Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/249

LEGEND AS CONCEIVED BY ARRIAN. 217 with which these ancient legends were worked into the national faith and feelings of the Greeks, than these remarks of a judi- cious historian upon the fable of the Amazons. Probably if any plausible mode of rationalizing it, and of transforming it into a quasi-political event, had been offered to Arrian, he would have been better pleased to adopt such a middle term, and would have rested comfortably in the supposition that he believed the legend in its true meaning, while his less inquiring countrymen were imposed upon by the exaggerations of poets. But as the story was presented to him plain and unvarnished, either for accept- ance or rejection, his feelings as a patriot and a religious man prevented him from applying to the past such tests of credibility as his untrammelled reason acknowledged to be paramount in regard to the present. When we see moreover how much his belief was strengthened, and all tendency to scepticism shut out by the familiarity of his eye and memory with sculptured or painted Amazons 1 we may calculate the irresistible force of this sensi- ble demonstration on the convictions of the unlettered public, at once more deeply retentive of passive impressions, and unaccus- tomed to the countervailing habit of rational investigation into evidence. Had the march of an army of warlike women, from the Thermodon or the Tanais into the heart of Attica, been re- counted to Arrian as an incident belonging to the time of Alexan- der the Great, he would have rejected it no less emphatically than Strabo ; but cast back as it was into an undefined past, it took rank among the hallowed traditions of divine or heroic antiquity, gratifying to extol by rhetoric, but repulsive to scrutinize in argument. 2 1 Ktesias described as real animals, existing in wild and distant regions, the heterogeneous and fantastic combinations which he saw sculptured in the East (see this stated and illustrated in Bahr, Preface to the Fragm. of Ktesias, pp. 58, 59). 2 Hcyne observes (Apollodor. ii. 5, 9) with respect to the fable of the Ama- zons, "In his historiarum fidem aut vestigia nemo qusesiverit." Admitting the wisdom of this counsel (and I think it indisputable), why are we required to presume, in the absence of all proof, an historical basis for each of those other narratives, such as the Kalydonian boar-hunt, the Argonautic expedi- tion, or the siege of Troy, which go to make up, along with the story of the Amazons, the aggregate matter of Grecian legendary faith ? If the tale of voi . T. 10