iliad intro, histoiology

It has been an easy, and a popular expedient, of late years, to deny the personal or real existence of men and things whose life and condition were too much for our belief. This system—which has often comforted the religious sceptic, and substituted the consolations of Strauss for those of the New Testament—has been of incalculable value to the historical theorists of the last and present centuries. To question the existence of Alexander the Great, would be a more excusable act, than to believe in that of Romulus. To deny a fact related in Herodotus, because it is inconsistent with a theory developed from an Assyrian inscription which no two scholars read in the same way, is more pardonable, than to believe in the good-natured old king whom the elegant pen of Florian has idealized—Numa Pompilius.

!! In the tradition of thinkers like Hege the author posits that historical characters are more believable than that of myth.  In fact, one has a harder time arguing away Socrates and Alexander the great as opposed to the mythical Romulus.  This precedence in historic fact versus fiction has come to dominate the main stay of academia. What Herodotus fostered historians have demanded as the bases of the fact of occurrence in human existence: time coded of course to reflect those recording their events for posterity and future study.  Furthermore analysis such as my own uses this type of foundation and skeptics to analysis myth in an attempt to come to a grounded meaning to the tale, which is a better understanding of the real events that fostered the myth .  Analysis now tries to examine the events and people from a real prospective and tries to see the everyday life of the person rather than the legendary image that can often shroud the truth of what the events were and what a person was really like. This type of mentality is crucial for understanding and analysis everything from religion to myth to history itself, ie historiology and study of the same demeanor and type