The ancient Greek historians (Harvard lectures) by J. B. Bury.

THE EPICS AS HISTORY

5

part in it,-questions to which Homer gave no
answer. To quench the thirst for such information was the office of later poets, who related
events which the older bards did not know or
assumed as known. They had to fill up interstices
and to explain inconsistencies, and this process
necessarily entailed a definite consideration of
chronological sequence, an element which the
original creators of myth do not take into serious
account. It is impossible to say how far these
later poets of the Homeric school drew upon
local legends, how far upon their own invention,
but in their hands the traditions of the Trojan
expedition and its heroes were wrought into a
corpus of Trojan epics, chronologically connected,
in which the Iliad and the Odyssey had their
places.
The new instinct for systematizing tradition
gave rise at the same time to the school of
genealogical poets, of which Hesiod was the most
distinguished and perhaps the first. Their aim
was to work into a consistent system the relationships of the gods and heroes, deriving them from
the primeval beings who generated the world,
and tracing thereby to the origin of things the
pedigrees of the royal families which ruled in
the states of Hellas.1 The interest in genealogies
1 Hesiod's Theogony contains a first crude idea of a history of civilisation in the legend of the Five Ages of man, which evidently brings up to
date an older version in which the ages were Four. The fanciful notion
of marking the degeneration of the race by four ages named after four
metals is improved upon by interpolating the age of Homeric heroes
before the last or iron age.