34 HISTORY OF GREECE. The obscure and barren centuries which immediately precede the first recorded Olympiad, form the natural separation between the legendary return of the Herakleids and the historical wars of Sparta against Messene, between the province of legend, wherein matter of fact (if any there be) is so intimately combined with its accompaniments of fiction, as to be undistinguishable without the aid of extrinsic evidence, and that of history where some matters of fact can hi ascertained, and where a sagacious criticism may be usefully employed in trying to add to 1 their number. CHAPTER XIX. APPLICATION OF CHRONOLOGY TO GRECIAN LEGEND. I NEED not repeat, what has already been sufficiently set forth in the preceding pages, that the mass of Grecian incident anterior to 776 B. c. appears to me not reducible either to history or to chronology, and that any chronological system which may be applied to it must be essentially uncertified and illusory. It was, however, chronologized in ancient times, and has continued to be so in modern ; and the various schemes employed for this pur- pose may be found stated and compared in the first volume (the last published) of Mr. Fynes Clinton's Fasti Hellenici. There were among the Greeks, and there still are among modern scholars, important differences as to the dates of the principal events :' Eratosthenes dissented both from Herodotus and from Phanias and Kallimachus, while Larcher and Raoul Kochette 1 Larcher and Raoul llochette, adopting the chronological date of Herodo- tus, fix the taking of Troy at 1270 B.C., and the Return of the Herakleids at 1190 B.C. According to the scheme of Eratosthenes, these two events ,Uand at 1 184 and 1104 B. c. O. Miiller, in his Chronological Tables (Appendix vi. to History of Do- rians, TO! ii. p. 441, Ervgl. transl.), gives no dates or computation of yean
