284 HISTORY OF GREECE. were naturally drawn from the great prophetic race of the Ife- lampodids. Thus ends the legend of the two sieges of Thebes ; the great- est event, except the siege of Troy, in the ancient epic ; the great- est enterprise of war, between Greeks and Greeks, during the time of those who are called the Heroes. CHAPTER XV. LEGEND OF TROY. WE now arrive at the capital and culminating point of the Grecian epic, the two sieges and capture of Troy, with the destinies of the dispersed heroes, Trojan as well as Grecian, after the second and most celebrated capture and destruction of the city. It would require a large volume to convey any tolerable idea of the vast extent and expansion of this interesting fable, first handled by so many poets, epic, lyric and tragic, with their end- less additions, transformations and contradictions, then purged and recast by historical inquirers, who under color of setting aside the exaggerations of the poets, introduced a new vein of prosaic invention, lastly, moralized and allegorized by philoso- phers. In the present brief outline of the general field of Gre- cian legend, or of that which the Greeks believed to be their an- tiquities, the Trojan war can be regarded as only one among a large number of incidents upon which Hekataeus and Herodotus looked back as constituting their fore-time. Taken as a special legendary event, it is indeed of wider and larger interest than any other, but it is a mistake to single it out from the rest as if it rested upon a different and more trustworthy basis. I must therefore confine myself to an abridged narrative of the current and leading facts ; and amidst the numerous contradictory state- ments which are to be found respecting every one of them, I know no better ground of preference than comparative antiquity,
