conclude from the scanty remains of any city that its legendary
greatness in primitive times was a mere exaggeration. 'We are not
justified,' he says, 'in rejecting the tradition of the magnitude
of the Trojan armament, because Mycenae and the other towns of that
age seem to us small and insignificant. For, if Lacedaemon was to
become desolate, any antiquarian judging merely from its ruins
would be inclined to regard the tale of the Spartan hegemony as an
idle myth; for the city is a mere collection of villages after the
old fashion of Hellas, and has none of those splendid public
buildings and temples which characterise Athens, and whose remains,
in the case of the latter city, would be so marvellous as to lead
the superficial observer into an exaggerated estimate of the
Athenian power.' Nothing can be more scientific than the
archaeological canons laid down, whose truth is strikingly
illustrated to any one who has compared the waste fields of the
Eurotas plain with the lordly monuments of the Athenian acropolis.
(3)

On the other hand, Thucydides is quite conscious of the value of
the positive evidence afforded by archaeological remains. He
appeals, for instance, to the character of the armour found in the
Delian tombs and the peculiar mode of sepulture, as corroboration
of his theory of the predominance of the Carian element among the
primitive islanders, and to the concentration of all the temples
either in the Acropolis, or in its immediate vicinity, to the name
of [Greek text which cannot be reproduced] by which it was still
known, and to the extraordinary sanctity of the spring of water
there, as proof that the primitive city was originally confined to
the citadel, and the district immediately beneath it (ii. 16). And
lastly, in the very opening of his history, anticipating one of the