336 SCIENCE PROGRESS. 



strictly anthropological work in this field must stand, if it is 

 to be intelligible, in close relation with the data and 

 assumptions, which have so mainly determined its course. 



ANCIENT TRADITIONS AND MODERN INTERPRETATIONS. 



i. The data upon which Greeks of the sixth and early 

 fifth centuries relied for the reconstruction of their own 

 history consisted wholly of traditional anecdotes, appended 

 to traditional genealogies, or grouped, in more or less organic 

 connection, round equally traditional events, such as an 

 invasion of the Troad, or an exploration of the Euxine, or 

 the adventures of a typical navigator like Odysseus. Many 

 of the lays in which these anecdotes were preserved can be 

 traced with some probability to their places of origin, which 

 range from Cyprus to the islands off the west coast of 

 Greece, and from Thessaly and the Troad to Crete. All 

 profess to represent the civilisation of the yEgean area at a 

 period removed by several centuries from the point at 

 which the Hellenic world emerges into history ; and the 

 traditional chronology of historical Hellas went up to an 

 era which is slightly later, but approximately contemporary 

 with the latest episodes of the Epic poems. Now though the 

 lays which display the greater literary skill and the maturer 

 idiom give a less vivid and more conventional picture ; and 

 though occasional allusions occur to customs and beliefs 

 which are characteristic of Hellenic culture, those others 

 which Greek tradition reckons primary, namely, the Iliad 

 and the Odyssey, are obviously at close quarters with their 

 subject ; and if there is one thing certain about the civilisa- 

 tion of the "Homeric Age" thus described, it is that it 

 differs in nearly every important feature from that of the 

 " Hellenic Age" of historical Greece. 



2. The Greeks, in fact, themselves regarded their earliest 

 literature as antedating the chronological limits of their 

 history, and already perceived that they belonged to a 

 different order of things. In particular, the ethnography 

 of the /Egean, preserved in an admittedly late and de- 

 generate lay, differs uniformly from that of historic Hellas as 

 far back as it can be traced, and those names are almost 



