George Grote, born at Beckenham, England, Nov. 17, 1794, entered the bank founded by his grandfather, from which he withdrew in 1843. He joined the group of "philosophic Radicals," among whom James Mill was a leader, and was a keen politician and reformer, and an ardent advocate of the ballot. His determination to write a sound "History of Greece" was ensured, if it was not inspired, by Mitford's history, a work full of anti-democratic fervour and very antagonistic to the great Greek democratic state of Athens. In some respects his work is a defence of the Athenian democracy, at least as contrasted with Sparta; it appeared in twelve volumes between 1846 and 1856, and covered Greek history from the earliest times "till the close of the generation contemporary with Alexander the Great." It at once occupied, and still holds, the field as the classic work on the subject as a whole, though later research has modified many of his conclusions. His methods were pre-eminently thorough, dispassionate, and judicial; but he suffers from a lack of sympathetic imagination. He died on June 18, 1871, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. _I.--Early History_ The divine myths constitute the earliest matter of Greek history. These may be divided into those which belong to the gods and to the heroes respectively; but most of them, in point of fact, present gods, heroes, and men in juxtaposition. Every community sought to trace its origin to some common divine, or semi-divine, progenitor; the establishment of a pedigree was a necessity; and each pedigree contains at some, point figures corresponding to some actual historical character, before whom the pedigree is imaginary, but after whom, in the main, actual. The precise point where the legend fades into the mythical, or consolidates into the historical, is not usually ascertainable. The legendary period culminates in the tale of Troy, which belongs to a period prior to the Dorian conquest presented in the Herakleid legend; the tale of Troy itself remaining the common heritage of the Greek peoples, and having an actual basis in historical fact. The events, however, are of less importance than the picture of an actual historical, political, and social system, corresponding, not to the supposed date of the Trojan war, but to the date of the composition of the Homeric poems. Later ages regarded the myths themselves with a good deal of scepticism, and were often disposed to rationalise them, or to find for them an allegorical interpretation. The myths of other European peoples have undergone a somewhat similar treatment.