The year 776 B.C. witnessed the first Olympic games, a festival which ail the Greeks kept at the precinct of Zeus at Olympia in the north-west of the Peloponnese. Whether it was really the first is doubtful, but it was so reckoned by the later Greeks whose records went back to that date. It is a significant date in Greek history because it marks and symbolizes the adoption in Greece of the Phoenician alphabet, from which ultimately all other alphabets are descended; from the eighth century B.C. onwards the Greeks were a literate people, able to record their own history. Thus Greek history in the strict sense may be said to begin then, and what hes before that date can be termed pre-history. But this was no more the beginning of Greek history than A.D. 1066 was of British. Long before that men and women had lived, fought and died among the mountains and islands of Greece, and by the only test which can properly be applied, that of language, they were as Greek as their successors.

There are three ways of penetrating the fog which blots out the early stages of the development of the Greeks; none of them satisfactory or offering more than scraps of information, but by a cautious synthesis allowing some general conclusions.

First, there is the memory of people and events which survived into a literate era. The Greeks of the classical period had many legends of a remote past, a heroic age when men were capable of heroic feats and the gods were always at hand to help; many of the heroes were the sons of gods or goddesses. There are two notable events recorded in these legends: the war against Thebes in Boeotia and the expedition against Troy. The latter is better known, since it provides the background for the twin masterpieces of Greek literature, the Iliad and the Odyssey.