Very easily conceived, but not rendered a jot more easy by aid of this legend of Hercules. The story of him of the Twelve Labours, who had been cheated of the divine mares for which he had bargained, and had mere earthly mares given to him, and who therefore, in revenge, had sacked the town of Troy, is, in the first place, so interpreted as to show "that the opulence of that city had in former times tempted the cupidity of the Greeks;" and then this interpretation is made a ground for supposing that a similar motive had led to the expedition of Agamemnon and his chiefs. As well, surely, have said at once of the second war, what is said of the first, that it was an ordinary case of plunder and violence. It is hard to understand how the earlier legend can assist in giving an historical character to the later.
But the elder legend may assist in explaining how a siege of Troy became the great subject of the Homeric poems; and thus, whatever there was of actual siege may be carried altogether into that remote anterior epoch which is shadowed forth, if you will, under the exploits of Hercules. For with that charming candour by which he often contrives to neutralise the errors of his conjectural method of writing history, Dr Thirlwall himself adds:--"This expedition of Hercules may indeed suggest a doubt _whether it was not an earlier and simpler form of the same tradition, which grew at length into the argument of the Iliad_; for there is a striking resemblance between the two wars, not only in the events, but in the principal actors. As the prominent figures in the second siege are Agamemnon and Achilles, who represent the royal house of Mycenae, and that of the Aeacids; so in the first the Argive Hercules is accompanied by the Aeacid Telamon; and even the quarrel and reconciliation of the allied chiefs are features common to both traditions."[6]
The disquisition on the legend of Troy naturally leads the historian, and will naturally suggest to our own readers, the mooted question of the authorship of the Homeric poems. Some of them be happy to learn that the opinion of Mr Grote is not of so sceptical a nature as they may have been prepared to expect. The Wolfian hypothesis he by no means adopts--namely, that before the time of Pisistratus, there was no such thing in existence as an extended and entire epic, but that the two great epics we now possess were then constructed by stringing together a number of detached poems, the separate chants of the old Greek bards or rhapsodists. Mr Grote sees in the _Odyssey_ all the marks of unity of design, and of what he rather quaintly calls "single-headed authorship." With regard to the _Iliad_, he admits that there is not the same stringent evidence of an original plan according to which the whole poem has been written, and he detects here the signs of interpolation and addition. According to his view, there is in the poem, as we possess it, an original whole, which he calls the Achilleïs, to which additions have been made from other sources, converting the Achilleïs into an Iliad. But our readers would prefer to have the words themselves of the author; and the following passage will present them with a very intelligent view of this famous controversy:--