Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/69

 VALUE OF THE GENEAL JGIES. 5i eponj -as is to be trusted. " The descendants of Hercules (ob- serves Mr. Clinton) remained in many states down to the histor- ical times." So did those of Zeus and Apollo, and of that god whom the historian Hekataeus recognized as his progenitor in the sixteenth generation ; the titular kings of Ephesus, in the histor- ical times, as well as Peisistratus, the despot of Athens, traced their origin up to JEolus and Hellen, yet Mr. Clinton does not hesitate to reject ^Eolus and Hellen as fictitious persons. I dis- pute the propriety of quoting the Iliad and Odyssey (as Mr. Clinton does) in evidence of the historic personality of Hercules. For, even with regard to the ordinary men who figure in those poems, we have no means of discriminating the real from the fictitious ; while the Homeric Herakles is unquestionably more than an ordinary man, he is the favorite son of Zeus, from his birth predestined to a life of labor and servitude, as preparation for a glorious immortality. Without doubt, the poet himself be- lieved in the reality of Hercules, but it was a reality clothed with superhuman attributes. Mr. Clinton observes (Introd. p. ii.), that "because some gene- alogies were fictitious, we are not justified in concluding that all were fabulous." It is no way necessary that we should maintain so extensive a position : it is sufficient that all are fabulous so far as concerns gods and heroes, some fabulous throughout, and none ascertainably true, for the period anterior to the recorded Olympiads. How much, or what particular portions, may be true, no one can pronounce. The gods and heroes are, from our point of view, essentially fictitious ; but from the Grecian point of view they were the most real (if the expression may be per- mitted, i. e. clung to with the strongest faith) of all the members of the series. They not only formed parts of the genealogy as originally conceived, but were in themselves the grand reason why it was conceived, as a golden chain to connect the living man with a divine ancestor. The genealogy, therefore, taken as a whole, (and its value consists in its being taken as a whole,) was from the beginning a fiction ; but the names of the father and grandfather of the living man, in whose day it first came forth, were doubtless those of real men. Wherever, therefore, we can verify the date of a genealogy, as applied to some living person, we may reasonably presume the two lowest members of