Weissenborns Homeric Life

ast of Apollo the sun god's arrows dissipate the night with all her stars. 2. The Hero-Tales of the Trojan War. Furthermore, tradition told of great wars that were waged in the time of the Greek migration. As memorable events of those early days there stood out prominently the futile battles about seven-gated Thebes and the final capture of Troy. The excavations in the sixth stratum of the nine buried cities of Hissarlik, begun by Schliemann and continued by Dorpfeld, support the view that ancient Troy belonged to the period of Mycenaean civilization.1 The tales of the rape of Helen and the capture of the city by means of the wooden horse point to the fact that the Trojan war fell in the time of the first migration of the Greeks into the country bordering on the Mediterranean, since they, being inexperienced in navigation, still called their vessels "horses of the sea." At the same period occurred also the long-continued struggles on the part of those early settlers at Tiryns, Mycenae, Thebes, and Orchomenus, a people who were probably of Phoenician origin, and who had already reached a high state of civilization. These contests, which finally led to a political union of hostile tribes, found expression in the hoft-ible tales concerning the chapter{Section 4house of Mycenaean Atreus and the family of The- ban Labdacus, in the story of the fratricidal war between Eteocles and Polynices, and in the recital of the wretched fate of the heroes who returned from Troy. ...