Excerpt from History of Greece, Vol. 2 of 10

Though the particular persons and events chronicled in the legendary poems of Greece are not to be regarded as belonging to the province of real history, those poems are nevertheless full of instruction as pictures of life and manners; and the very same circumstances which divest their composers of all credibility as historians, render them so much the more valuable as unconscious expositors of their own contemporary society. While professedly describing an uncertified past, their combinations are involuntarily borrowed from the surrounding present. For among communities, such as those of the primitive Greeks, without books, without means of extended travel, without acquaintance with foreign languages and habits, the imagination even of highly gifted men was naturally enslaved by the circumstances around them to a far greater degree than in the later days of Solon or Herodotus; insomuch that the characters which they conceived and the scenes which they described would for that reason bear a stronger generic resemblance to the realities of their own time and locality.

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