The Hellenes, like the ancient Pelasgians, had a system of religion which we call mythology.  They worshipped twelve principal deities and countless smaller ones, who, they believed, ruled the lives and fortunes of men.  Jupiter was the chief of these, and his will and that of the other gods were communicated to the people by priestesses, in the form of “Oracles.”  These were mysterious utterances, the meaning of which had to be guessed like riddles.  But for centuries no war was undertaken nor a single important thing done without first consulting the “Oracles.”

The “Heroic Age” (as it is called) is all so vague and shadowy, we should know nothing about it were it not for the great poet Homer.  But, strangely enough, about nine hundred years before Christ, Homer gathered all that was then known about the early life and habits of the Hellenes into two great poems, called the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey.”

In describing an ancient war which took place between the Hellenes and the Trojans—­a people in Asia Minor—­he so minutely pictured the people engaged in the struggle, their habits of life, their thoughts and feelings, with the minutest details of the circumstances in which they lived, that it enables us to know what would otherwise be impossible.

This marvellous work, produced more than a thousand years before there was a Germany, or an England, and almost a thousand before there was a Roman Empire, is still the world’s great masterpiece, and is to-day an indispensable part of education.

At the close of the “Heroic Age” something happened, which had the same effect upon Ancient Greece that many centuries later the descent of the Goths and Vandals had upon Southern Europe.  Greece, too, had its northern barbarians.  Some stronger and fiercer Aryan tribes poured down from Epirus, and for a time upset everything, just as the Goths did in Europe.

The Dorians, a stern, unrelenting tribe, took possession of the southern extremity of the peninsula, called the Peloponnesus; and the city of Sparta was the head of their State.  There were other States, too, in Greece, and each had its king and separate government.  But although jealous of each other and almost always at war, they worshipped the same deities, consulted the same Oracles, and all alike gloried in being descended from the same gods and in being Greeks.

The two most powerful States (or cities, which meant the same thing) were Athens and Sparta.  But they were as widely separated in character and habits as if they did not belong to the same family.  Athens was the brain, and Sparta the rough, strong arm of Greece.

Athens delighted in poetry, music, art, and eloquence.  The Spartans despised all these things.  They scorned to use three words where two would do, and aimed only to make their youth fearless and terrible defenders of Greece.