The invaders are not to be thought of as a single tribe or a single movement. More like our early Danish invaders, they began gradually and continued slowly. The culture of the Ægean declined rather than ceased, surviving longer in the hill-fortresses of the mainland than in unfortified Cnossos. But sooner or later destruction came to Mycenæ and Tiryns and Troy, so that people of alien civilisation came and built inferior houses among the ruins of the palaces or sheltered themselves like the jackals and owls of Isaiah among the Cyclopean masses. In one case they plastered over an old Mycenæan gravestone and drew their own clumsy picture upon it (see p. 37). No wonder that legends arose about the magical race of Cyclopes who built so amazingly, and no wonder that the Greeks of later time put their Golden Age into the past instead of the future. The poet Hesiod, writing probably in the seventh century B.C., divided the history of the world into five ages of deterioration. First come the Golden and Silver Ages of virtue, both, of course, purely ideal. Then comes the Bronze Age, mighty and strong. “Of bronze were their vessels, of bronze their houses, with tools of bronze they worked: dark iron was not yet.” At last they passed away, and then came a fourth generation on the procreant earth, “a generation juster and better, the divine race of Heroes, who are called demigods. Cruel war and the stern cry of battle destroyed them, some as they strove for the flocks of Œdipus at Thebes, and some when they had been led on shipboard over the great gulf of the sea to Troy for the sake of Helen with her lovely tresses.” Then these too went hence “to dwell in the Isles of the Blessed by the deep-surging Ocean, like happy heroes, and the fertile earth yields them honey-sweet harvest thrice a year.” But, alas for the poet, _he_ is doomed to live among the fifth race, the Men of Iron. [Illustration: Warrior Stelé from Mycenæ] This is not all fancy: the Bronze Age is history, as we have seen; so is the Iron Age. What then of the age between, the Age of Heroes? It comes in awkwardly, for it disturbs the poet’s picture of degeneration. But it has to be inserted in deference to the beliefs of Hesiod’s audience. Hesiod is more or less consciously writing a Bible for the Greeks--that is, putting their religious customs into literary form. This is his concession to hero-worship or ancestor-worship. The Heroic Age of Demigods, the milieu of Homeric poems and Attic tragedy, is not historical, and it is vain to make it so.