Two lines of evidence, then, if given their fair weight, seemed to point in the same direction. On the one hand, there were the legends of a prehistoric age of heroes, with their travels and expeditions and wars, legends with which Greek literature teemed, and which, however inextricably blended with fancy, and with details obviously monstrous and impossible, can scarcely be supposed to have sprung into being without something behind them to account for their existence. On the other hand, there was this strange, wonderful, realistic world of the Homeric poems, no longer existing, it is true, even at the earliest stage of Greek history, but almost absolutely refusing to be dismissed as a mere figment of the imagination. Was it, then, impossible to believe that in the bosom of the great gulf which separated the Hellas of legend from the Hellas of history there lay a civilization, real, and once living, of which the legends and the Homeric pictures preserved but the scanty surviving ruins and relics? [Illustration IV: THE IRON GATE, MYCENAE (_p_. 42)] Here we have to recall two facts of importance. First, that universal Greek tradition affirmed that before the birth of historic Greece there lay a Dark Age, its darkness caused by the descent from the North of the rude, iron-using Dorian tribes, who found in the lands which they invaded a civilization of the Bronze Age, far more advanced than their own, and, by the help of their superior weapons, conquered and indeed destroyed it. And second, that even in the gorgeous picture given by the Homeric poems of the period with which they deal, there is a constant tendency to regard that period as being only the decadent and inferior heir of a civilization which had preceded it. Nothing is plainer in Homer than the suggestion that the men of the age before the Trojan Wars were greater, stronger, wiser, better in every respect than even the heroes who fought on 'the ringing plains of windy Troy,' even as these were greater than the men of the poet's own degenerate days. Does it not seem as though we were being led towards the conclusion that the Homeric civilization is itself the representation of a very real fact of history, the picture of a state of things which was submerged and swept away by the coming of the Dorians, or by whatever inrush of wild northern tribes the Greeks may have called by that general title, but which was itself only the last decadent stage of an antecedent culture, still greater and more highly developed--that of the legendary period? The answer to this question has come in the most surprising and romantic fashion from the archaeological discoveries of the last forty years. CHAPTER III SCHLIEMANN AND HIS WORK