THE EXPANSION OF GREEK HISTORY 57 



cation, because it has been branded in the false jargon of his crowd as 

 a dead language. My duty here is to show you the relations which 

 have grown up between Greek political history and the sister studies 

 in our day; how fruitful researches and explorations have told upon 

 our knowledge of Greek history, and more especially how the cen- 

 turies that went before and those that followed after the golden age 

 of Greek culture are emerging both from the gray dawn of obscure 

 origins and the lurid twilight of confused decadence, into the order 

 and proper sequence of rational history. In attempting this huge 

 task I hope I may gain your earnest attention. I know you will 

 vouchsafe me your generous indulgence. I may also forewarn you 

 that, for obvious reasons, Professor Pais, my colleague in the matter, 

 has agreed with me that each of us will prosecute that branch of the 

 subject which he has made the special study of his life. 



When I was a boy and first plunged into Greek history, the begin- 

 ning of our knowledge was the Iliad of Homer. We were taught by 

 Niebuhr, and still more explicitly by Grote, that all the legends of 

 the Greeks concerning their earlier settlements and expansion were 

 the mere play of fancy, quite possibly pure inventions, in any case 

 only admissible into history as a picture of the national mind in a 

 certain stage, at a certain epoch. Even the facts narrated by Homer 

 were within the range of fiction; the society which he painted was 

 only real in so far as the poet reflected his own times and the life of 

 men around him. And no doubt Grote and his school were perfectly 

 right that the uncorroborated statements of legend by a poet, nay, 

 even the early genealogies which commence with the gods, are but 

 the wreck which the stream of time leaves about some chance obstacle 

 that succeeds in staying its course. Thus we arrived at the skepticism 

 of Sir George Cox and Sir George Lewis, in my youth very active vol- 

 canoes, but now happily extinct,, that no Greek history is credible 

 till after the middle of the seventh century, B. c. ; and I myself have 

 contributed my share in showing that the early Olympic Register 

 was not the contemporary and continuous record of early facts, but 

 the fabrication of a learned theorist. And this destructive criticism 

 of mine, bowed aside as a paradox when it appeared, is accepted by 

 the recent historians as a pretty obvious deduction from our facts, 

 either with or without the mention of the critic who first ventured to 

 declare it. 



But have we now no corroboration of our body of early Greek 

 legends, and if we have, from whence did we obtain it? The man, 

 Schliemann, who opens the last epoch of research into early Greek 

 history, was not a scholar, or a man of literary habits, but a man of 

 enthusiasm for Homer, and of boundless energy in carrying out his 

 mind. He had shown his ability by making a large fortune early in 

 life out of nothing but his brains, and when I tell you that he made 



