ABSTRACT
IN the last chapter I somewhat anticipated the strict chronological course of events by describing the circumstances of the fall of M ycenaean and Hittite power around 1200 B.C. in order to indicate the part played in these events by barbarian Europe beyond the Alps. For Europe beyond the Aegean the disruption of the ancient seats of power seems long to have been remembered as the beginning of an epoch. Dim folkmemories rumbled down the centuries, muddled now with the legends of Troy, and the New Peoples of the first millennium B. C. liked to date their beginnings to the movements of heroes after the Trojan War. It was not only the Romans; in the first century B.C. the Celtic peoples are recorded as thinking themselves of like origin, 1 and while this might have been merely a quest for respectable ancestors, and a keepingup with the Aeneases, it could be something more. And even the medieval stories about Trojan, Scythian, or Thracian origins for Britons, Irish, and Picts may be not only learned inventions based on Homer, Virgil, Dictys Cretensis, Dares Phrygius and the rest, but might once again in part strike back to indigenous oral tradition, and a faint memory of a time when peoples were on the move, especially from east to west.2
