The _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ may perhaps be trusted as truly portraying, so far as they go, the manners and customs of the great period of Achaian civilisation, known as Mycenean, which may be said to have culminated just before the Dorian invasion. Whence then came the public recognition of those household ceremonies of ancestor-worship, which filled such a large place in the life of the Athenian citizen, and which, it has been suggested, were consciously or unconsciously slurred over by the Homeric poets? (M175) Mr. Walter Leaf has already found an answer to this question,(351) viz. that these ceremonies were the long cherished customs of the ancient Ionian or Pelasgian inhabitants of Greece, who had formed the substratum of society under Achaian rule, and who only came into prominence on the removal of their superiors at the time of the Dorian invasion. And this continuity, underlying the superficial rule of the Achaians, seems to be borne out by recent research and discovery.(352) The Athenians always boasted their Ionian descent, and may well have inherited their habits with the traditions of their origin. (M176) But the customs reviewed in the foregoing pages seem to have a wider parentage than can be attributed to the Pelasgians alone. Spartan customs at any rate cannot thus be accounted for. (M177) In the course of argument reference has often been made to the Jewish records in the Books of the Old Testament, and indeed a remarkable parallel is presented in the history of the two peoples. Both peoples apparently reached their greatest period about the same time. The reign of Solomon with its gold and costly workmanship must have resembled that of the Mycenean kings in more than similarity of date, and outward splendour. Taking Homer again as the courtly chronicler of the Achaian age of gold, the Books of the Kings of both peoples are curiously conscious of their former tribal conditions, through which they easily trace back to the very fountain-head of their race. (M178) In the period of the decay of the Jewish people under the stress of invasion by foreign kings, strenuous efforts were made by their prophet leaders to purge them from the alien blood and alien influences contracted in the careless days of their prosperity. Their aim was to restore once more those strict tribal habits which had served them so well at the time of their own victorious invasion, and which still lay dormant in their constitution. In similar wise, the period of Achaian prosperity seems to have been followed by a rise into prominence at any rate, if not an actual resuscitation, of old tribal customs.