Message #148566

[Skinwalker]

Pyrrha, who took refuge in an ark. According to one tradition, this couple, on praying to Zeus, were enabled to repeople the devastated world by throwing over their shoulders stones which were transformed into human beings. These were "the Stone Folk". Another tradition made Deucalion the ancestor of the whole Greek race, through his son Hellen, who had three children, named Dorus and Æolus, the ancestors of the Dorians and Æolians, and Xuthus, whose sons Achæus and Ion, were the progenitors of the Achæans and Ionians.

The period that elapsed between the early settlement of the Hellenes and the siege of Troy was called the Heroic Age, after the fourth Hesiodic Age of the World, or the Homeric Age, during which the civilization depicted in those great epics the Iliad and the Odyssey had full development.

Historians parted company when they came to deal with the prehistoric period. Thirlwall was inclined to sift historical matter from the legends. Grote, however, was frankly sceptical. "That which I note as Terra Incognita", he said, "is in his (Thirlwall's) view a land which may be known up to a certain point, but the map which he draws of it contains so few ascertained places as to differ very little from absolute vacuity." 1 Dealing with the Trojan war, he declared that, "though literally believed, reverentially cherished, and numbered among the gigantic phenomena of the past by the Grecian public, it is in the eyes of modern enquiry essentially a legend and nothing more". His answer to the question as to whether the war ever took place was: "As the possibility of it cannot be denied, so neither can the reality of it be affirmed". 2 We who are "wise after the event" may rail at Grote, but it must be remembered that he wrote at



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