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345 ON THE KINGS OF ATTICA BEFORE THESEUS. Every one who has endeavoured to form for himself a clear idea of Greek history and to estimate its evidence^ must have felt himself perplexed to determine the relation in which the heroic ao-es stand to the historical. The Greeks themselves^ indeed, for a long time felt no such perplexity ; they received in simple faith the legends of their mythology, and never doubted that their kings and nobles were descended from the gods, that their temples had been founded, their hills, rivers and cities named, their ancient rites and customs introduced by an ancient race, whose close affinity with the gods enabled them to accomplish what would have been im- possible to mere mortals. To them the mythic age appeared to be separated by no wide gulph from the historic ; believing their divinities still to interpose in human affairs, the only difference was, that what was a rare occurrence in their own times had been an event of every day in the heroic age. Even those who might doubt of the supernatural part of the story never called in question the existence of the per- sonages themselves whose names filled the early annals of every Grecian state. The moderns reject of course all that is supernatural from the history of the heroic times, and many of them seem to have flattered themselves that by so doing, and supplying the place of the divine machinery thus withdrawn, by the human machinery of means and motives, they could convert mythology into very passable history. Allowing them to make these additions however, as a necessary liberty for an historian, whose building would advance slowly if he were not permitted to make mortar as well as to collect stones, we ]nay at least claim to enquire strictly into the evidence