42 HISTORY OF GREECE. we have no means of deciding, nor can we accept Mr. Clinton's unsupported conjecture, when he tells us : "Perhaps these were begun to be writte i as early as B. c. 1048, the probable time of the Dorian conquest." Again, he tells us : " At Argos, a register was preserved of the priestesses of Juno, which might be more ancient than the catalogues of the kings of Sparta or Corinth. That register, from which Hellanikus composed his work, con- tained the priestesses from the earliest times down to the age of Hellanikus himself. .... But this catalogue might have been commenced as early as the Trojan war itself, and even at a still earlier date." (pp. x. xi.) Again, respecting the inscriptions quoted by Herodotus from the temple of the Ismenian Apollo at Thebes, in which Amphitryo and Laodamas are named, Mr. Clinton says, " They were ancient in the time of Herodotus, which may perhaps carry them back 400 years before his time: and in that case they might approach within 300 years of Laodamas and within 400 years of the probable time of Kadmus himself." " It is granted (he adds, in a note,) that these inscriptions were not genuine, that is, not of the date to which they were assigned by Herodotus himself. But that they were ancient, cannot be doubted," &c. The time when Herodotus saw the temple of the Ismenian Apollo at Thebes can hardly have been earlier than 450 B. c. reckoning upwards from hence to 776 B. c., we have an interval of 326 years : the inscriptions which Herodotus saw may well therefore have been ancient, without being earlier than the first recorded Olympiad. Mr. Clinton does, indeed, tell us that an- cient " may perhaps " be construed as 400 years earlier than He- rodotus. But no careful reader can permit himself to convert such bare possibility into a ground of inference, and to make it available, in conjunction with other similar possibilities before enumerated, for the purpose of showing that there really existed inscriptions in Greece of a date anterior to 776 B. c. Unless Mr. Clinton can make out this, he can derive no benefit from in- scriptions, in his attempt to substantiate the reality of the mythi- cal persons or of the mythical events. The truth is, that the Herakleid pedigree of the Spartan kings (as has been observed in a former chapter) is only one out of the numerous divine and heroic genealogies with w?-ich the Hel-
