no ANTIENT METAPHYSICS. Book II. 



we cannot fuppofe that the heroic race ended at once, but that it 

 continued, with fome diminution, no doubt, of the fize and ftrengtli 

 of men, fuch as Neftor obferves there was from the time of the war 

 with the Lapithae, down to the expedition againft Troy. The Do- 

 rians, who, under the Heracleidae, invaded Peloponnefus, about 80 

 years after the Trojan war, and eftabhflied there thofe three famous 

 kingdoms of Sparta, Argos, and MelTena, were, as Plato informs 

 us *, Greeks who had been at the Trojan war, or their defcendants. 

 And in Sparta, the moft heroic race of any^ I mean the race of Her- 

 cules, was moft wonderfully preferved, by the laws and inftitutions 

 of Lycurgus, much better, I believe, than in other countries, where 

 his race alfo reigned ; and, in general, the men of Sparta v/ere, as 

 late dov^rn as the days of Xenophon, the beft bodied men in Greecef. 

 There was then, however, no doubt, a very great decline, even in 

 Sparta, from the heroic fize ; for, three or four generations before 

 Xenophon, when Xerxes invaded Greece, it is evident, from He- 

 rodotus's account of that war, that the Perfians, who were a much 



younger 



take the trouble to read, not the mythological writers only, fuch as Apollodorus, but 

 the account given by a grave hiftorian, and one of the moft accurate and diligent of 

 antiquity, 1 mean Diodcrus Siculus in the Fourth Book of his Hiftory, cannot doubt 

 but that iuch men exifted, and that there was among them a i'p:rit ot gallantry and. 

 adventure, fuch as was in Europe in the days of chivalry, which made them under- 

 take expeditions into remote countries, and perform wonderful anions, that were 

 recorded by many different hiftorians, but who, like hiftorians in much later times, 

 differed a good deal from one another in particular fa(fts, as Diodorus informs us. 



* Lib. iii- Be Legibus, p. 682. Edit Serrani. He fays that thefe Greeks, after 

 their return from Troy being driven out of their feveral cities by the factions that 

 ■were formed againfl them in their abfence, aflembled together under one leader, 

 called Dorus, from whom they took the name of Dorians, inftead of Achaeans, as 

 tbey were called before. 



t Xenophon, in his Treatife on the Lasedemon'ian Polityy towards the beginning. 



