time, is nowise superior in credibility and trustworthiness to the thousand other gentile and family pedigrees with which Greece abounded ; it is rather indeed to be numbered among the most incredible of all, seeing that Herakles as a pro- genitor is placed at the head of perhaps more pedigrees than any other Grecian god or hero. 1 The descent of the Spartan king Leonidas from Herakles rests upon no better evidence than that of Aristotle or Hippocrates from Asklepius, 2 of Evagoras or 1 According to that which Aristotle seems to recognize (Histor. Animal. vii. 6), Herakles was father of seventy- two sons, but of only one daughter he was essentially df>f>ev6-yovo<;, illustrating one of the physical peculiarities noticed by Aristotle. Euripides, towever, mentions daughters of Herakles in the plural number (Euripid. Herakleid. 45).
 * Hippocrates was twentieth in descent from Herakles, and nineteenth