Excerpt from History of Greece, Vol. 2 of 10Though the particular persons and events chronicled in the legendary poems of Greece are not to be regarded as belonging to the province of real history, those poems are nevertheless full of instruction as pictures of life and manners; and the very same circumstances which divest their composers of all credibility as historians, render them so much the more valuable as unconscious expositors of their own contemporary society. While professedly describing an uncertified past, their combinations are involuntarily borrowed from the surrounding present. For among communities, such as those of the primitive Greeks, without books, without means of extended travel, without acquaintance with foreign languages and habits, the imagination even of highly gifted men was naturally enslaved by the circumstances around them to a far greater degree than in the later days of Solôn or Herodotus; insomuch that the characters which they conceived and the scenes which they described would for that reason bear a stronger generic resemblance to the realities of their own time and locality.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.