320 HISTORY OF GREECE. can imagine the extent to which this discrepancy proceeds ; il covers almost every portion and fragment of the tale. 1 But though much may have been thus omitted of what the reader might expect to find in an account of the Trojan war, its genuine character has been studiously preserved, without either exaggeration or abatement. The real Trojan war is that which was recounted by Homer and the old epic poets, and continued by all the lyric and tragic composers. For the latter, though they took great liberties with the particular incidents, and in- troduced to some extent a new moral tone, yet worked more or less faithfully on the Homeric scale : and even Euripides, who departed the most widely from the feeling of the old legend, nev er lowered down his matter to the analogy of contemporary life. They preserved its well-defined object, at once righteous and ro- mantic, the recovery of the daughter of Zeus and sister of the Dioskuri its mixed agencies, divine, heroic and human the colossal force and deeds of its chief actors its vast magnitude and long duration, as well as the toils which the conquerors un- derwent, and the Nemesis which followed upon their success. And these were the circumstances which, set forth in the full blaze of epic and tragic poetry, bestowed upon the legend its powerful and imperishable influence over the Hellenic mind. The enterprise was one comprehending all the members of the Hellenic body, of which each individually might be proud, and in which, nevertheless, those feelings of jealous and narrow pa- triotism, so lamentably prevalent in many of the towns, were as much as possible excluded. It supplied them with a grand and inexhaustible object of common sympathy, common faith, and common admiration ; and when occasions arose for bringing to- gether a Pan-Hellenic force against the barbarians, the prece- dent of the Homeric expedition was one upon which the elevated minds of Greece could dwell with the certainty of rousing an unanimous impulse, if not always of counterworking sinister by- 1 These diversities are well set forth in the useful Dissertation of Fuchs Ue Varietate Fabularum Troicarum (Cologne, 1830). Of the number of romantic statements put forth respecting Helen and Achilles especially, some idea may be formed from the fourth, fifth and sixth chapters of Ptolemy Hephsestioit (apud Westennann. Scriptt. Mythograph p. 188, etc.).
