The "Heroic Age" (as it is called) is all so vague and shadowy, we should
know nothing about it were it not for the great poet Homer. But, strangely
enough, about nine hundred years before Christ, Homer gathered all that
was then known about the early life and habits of the Hellenes into two
great poems, called the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey."

In describing an ancient war which took place between the Hellenes and the
Trojans--a people in Asia Minor--he so minutely pictured the people
engaged in the struggle, their habits of life, their thoughts and
feelings, with the minutest details of the circumstances in which they
lived, that it enables us to know what would otherwise be impossible.

This marvellous work, produced more than a thousand years before there was
a Germany, or an England, and almost a thousand before there was a Roman
Empire, is still the world's great masterpiece, and is to-day an
indispensable part of education.

At the close of the "Heroic Age" something happened, which had the same
effect upon Ancient Greece that many centuries later the descent of the
Goths and Vandals had upon Southern Europe. Greece, too, had its northern
barbarians. Some stronger and fiercer Aryan tribes poured down from
Epirus, and for a time upset everything, just as the Goths did in Europe.

The Dorians, a stern, unrelenting tribe, took possession of the southern
extremity of the peninsula, called the Peloponnesus; and the city of
Sparta was the head of their State. There were other States, too, in
Greece, and each had its king and separate government. But although
jealous of each other and almost always at war, they worshipped the same
deities, consulted the same Oracles, and all alike gloried in being