The ethnological interpretation of the four _strata_ of remains at Hissarlik is another of the questions which it would be premature to discuss; but a passing reference may be allowed to their very remarkable correspondence with the traditions relating to the site. First, Homer recognizes a city which preceded the Ilium of Priam, and which had been destroyed by Hercules; and Schliemann found a primeval city, of considerable civilization, on the native rock, below the ruins which he regards as the Homeric Troy. Tradition speaks of a Phrygian population, of which the Trojans were a branch, as having apparently displaced, and driven over into Europe, the kindred Pelasgians. Above the second stratum are the remains of a third city, which, in the type and patterns of its terra-cottas, instruments, and ornaments, shows a close resemblance to the second; and the link of connection is rivetted by the inscriptions in the same character in both strata. And so, in the Homeric poems, every reader is struck with the common bonds of genealogy and language, traditions and mutual intercourse, religion and manners, between the Greeks who assail Troy and the Trojans who defend it. If the legend of the Trojan War preserves the tradition of a real conquest of the city by a kindred race, the very nature of the case forbids us to accept literally the story, that the conquerors simply sailed away again.[18] It is far more reasonable to regard the _ten years_ of the War, and the _ten years_ of the _Return of the Chiefs_ (Νόστοι) as cycles of ethnic struggles, the details of which had been sublimed into poetical traditions. The fact, that Schliemann traces in the third stratum a civilization lower than in the second, is an objection only from the point of view of our classical prepossessions. There are not wanting indications in Homer (as Curtius, among others, has pointed out) that the Trojans were more civilized and wealthy than the Greeks; and in the much earlier age, to which the conflict--if real at all--must have belonged, we may be sure that the Asiatic people had over their European kindred an advantage which we may venture to symbolize by the golden arms of Glaucus and the brazen arms of Diomed (Homer, _Iliad_, VI. 235, 236). Xanthus, the old historian of Lydia, preserves the tradition of a reflux migration of Phrygians from Europe into Asia, after the Trojan War, and says that they conquered Troy and settled in its territory. This migration is ascribed to the pressure of the barbarian Thracians; and the fourth stratum, with its traces of merely wooden buildings, and other marks of a lower stage of civilization, corresponds to that conquest of the Troad by those same barbarian Thracians, the tradition of which is preserved by Herodotus and other writers. The primitive dwellings of those races in Thrace still furnish the flint implements, which are most abundant in the fourth stratum at Hissarlik.