Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/63

 ANCIENT AND MODERN CHKONOLOGISTS. 47 one of the chronological reckoners of antiquity, would have ad- mitted the distinction which Mr. Clinton draws between persons real and persons fictitious in the old mythical world, though they might perhaps occasionally, on special grounds, call in question the existence of some individual characters amongst the mythical ancestry of Greece ; but they never dreamed of that general severance into real and fictitious persons, which forms the princi- ple of Mr. Clinton's " middle course." Their chronological com- putations for Grecian antiquity assumed that the mythical char- acters, in their full and entire sequence, were all real persons. Setting up the entire list as real, they calculated so many genera- tions to a century, and thus determined the number of centuries which separated themselves from the gods, the heroes, or the autochthonous men who formed in their view the historical start- ing point. But as soon as it is admitted that the personages in the mythical world are divisible into two classes, partly real and partly fictitious, the integrity of the series is broken up, and it can be no longer employed as a basis for chronological calculation. In the estimate of the ancient chronologers, three succeeding per- sons of the same lineage grandfather, father, and son, counted for a century ; and this may pass in a rough way, so long as you are thoroughly satisfied that they are all real persons : but if, in the succession of persons A, B, C, you strike out B as a fiction, the continuity of data necessary for chronological computation disappears. Now Mr. Clinton is inconsistent with himself in this, that, while he abandons the unsuspecting historical faith of the Grecian chronologers, he nevertheless continues his chro- nological computations upon the data of that ancient faith, upon the assumed reality of all the persons constituting his ante- historical generations. "What becomes, for example, of the Hera- kleid genealogy of the Spartan kings, when it is admitted that eponymous persons are to be cancelled as fictions ; seeing that Hyllus, through whom those kings traced their origin to Hera- kles comes in the most distinct manner under that category, as much so as Hoples the son of Ion ? It will be found that, when we once cease to believe in the mythical world as an uninter- rupted and unalloyed succession of real individuals, it becomes unfit to serve as a basis for chronological computations, and that Mr. Clinton, when he mutilated the data of the ancient chronolo*