Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/71

 APPLICATION OF CHRONOLOGY IV LEGEND. 55 It would be curious to ascertain at what time, or by whom, the earliest continuous genealogies, connecting existing persons with the supposed antecedent age of legend, were formed and pre- served. Neither Homer nor Hesiod mentioned any verifiable present persons or circumstances : had they done so, the age of one or other of them could have been determined upon good evidence, which we may fairly presume to have been impossible, from the endless controversies upon this topic among ancient writers. In the Hesiodic "Works and Days, the heroes of Troy and Thebes are even presented as an extinct race, 1 radically different from the poet's own contemporaries, who are a new race, far too de- praved to be conceived as sprung from the loins of the heroes ; so that we can hardly suppose Hesiod (though his father was a native of the ^Eolic Kyme) to have admitted the pedigree of the JEolic chiefs, as reputed descendants of Agamemnon. Cer- tain it is, that the earliest poets did not attempt to measure or bridge over the supposed interval, between their own age and the war of Troy, by any definite series of fathers and sons : whether Eumelus or Asius made any such attempt, we cannot tell, but ,'he earliest continuous backward genealogies which we find men- tioned are those of Pherekydek, Hellanikus, and Herodotus. It is well known that Herodotus, in his manner of computing the upward genealogy of the Spartan kings, assigns the date of the Trojan war to a period 800 years earlier than himself, equivalent about to B. c. 1270-1250 ; while the subsequent Alexandrine chronologists, Eratosthenes and Apollodorus, place that event in 1184 and 1183 B. c. ; and the Parian marble refers it to an in termediate date, different from either, 1209 B. c. Ephorus, Phanias, Timasus, Kleitarchus, and Duris, had each his own con- jectural date ; but the computations of the Alexandrine chronol- ogists was the most generally followed by those who succeeded them, and seems to have passed to modern times as the received date of this great legendary event, though some distinguished inquirers have adopted the epoch of Herodotus, which Larcher has attempted to vindicate in an elaborate but feeble disserta- tion. 2 It is unnecessary to state that, in my view, the inquiry 1 Sec the preceding volume of this History, Chap. ii. p. 66. Prom the capture of Troy down to the passage of Alexander with hii
 * Larcher, Chronologic d'Herodote, chap. xiv. pp. 352-401.