If we could imagine a modern critical scholar transported into Greece at the time of the Persian war,—endued with his present habits of appreciating historical evidence, without sharing in the religious or patriotic feelings of the country,—and invited to prepare, out of the great body of Grecian epic which then existed, a History and Chronology of Greece anterior to 776 B. C., assigning reasons as well for what he admitted as for what he rejected,—I feel persuaded that he would have judged the undertaking to be little better than a process of guesswork. But the modern critic finds that not only Pherekydês and Hellanikus, but also Herodotus and Thucydidês, have either attempted the task or sanctioned the belief that it was practicable,—a matter not at all surprising, when we consider both their narrow experience of historical evidence and the powerful ascendency of religion and patriotism in predisposing them to antiquarian belief,—and he therefore accepts the problem as they have bequeathed it, adding his own efforts to bring it to a satisfactory solution. Nevertheless, he not only follows them with some degree of reserve and uneasiness, but even admits important distinctions quite foreign to their habits of thought. Thucydidês talks of the deeds of Hellên and his sons with as much confidence as we now speak of William the Conqueror: Mr. Clinton recognizes Hellên, with his sons Dôrus, Æolus, and Xuthus, as fictitious persons. Herodotus recites the great heroic genealogies down from Kadmus and Danaus, with a belief not less complete in the higher members of the series than in the lower: but Mr. Clinton admits a radical distinction in the evidence of events before and after the first recorded Olympiad, or 776 B. C.,—“the first date in Grecian chronology (he remarks, p. 123) which can be fixed upon _authentic evidence_,”—the highest point to which Grecian chronology, _reckoning upward_, can be carried. Of this important epoch in Grecian development,—the commencement of authentic chronological life,—Herodotus and Thucydidês had no knowledge or took no account: the later chronologists, from Timæus downwards, noted it, and made it serve as the basis of their chronological comparisons, so far as it went: but neither Eratosthenês nor Apollodôrus seem to have recognized (though Varro and Africanus did recognize) a marked difference in respect of certainty or authenticity between the period before and the period after.