A Greek city-state usually embraced, besides the walled town, a more or less extensive border of gardens and farms, a strip of sea-coast, or perhaps a considerable mountain-hemmed valley or plain. The _model_ city (or _state_, as we should say) must not be over large. In this, as in everything else, the ancient Greeks applied the Delphian rule-- "Measure in all things." "A small city," says one of their poets, "set upon a rock and well governed, is better than all foolish Nineveh." Aristotle thought that the ideal city should not have more than ten thousand citizens. CHAPTER X. THE LEGENDARY, OR HEROIC AGE. (From the earliest times to 776 B.C.) CHARACTER OF THE LEGENDARY AGE.--The real history of the Greeks does not begin before the eighth century B.C. All that lies back of that date is an inseparable mixture of myth, legend, and fact. Yet this shadowy period forms the background of Grecian history, and we cannot understand the ideas and acts of the Greeks of historic times without at least some knowledge of what they believed their ancestors did and experienced in those prehistoric ages. So, as a sort of prelude to the story we have to tell, we shall repeat some of the legends of the Greeks respecting their national heroes and their great labors and undertakings. But it must be carefully borne in mind that these legends are not history, though some of them may be confused remembrances of actual events. THE HEROES: HERACLES, THESEUS, AND MINOS.--The Greeks believed that their ancestors were a race of heroes of divine or semi-divine lineage. Every tribe, district, city, and village even, preserved traditions of its heroes, whose wonderful exploits were commemorated in song and story. Many of these personages acquired national renown, and became the revered heroes of the whole Greek race. Heracles was the greatest of the national heroes of the Greeks. He is represented as performing, besides various other exploits, twelve superhuman labors, and as being at last translated from a blazing pyre to a place among the immortal gods. The myth of Heracles, who was at first a solar divinity, is made up mainly of the very same fables that were told of the Chaldæan solar hero Izdubar (see p. 46). Through the Phoenicians, these stories found their way to the Greeks, who ascribed to their own Heracles the deeds of the Chaldæan sun-god. Theseus, a descendant of Cecrops, was the favorite hero of the Athenians, being one of their legendary kings. Among his great exploits was the slaying of the Minotaur,--a monster which Minos, king of Crete, kept in a labyrinth, and fed upon youths and maidens sent from Athens as a forced tribute. Minos, king of Crete, was one of the greatest tribal heroes of the Dorians. Legend makes him a legislator of divine wisdom, the suppressor of piracy in the Grecian seas, and the founder of the first great maritime state of Hellas.