The beautiful myths of Greece cannot and must not be given up, and fortunately they need not. The view which Grote and the host of his followers maintained, practically solves the problem for the historian. He may retain the legend and gain from it the fullest measure of imaginative satisfaction; he may draw from it inferences of the greatest value as to the mental status of the Greek people at the time when the legends were crystallised into their final form; he may even believe that, in the main, the legends have been built upon a substructure of historical fact, and he may leave to specialists the controversy as to the exact relations which this substructure bears to the finished whole, content to accept the decision of the greatest critical historians of Greece that this question is insoluble. From the period of myth pure and simple when the gods and goddesses themselves roved the earth achieving miracles, taking various shapes, slaying pythons, titans, and other monsters, and exercising their amorous fancies among the men and women of earth--from this period we come to the semi-historical time of the activity of the demi-gods and the men who, superior to the ordinary clay, were called Heroes. The term “Heroic Age” has passed into general use with the historian as applying to the period of Grecian history immediately preceding and including the Trojan wars. As there are very few reliable documents at hand relating to this period--there were none at all until recently--it is clear that this age is in reality only the latter part of that mythical period to which we have just referred. Recent historians tend to treat it much more sceptically than did the historians of an earlier epoch; some are even disposed practically to ignore it. But the term has passed far too generally into use to be altogether abandoned; and, indeed, it is not desirable that it should be quite given up, for, however vague the details of the history it connotes, it is after all the shadowy record of a real epoch of history. We shall, perhaps, do best, therefore, to view it through the eyes of a distinguished historian of an earlier generation, remembering only that what is here narrated is still only half history--that is to say, history only half emerged from the realm of legend.[a]