=The Legends.=—­The Greeks like all the other ancient peoples were ignorant of their origin.  They neither knew whence their ancestors had come nor when they had established themselves in Greece, nor what they had done there.  To preserve the exact memory of things as they occur, there is need of some means of fixing them; but the Greeks did not know how to write; they did not employ writing until about the eighth century B.C.  They had no way of calculating the number of years.  Later they adopted the usage of counting the years according to the great feast which was celebrated every four years at Olympia; a period of four years was called an olympiad.  But the first olympiad was placed in 776 B.C., and the chronology of the Greeks does not rise beyond this date.

And yet they used to tell in Greece a great number of legends about this primitive period.  These were especially the exploits of ancient kings and of heroes who were adored as demi-gods.  These stories were so mingled with fable that it is impossible to know how much truth they may contain.  They said at Athens that the first king, Cecrops, was half man and half serpent; at Thebes, that Cadmus, founder of the city, had come from Phoenicia to seek his sister Europa who had been stolen by a bull; that he had killed a dragon and had sowed his teeth, from which was sprung a race of warriors, and that the noble families of Thebes descended from these warriors.  At Argos it was said that the royal family was the issue of Pelops to whom Zeus had given a shoulder of ivory to replace the one devoured by a goddess.  Thus each country had its legends and the Greeks continued to the end to relate them and to offer worship to their ancient heroes—­Perseus, Bellerophon, Herakles, Theseus, Minos, Castor and Pollux, Meleager, OEdipus.  The majority of the Greeks, even among the better educated, admitted, at least in part, the truth of these traditions.  They accepted as historical facts the war between the two sons of OEdipus, king of Thebes, and the expedition of the Argonauts, sailing forth in quest of the Golden Fleece, which was guarded by two brazen-footed bulls vomiting flames.

=The Trojan War.=—­Of all these legends the most fully developed and the most celebrated was the legend of the Trojan War.  It recounted that about the twelfth century, Troy, a rich and powerful city, held sway over the coast of Asia.  Paris, a Trojan prince, having come to Greece, had abducted Helen, wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta.  Agamemnon, king of Argos, made a league of the kings of Greece; a Greek army went in a fleet of two hundred galleys to besiege Troy.  The siege endured ten years because the supreme god, Zeus, had taken the side of the Trojans.  All the Greek chiefs participated in this adventure.  Achilles, the bravest and the most beautiful of these, killed Hector, the principal defender of Troy, and dragged his corpse around the city; he fought clad in divine armor which had been