All these heroes of whom we have been telling lived, if they lived at all, about the time of the Judges of Israel.  Troy is thought to have been taken at the time that Saul was reigning in Israel, and there is no doubt that there once was a city between Mount Ida and the Ægean Sea, for quantities of remains have been dug up, and among them many rude earthenware images of an owl, the emblem of Pallas Athene, likenesses perhaps of the Palladium.  Hardly anything is told either false or true of Greece for three hundred years after this time, and when something more like history begins we find that all Greece, small as it is, was divided into very small states, each of which had a chief city and a government of its own, and was generally shut in from its neighbours by mountains or by sea.  There were the three tribes, Ionian, Dorian, and Æolian, dwelling in these little states, and, though they often quarrelled among themselves, all thinking themselves one nation, together with their kindred in the islands of the Ægean, on the coasts of Asia, and also in Sicily and Southern Italy, which was sometimes called Greater Greece.