Charles Kingsley has no doubt turned in his grave. When he wrote _The Heroes_ he was writing, as he himself explained, a fairy story for his children. He little knew that his fairy story was in many ways historical truth. He wrote, for instance, that the palace of King Minos at Knossos was like a marble hill. He did not know that there actually lived a King Minos in Crete, and that his palace, standing on a hill at Knossos, was built, if not of marble, at any rate of stone. Up to the last half-century the whole story of classical Greece, as taught in the schools and in the Universities, was regarded as something original, as the beginning of things springing suddenly, like the mythical Athene, into life. The sculpture, architecture, philosophy, oratory, and drama of the fifth century B.C., were accepted unquestioningly and with awe as the spontaneous first-fruits of Greek genius. The history of Greece, as then understood, went back only to the eighth century B.C., beyond which were the Dark Ages and nothing. Before the time of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides it is true there had been a problematic poet, half mythical, half real, elusive and shadowy, known as Homer. The fact that he was represented as having been born in nine separate places was an illustration of the vagueness in which the poet’s identity was enveloped. He (or they, if his poems were a composite work) had sung of deeds and of men who seemed to echo from those Dark Ages. Whatever speculation there was as to Homer himself and his identity, no one ever doubted that if he was a real person he certainly was the first real person that European history could establish. During the last twenty years he has been shown to have been not the beginning but the end of an enormous phase of Greek and European history. Now that the real beginnings of Greek civilization are beginning to be known, it strikes one as remarkable that up to now they should have been so completely buried in two senses. It is the more remarkable because a good deal was known about other corresponding origins in the Near East. In Egypt and Babylonia the old traditions had been passed on by later generations to Greek writers, who preserved, imperfectly it is true, the necessary connecting links. In the case of Greek civilization not only were there no stepping-stones back to the corresponding phase; it did not even seem to occur to anybody that there had been such a phase. The unquestioning and complacent acceptance as myths (which is the same thing as the tacit and complete disbelief) of the epic stories which centred round Agamemnon and the Homeric heroes was never challenged up to the middle of the last century. The historian Grote, for instance, declared that “to analyse the fables and to elicit from them any trustworthy particular facts” would be “a fruitless attempt” (_History of Greece_, 2nd edition, 1849, p. 223).