effect of all Asia the Less. He married Hecuba, the daughter of Cisseus, king of Thrace, and had in all (saith i Cicero) fifty sons, whereof seventeen by Hecuba, of whom Paris was one; who, attempting to recover his aunt Hesione, took Helena, the wife of Menelaus, the cause of the war which followed. Theseus, the tenth king of Athens, began likewise to reign in the beginning of Jair: some writers call him the son of Neptune and Æthra; but Plutarch, in the story of his life, finds him begotten by Egeus, of whom the Grecian sea between it and Asia the Less took name. For when Minos had mastered the Athenians so far, as he forced them to pay him seven of their sons every year for tribute, whom he enclosed within a labyrinth, to be devoured by the monster Minotaur; because belike the sons of Taurus, which he begat on Pasiphaë the queen, had the charge of them; among these seven Theseus thrust himself, not doubting by his valour to deliver the rest, and to free his country of that slavery occasioned for the death of Androgeus, Minos's son. And having possessed himself of Ariadne's affection, who was Minos's daughter, he received from her a bottom of thread, by which he conducted himself through all the crooked and inextricable turnings of the labyrinth, made in all like that of the city of crocodiles in Egypt; by mean whereof, having slain Minotaur, he found a ready way to return. But whereas his father Ægeus had given order, that if he came back with victory and in safety he should use a white sail in sign thereof, and not that mournful black sail under which they left the port of Athens; this instruction being either forgotten or neglected, Ægeus descrying the ship of Theseus with a black sail, cast himself over the rocks into the sea, afterward called of his name Ægeum. One of the first famous acts of Theseus was the killing of Scyron, who kept a passage between Megara and the Peloponnesian isthmus, and threw all whom he mastered into i In Tusc. RALEGH, HIST. WORLD. VOL. II. E e the sea from the high rocks. Afterward he did the like to Cercyon by wrestling, who used by that art to kill others. He also rid the country of Procrustes, who used to bend down the strong limbs of two trees, and fastened by cords such as he took, part of them to one and part to the other bough, and by their springing back tare them asunder. So did he root out Periphetes, and other mischievous thieves and murderers. He overthrew the army of the Amazons, who, after many victories and vastations, entered the territory of Athens. Theseus, having taken their queen Hippolyta prisoner, begat on her Hippolytus; with whom afterward his mother-in-law Phædra falling in love, and he refusing to abuse his father's bed, Phædra persuaded Theseus that his son offered to force her; after which it is feigned, that Theseus besought Neptune to revenge this wrong of his son's by some violent death. Neptune, taking a time of advantage, sent out his sea-calves, as Hippolytus passed by the sea-shore, and so affrighted his horses, as casting the coach over, he was (by being entangled therein) torn in pieces; which miserable and undeserved destiny when Phædra had heard of, she strangled herself. After which it is feigned, that Diana entreated Æsculapius to set Hippolytus's pieces together, and to restore him to life; which done, because he was chaste, she led him with her into Italy, to accompany her in her hunting and field sports. It is probable that Hippolytus, when his father sought his life, thinking to escape by sea, was affronted thereat, and received many wounds in forcing his passage and escape, which wounds Esculapius, to wit, some skilful physician or chirurgeon, healed again; after which he passed into Italy, where he lived with Diana, that is, the life of a hunter, in which he most delighted. But of these ancient profane stories, Plutarch saith well, that as cosmographers in their descriptions of the world, where they find many vast places, whereof they know nothing, fill the same with strange beasts, birds, and fishes, and with mathematical lines; so do the Grecian historians and poets embroider and intermix the tales of ancient times with a world of fictions and fabulous discourses. True it is, that Theseus did many great things in imitation of Hercules, whom he made his pattern, and was the first that gathered the Athenians from being dispersed in thin and ragged villages: in recompense whereof, and for devising them laws to live under, and in order, he was, by the beggarly, mutable, and ungrateful multitude, in the end banished: some say per ostracismum, by the law of lots, or names written on shells, which was a device of his own. He stole Helen (as they say) when she was fifteen years old, from Aphidna, which city Castor and Pollux overturned, when they followed after Theseus to recover their sister. k Erasistratus and Pausanias write, that Theseus begat her with child at Argos, where she erected a temple to Lucina; but her age makes that