[Sidenote: Mycenæ preserved in legend only.]
That Mycenæ was really the most powerful city in the Greece of some early period, is another fact which nobody would ever have suspected but for the teaching of the legend. Even Dr. Schliemann's new demonstration of its truth, by the display of wealth and of high art which he found in the royal tombs, would never have been attempted had he not been guided by the consistent assertions of the _Iliad_. For the massive remains of the fortifications, and the tombs, proved no guides to the historical Greeks, who knew Argos only as the head of that province, and early forgot the splendour of Mycenæ so far as it was not kept alive in their epic Bible.
[Sidenote: General teaching of the epic poems.]
§ 23. Quite apart from such particular facts, which teach us that the statements of Greek legend are never to be despised, there are large general conclusions which most of us think warranted by the Homeric poems. We may infer the political ideas prevalent when they were composed; the relative importance of king, nobles, and commons; the usages of peace and war; the life of men in its social side; the position of women and of slaves; the religious notions of the day; and such other questions as must be answered if we desire to obtain a living picture of the people. Every recent history of Greece has a chapter on the Homeric poems from this point of view--none of them fuller or better than the chapters of Grote.
[Sidenote: Alleged artificiality of the poems.]
What I had to say on this subject was set down in the opening chapters of my _Social Life in Greece_, from which some stray critics have indeed expressed their dissent, without undertaking to probe and refute my arguments. Until that is done, the sketch there given of the aristocratic society described in the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ claims to be just, and it is unnecessary to defend it here. Perhaps, however, recent inquiry may have led some students to imagine that I have attached too much credit to the Homeric pictures of life, seeing that they are now often asserted to be artificial, and constructed by the poets to represent an age and a society different from their own.
[Sidenote: not corroborated by recent discoveries.]