The general authority of Mr. Clinton’s book, and the sincere respect which I entertain for his elucidations of the later chronology, have imposed upon me the duty of assigning those grounds on which I dissent from his conclusions prior to the first recorded Olympiad. The reader who desires to see the numerous and contradictory guesses (they deserve no better name) of the Greeks themselves in the attempt to chronologize their mythical narratives, will find them in the copious notes annexed to the first half of his first volume. As I consider all such researches not merely as fruitless, in regard to any trustworthy result, but as serving to divert attention from the genuine form and really illustrative character of Grecian legend, I have not thought it right to go over the same ground in the present work. Differing as I do, however, from Mr. Clinton’s views on this subject, I concur with him in deprecating the application of etymology (Intr. pp. xi-xii.) as a general scheme of explanation to the characters and events of Greek legend. Amongst the many causes which operated as suggestives and stimulants to Greek fancy in the creation of these interesting tales, doubtless etymology has had its share; but it cannot be applied (as Hermann, above all others, has sought to apply it) for the purpose of imparting supposed sense and system to the general body of mythical narrative. I have already remarked on this topic in a former chapter. It would be curious to ascertain at what time, or by whom, the earliest continuous genealogies, connecting existing persons with the supposed antecedent age of legend, were formed and preserved. Neither Homer nor Hesiod mentioned any verifiable _present_ persons or circumstances: had they done so, the age of one or other of them could have been determined upon good evidence, which we may fairly presume to have been impossible, from the endless controversies upon this topic among ancient writers. In the Hesiodic Works and Days, the heroes of Troy and Thêbes are even presented as an extinct race,[79] radically different from the poet’s own contemporaries, who are a new race, far too depraved to be conceived as sprung from the loins of the heroes; so that we can hardly suppose Hesiod (though his father was a native of the Æolic Kymê) to have admitted the pedigree of the Æolic chiefs, as reputed descendants of Agamemnôn. Certain it is, that the earliest poets did not attempt to measure or bridge over the supposed interval, between their own age and the war of Troy, by any definite series of fathers and sons: whether Eumêlus or Asius made any such attempt, we cannot tell, but the earliest continuous backward genealogies which we find mentioned are those of Pherekydês, Hellanikus, and Herodotus. It is well known that Herodotus, in his manner of computing the upward genealogy of the Spartan kings, assigns the date of the Trojan war to a period 800 years earlier than himself, equivalent about to B. C.