DISCOVERIES AT OLYMPIA. 661, 



without falling from its even heroic strain to meet the comprehension of 

 promiscuous assemblages of hearers. ]^;ither the Greeks were stubborn bar- 

 barians at the epoch of the Trojan war, or they gave no token, then, of the 

 inventive and independent genius which, a few centuries afterward, made 

 them an immortal, an almost ideal race, for all succeeding ages. 



But if, on the one hand, the accepted views in regard to the scope and 

 character of the early Hellenic culture may be false, on the other hand 

 tchese recent explorations suggest, even to the most skeptical, the truth 

 underlying the heroic myths. Whether or not Hissarlik be the site of Troy, 

 it is at least that of a prehistoric city, which was destroyed by fire. The 

 coincidence of the art, and especially the mortuary ornaments and modes 

 of sepulture, discovered at Mycenae and in Cyprus, may or may not prove 

 that the same race at one time inhabited both : the diadems and laurel- 

 crowns may be no indication of royal rank ; but the location of the tombs 

 in the Agora is a certain evidence of the distinction in which the dead were 

 held, and at least five of the latter must have been buried at the same 

 time. We have thus the fact of slaughter, or war, followed by posthumous 

 honor, and transmitted in the tradition of Agamemnon repeated by Pausa- 

 nias. Dr. Schliemann's discoveries do not turn ^Eschylus into history, but 

 they furnish a remote historic basis for the tragedy. In Cyprus, the brace- 

 lets of King Etevander and the inscription on the Assyrian cylinder estab- 

 lish each other's veracity, even as the record of Sennacherib at Nineveh 

 and the Hebrew statement of the tribute paid by King Hezekiah. The 

 human brain is not skilled in the art of inventing history without material. 

 Some of the most monstrous legends have been finally traced to an intel- 

 ligible origin ; and it is scarcely possible that the large frame of geogra- 

 phical and ethnological truth, inclosed by the "Iliad," should have been 

 peopled by merely imaginary figures, and made the scene of imaginary 

 deeds. 



DISCOVERIES AT OLYMPIA. 



According to the instructions received from the directing committee at 

 Berlin, the first aim of the operations conducted this year by the new chief 

 of the German expedition at Olympia, Dr. George Treu, has been to con- 

 tinue and complete the clearance of the ground already excavated in front 

 of either end of the Temple of Zeus. Eich successes have already re- 

 warded those renewed labors. On the eastern side, the demolition of the 

 walls of the Byzantine settlement has yielded a large number of fragments, 

 but most of them small, and among them only one which could be imme- 

 diately identified as belonging to the sculptors of the pediment group; this 

 was a part of the helmet of Oenomaus. 



Another wall, however, in the same neighborhood, bufe farther north, 

 Btartinar from the second column of the. east front of the Heraeum, and com- 



