The conquest of the Greek peninsula by the Greeks lies a long way behind recorded history, and the Greeks themselves, when they began to reflect on their own past, had completely forgotten what their remote ancestors had done ages and ages before. Their legends, their epic poems, their geographical names gave them material for attempting to reconstruct their history, and the outline of that reconstruction, which was a feat of genius, will demand our attention presently. But such a reconstruction, the work of a poetical age before historical criticism was applied, must be put away, if we would seek to discover what actually happened. We have most of the facts on which the Greek account was based...
