We have spoken of Hercules and Theseus as indicating the commencement of Grecian history. Previous to them, facts are mentioned which we have no ground to disbelieve, as the various settlements by Phœnician or Egyptian emigrants; but all further particulars of these persons, with the exception of Minos, are of such a nature, that where we find no internal evidence to pronounce them fabulous we can yet assign but scanty reasons for relying confidently upon their truth. But about this era our knowledge begins to increase. We must refer to it an event of which it is not easy to fix the date with certainty; namely, the celebrated Argonautic expedition, in which both these heroes are said to have joined: a statement, however, irreconcileable with the accounts of Theseus’ introduction to Ægeus, and the plot formed against him by Medea.[22] Without troubling ourselves to account for these discrepancies, it is evident that the expedition, if it ever took place, which there seems reason to believe in spite of Bryant’s opposition, who would ascribe this, and almost all other legends, to some faint traditions of the deluge and preservation of Noah, must have borne a close resemblance to the Danish piratical excursions which we have already described. Not long after occurs the first confederate war mentioned in Grecian history, that of the Seven against Thebes;[23] an event so closely connected with mythology that its reality might reasonably be questioned, but for the testimony of Homer and Hesiod. The revolting nature of the struggle between two brothers, for the kingdom of a banished, miserable, and neglected father, would incline us indeed to give as little credit to the concluding tragedy of the house of Laius, as to the series of crimes and misery by which that house had been polluted: but all arguments founded upon the horrors of such fratricidal warfare fall to the ground, when in the brightest period of chivalry we find it revived with no less rancour, and a no less fatal end, and the flower of French knighthood a calm spectator, nay, almost an actor in the scene. The strife between Don Pedro of Castile, and his brother Henry of Transtamara, the deadly struggle in which Pedro, who had already slain one brother, fell, when defeated and a prisoner, by the dagger of another against whom his own hand was armed, involve circumstances of horror scarce less adapted to dramatic effect than those legends which have so often employed the Greek tragedians.