It is possible that Delphi may have been a remnant of the ancient mysterious state of Cirrha, which was foreign to the Phocians. Many moderns relate a great many things about that state—the forms CIRRHA and CRISSA are only dialectic differences of the same name—as, for example, about its connection with Crete and the like. I confess that I know nothing of all this; the existence of the town alone is beyond doubt. Cirrha was a great commercial place on the Corinthian gulf, and against it a general religious war of the united Greeks was carried on in the early historical times, apparently about Olymp. 40 and 50. In that war the town was taken and destroyed. These events alone are historical, all the rest is mythical. The observation of these and similar circumstances is of importance, to prove how late our history of Greece commences. There is no necessity for pushing everything mysterious back beyond the commencement of the Olympiads, for even great events belonging to the period between that era and the Persian wars are buried in obscurity. We need not, therefore, push the great changes of early history back into remote antiquity as is commonly done; it is a mere delusion to believe that the space for changes in antiquity must be so very large. To mention an example, the time from the commencement of the Olympiads to the legislation of Solon is a period of 200 years, and the period from the Persian wars until the age of Pyrrhus is of the same length; and what immense changes did Greece experience during this latter period! An expedient equally illogical is the readiness with which certain critics distinguish, when they have to deal with different traditions about a person or a thing, and assume two persons or things of the same name. The late Professor Heyne, whose merits I readily acknowledge, was labouring under this delusion, for he invented, e.g., a double Minos, an idea which never occurred to any ancient writer. Minos is not an historical personage, the years of whose reign can be stated. Another bad expedient is to divide different accounts of the same subject, which do not agree with each other, so as to treat them as separate events. The Doric tradition and several ancient authors, and among them even Timaeus, stated that Lycurgus founded the Olympic games; now as Lycurgus, according to the calculation of generations, belongs to a period far beyond the time of the Olympiads, it was assumed that the Olympic games were instituted at two different times, first by Lycurgus, and when afterwards they fell into oblivion, they were restored by Coroebus. But Lycurgus is probably no historical person at all, as was believed even at the time after Alexander; it is impossible to assign him to any period: the intention was to fill up the period subsequent to the migration of the Heracleids, but in attempting this the ancients went too far back, by making three generations amount to a century; in order to remove the