Thus obscure and general is our information respecting the
Babylonians. But it was far otherwise with the Greeks. Long before
the period, when, by their successful resistance to the Persian
invasion, they had rendered themselves of paramount importance in the
history of the civilised world, they had their poets and annalists,
who preserved to future time the memory of their tastes, their manners
and superstitions, their strength, and their weakness. Homer in
particular had already composed his two great poems, rendering the
peculiarities of his countrymen familiar to the latest posterity. The
consequence of this is, that the wonderful things of early Greece are
even more frequent than the record of its sober facts. As men advance
in observation and experience, they are compelled more and more to
perceive that all the phenomena of nature are one vast chain of
uninterrupted causes and consequences: but to the eye of uninstructed
ignorance every thing is astonishing, every thing is unexpected. The
remote generations of mankind are in all cases full of prodigies: but
it is the fortune of Greece to have preserved its early adventures, so
as to render the beginning pages of its history one mass of impossible
falsehoods.