civilization which the excavations of Dr. Schliemann have actually revealed to us.
Hissarlik, then, or Ilion, as we will henceforth call it, must be the city whose siege and conquest became the subject-matter of Greek epic song. Here were localized the old myths which Aryan bards had recounted in days gone by; and Acolic poets and rhapsodists saw in the struggles which their countrymen had waged against the mighty ruler of Ilion, a repetition in the real world of the war that had once been waged by gods and heroes in the fairyland of legend. The date of the destruction of Troy is not so easy to fix. The second city of Hissarlik belongs to the prehistoric age, to that age, namely, for which contemporaneous written documents do not exist. It is marked by pottery of a peculiar character, by the use of stone and bronze implements, and by the absence of all such objects as coins or inscriptions, or the Hellenic pottery which characterizes the historical epoch. Above the ruins of the second city lie the remains of no less than four other prehistoric settlements, three of which have left traces of building behind them, while the fourth and last is represented only by that surest and most indestructible of memorials—heaps of broken sherds. Above these come the relics of the Ilion of Greek and Roman times, the oldest of which consist of fragments of those painted archaic Greek terra-cottas, which are found at Mykênæ and Orkhomenos, and to which we cannot assign a less antiquity than the seventh century before the Christian era. This agrees well with the date at which, according to Strabo, the Acolic Ilion was founded.
It is true that the four settlements, which succeeded one another on the hill of Hissarlik after the fall of Ilion, were hardly more than villages inhabited by rude tribes. But the very fact that they thus succeeded one another implies a considerable lapse of time. The accumulation of soil and débris, on the top of which the Greek colonists built their new city, must have occupied at least
