Mythology and Fables Explained by History

PREFACE.

...I do not examine at present: but it remains certain that their History was known, and that there were traditions upon which one could rely.

If it is true, after what I have just said, that one can trace the Fables of the Gods back to History, no one, I believe, will doubt that at least as much can be done for those of the Heroes and Demi-Gods, since the Greeks were in a position to transmit them to us. It is unnecessary to investigate right now for how long they remained without the use of Letters. At the very least, no one doubts that they received them from Cadmus In Greek mythology, the Phoenician prince who founded Thebes and is credited with introducing the alphabet to the Greeks. who brought them the Phoenician Alphabet, as I will prove in the appropriate place. Now, the Heroes of Greece and the events that gave rise to their Heroism occur after the establishment of the Colony that came under the leadership of this Chief to settle in Boeotia A region in central Greece; its capital was Thebes.; consequently, at a time when the Greeks did not lack the means to write their History. The name of fabulous times that Varro Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC), a Roman scholar who divided history into the "unknown," "fabulous" (mythological), and "historical" periods. gives to the centuries in which the Heroes appeared, and which (according to Scaliger Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540–1609), a prominent Renaissance scholar who specialized in historical chronology.) ought to have been named the Heroic times, does not lead one to believe that nothing certain was known of them, since the conquest of the Argonauts, the War of the Centaurs and the Lapiths, the Labors of Hercules, the two Theban Wars, and those of Troy, are events that cannot be called into doubt: this learned Roman [Varro], therefore, only gave them the name of fabulous times because the History of these events is found mixed with an infinity of fictions, which should not seem surprising; for if the Greeks have been so often reproached for having sacrificed truth to their inclination...