The law respecting sufficiency of evidence ought to be the same for ancient times as for modern; and the reader will find in this History an application, to the former, of criteria analogous to those which have been long recognized in the latter. Approaching, though with a certain measure of indulgence, to this standard, I begin the real history of Greece with the first recorded Olympiad, or 776 B. C. To such as are accustomed to the habits once universal, and still not uncommon, in investigating the ancient world, I may appear to be striking off one thousand years from the scroll of history; but to those whose canon of evidence is derived from Mr. Hallam, M. Sismondi, or any other eminent historian of modern events, I am well assured that I shall appear lax and credulous rather than exigent or sceptical. For the truth is, that historical records, properly so called, do not begin until long after this date: nor will any man, who candidly considers the extreme paucity of attested facts for two centuries after 776 B. C., be astonished to learn that the state of Greece in 900, 1000, 1100, 1200, 1300, 1400 B. C., etc.,—or any earlier century which it may please chronologists to include in their computed genealogies,—cannot be described to him upon anything like decent evidence. I shall hope, when I come to the lives of Socrates and Plato, to illustrate one of the most valuable of their principles,—that conscious and confessed ignorance is a better state of mind, than the fancy, without the reality, of knowledge. Meanwhile, I begin by making that confession, in reference to the real world of Greece anterior to the Olympiads; meaning the disclaimer to apply to anything like a general history,—not to exclude rigorously every individual event.
The times which I thus set apart from the region of history are discernible only through a different atmosphere,—that of epic poetry and legend. To confound together these disparate matters is, in my judgment, essentially unphilosophical. I describe the earlier times by themselves, as conceived by the faith and feeling of the first Greeks, and known only through their legends,—without presuming to measure how much or how little of historical matter these legends may contain. If the reader blame me for not assisting him to determine this,—if he ask me why I do not undraw the curtain and disclose the picture,—I reply in the words of the painter Zeuxis, when the same question was addressed to him on exhibiting his master-piece of imitative art: “The curtain is the picture.” What we now read as poetry and legend was once accredited history, and the only genuine history which the first Greeks could conceive or relish of their past time: the curtain conceals nothing behind, and cannot, by any ingenuity, be withdrawn. I undertake only to show it as it stands,—not to efface, still less to repaint it.