=The Legends.=--The Greeks like all the other ancient peoples were
ignorant of their origin. They neither knew whence their ancestors had
come nor when they had established themselves in Greece, nor what they
had done there. To preserve the exact memory of things as they occur,
there is need of some means of fixing them; but the Greeks did not
know how to write; they did not employ writing until about the eighth
century B.C. They had no way of calculating the number of years. Later
they adopted the usage of counting the years according to the great
feast which was celebrated every four years at Olympia; a period of
four years was called an olympiad. But the first olympiad was placed
in 776 B.C., and the chronology of the Greeks does not rise beyond
this date.
And yet they used to tell in Greece a great number of legends about
this primitive period. These were especially the exploits of ancient
kings and of heroes who were adored as demi-gods. These stories were
so mingled with fable that it is impossible to know how much truth
they may contain. They said at Athens that the first king, Cecrops,
was half man and half serpent; at Thebes, that Cadmus, founder of the
city, had come from Phoenicia to seek his sister Europa who had been
stolen by a bull; that he had killed a dragon and had sowed his teeth,
from which was sprung a race of warriors, and that the noble families
of Thebes descended from these warriors.
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