tale unlikely to be true; and so doth Ovid, Non tamen ex facto fructum tulit ille petitum, &c. The rape 'Eusebius finds in the first of m Jair, who governed Israel twenty-two years, to whom succeeded Jephta, or Jepte, six years, to whom Ibzan, who ruled seven years, and then Habdon eight years; in whose time was the fall of Troy. So as, if Theseus had a child by her in the first of Jair, (at which time we must count her no less than fifteen year old; for the women did not commonly begin so young as they do now,) she was then at least fiftytwo year old at the destruction of Troy; and when she was stolen by Paris, thirty-eight; but herein the chronologers do not agree. Yet Eusebius and Bunting, with Halicarnasseus, do in effect consent that the city was entered and burnt in the first year of Demophoon, king of Athens, the successor of Mnestheus, the successor of Theseus, seventeen days before the summer tropic; and that about the 11th of September following the Trojans crossed the Hellespont into Thrace, and wintered there; and in the next spring, that they navigated into Sicilia, where wintering the second year, the next summer they arrived at k Strab. 1. 9. Paus. in Con. In Epist. Helen. m Judges x. 3. n Bunt. Chron. Euseb. Chron. Hal. 1. r. Laurentum, and builded Lavinium. But St. Augustine hath it otherwise, that when Polyphides governed Sicyon, Mnestheus Athens, Tautanes Assyria, Habdon Israel, then Æneas arrived in Italy, transporting with him in twenty ships the remainder of the Trojans; but the difference is not great and hereof more at large in the story of Troy at hand. In Sicyonia, Phæstus, the two and twentieth king, reigned eight years, beginning by the common account in the time of Thola. His successors, Adrastus, who reigned four years, and Polyphides, who reigned thirteen, are accounted to the time of Jair; so is also Mnestheus, king of Athens, and Atreus, who held a great part of Peloponnesus. In Assyria, during the government of these two peaceable judges, Mitreus, and after him Tautanes, reigned. In Egypt, Amenophis, the son of Ramses, and afterwards Annemenes. SECT. VIII. Of the war of Thebes, which was in this age. IN this age was the war of Thebes, the most ancient that ever Greek poet or historian wrote of. Wherefore the Roman poet Lucretius, affirming (as the Epicures in this point held truly against the Peripatetics) that the world had a beginning, urgeth them with this objection. Si nulla fuit genitalis origo Rerumque et mundi, semperque æterna fuere ; But things have ever been as now they are: Why did no poet sing some elder war? It is true, that in these times Greece was very savage, the inhabitants being often chased from place to place by the captains of greater tribes; and no man thinking the ground whereon he dwelt his own longer than he could hold it by strong hand. Wherefore merchandise and other intercourse Aug. de Civitate Dei, 1. 18. c. 19. they used little, neither did they plant many trees, or sow more corn than was necessary for their sustenance. Money they had little or none; for it is thought that the name of money was not heard in Greece when Homer did write, who measures the value of gold and brass by the worth in cattle; saying, that the golden armour of Glaucus was worth 100 beeves, and the copper armour of Diomedes worth nine. Robberies by land and sea were common, and without shame; and to steal horses or kine was the usual exercise of their great men. Their towns were not many, whereof those that were walled were very few, and not great. For Mycenæ, the principal city in Peloponnesus, was a very little thing, and it may well be thought that the rest were proportionable. Briefly, Greece was then in her infancy; and though in some small towns of that half isle of Peloponnesus, the inhabitants might have enjoyed quietness within their narrow bounds; as likewise did the Athenians, because their country was so barren that none did care to take it from them; yet that the land in general was very rude, it will easily appear to such as consider what Thucydides, the greatest of their historians, hath written to this effect, in the preface to his history. Wherefore, as in these latter times, idle chroniclers use, when they want good matter, to fill whole books with reports of great frosts or dry summers, and other such things which no man cares to read; so did they who spake of Greece in her beginnings remember only the great floods which were in the times of Ogyges and Deucalion, or else rehearse fables of men changed into birds, of strange monsters, of adultery committed by their gods, and the mighty men which they begat; without writing ought that savoured of humanity, before the time of the war of Thebes; the brief whereof is this. Edipus, the son of Laius king of Thebes, having been cast forth when he was an infant, because an oracle foretold what evil should come to pass by him, did afterwards, in a narrow passage contending for the way, slay his own father, |