general belief among them that the Pelasgians were reclaimed from
barbarism by Oriental strangers, who settled in the country and
introduced among the rude inhabitants the first elements of
civilization. Attica is said to have been indebted for the arts
of civilized life to Cecrops, a native of Sais in Egypt. To him
is ascribed the foundation of the city of Athens, the institution
of marriage, and the introduction of religious rites and
ceremonies. Argos, in like manner, is said to have been founded
by the Egyptian Danaus, who fled to Greece with his fifty
daughters, to escape from the persecution of their suitors, the
fifty sons of his brother AEgyptus. The Egyptian stranger was
elected king by the natives, and from him the tribe of the Danai
derived their name, which Homer frequently uses as a general
appellation for the Greeks. Another colony was the one led from
Asia by Pelops, from whom the southern peninsula of Greece
derived its name of Peloponnesus. Pelops is represented as a
Phrygian, and the son of the wealthy king Tantalus. He became
king of Mycenae, and the founder of a powerful dynasty, one of
the most renowned in the Heroic age of Greece. From him was
descended Agamemnon, who led the Grecian host against Troy.

The tale of the Phoenician colony, conducted by Cadmus, and which
founded Thebes in Boeotia, rests upon a different basis. Whether
there was such a person as the Phoenician Cadmus, and whether he
built the town called Cadmea, which afterwards became the citadel
of Thebes, as the ancient legends relate, cannot be determined;
but it is certain that the Greeks were indebted to the
Phoenicians for the art of writing; for both the names and the
forms of the letters in the Greek alphabet are evidently derived
from the Phoenician. With this exception the Oriental strangers