THE TROJAN AND PERSIAN WARS.
[TO TIIE EDITOR OF TIIE "SPECTATOR."]
SIR,—Mr. G. W. Cox does not apprehend the point which I wished to make. I see no inherent improbability in the central fact of the Trojan war. A band of Asiatic pirates carries off a famous beauty from Greece, possibly commits a number of such outrages. Various Greek tribes combine to punish the marauders. Their town stands a long siege, and finally falls. This is as likely to have happened as that the Persian King led two millions of men against Greece. There is no necessity for any such explanation as Mr. Cox or Professor Max Muller suggests, no necessity like that which meets us when we have to deal with mythology proper, with the story of Niobe, for instance, or of Apollo and Daphne ; and it surely is a consideration of some weight that the Persian war, supposing that there were no historical evidence for it, might be explained in the same way. It seems much the same sort of argument as that Whately used in his Historical Difficulties about
Napoleon Buonaparte.—I am, Sir, &c., YOUR REVIEWER.
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