Peloponnese (see Heraclidae). The last of these attempts resulted in the “Dorian conquest” of the “Achaeans” and “Ionians” of Peloponnese, and in the assignment of Argolis, Laconia and Messenia to the Heracleid leaders, Temenus, Aristodemus and Cresphontes respectively; of Elis to their Aetolian allies; and of the north coast to the remnants of the conquered Achaeans. The conquest of Corinth and Megara was placed a generation later: Arcadia alone claimed to have escaped invasion. This conquest was dated relatively by Thucydides (i. 12) at eighty years after the Trojan War and twenty years after the conquest of Thessaly and Boeotia by the similar “invaders from Arne”; absolutely by Hellanicus and his school (5th century) at 1149 B.C.; by Isocrates and Ephorus (4th century B.C.) at about 1070 B.C.; and by Sosibius, Eratosthenes (3rd century), and later writers generally, at the generations from 1125 to 1100 B.C.
The invasion was commonly believed to have proceeded by way of Aetolia and Elis, and the name Naupactus was interpreted as an allusion to the needful “shipbuilding” on the Corinthian Gulf. One legend made Dorus himself originally an Aetolian prince; the participation of Oxylus, and the Aetolian claim to Elis, appear first in Ephorus (4th century). The conquest of Laconia at least is represented in 5th-century tradition as immediate and complete, though one legend admits the previous death of the Heracleid leader Aristodemus, and another describes a protracted struggle in the case of Corinth. Pausanias, however (following Sosibius), interprets a long series of conflicts in Arcadia as stages in a gradual advance southward, ending with the conquest of Amyclae by King Teleclus (c. 800 B.C.) and of Helos by King Alcamenes (c. 770 B.C.).
Of the invasion of Argolis a quite different version was already current in the 4th century. This represents the Argive Dorians as having come by sea (apparently from the Maliac Gulf, the nearest seashore to Parnassian Doris), accompanied by survivors of the Dryopes (former inhabitants of that Doris), whose traces in south Euboea (Styra and Carystus), in Cythnus, and at Eion (Halieis), Hermione and Asine in Argolis, were held to indicate their probable route.
The Homeric Dorians of Crete were also interpreted by Andron and others (3rd century) as an advance-guard of this sea-borne migration, and as having separated from the other Dorians while still in Histiaeotis. The 5th-century tradition that the Heracleid kings of Macedon were Temenid exiles from Argos may belong to the same cycle.
The fate of the Dorian invaders was represented as differing locally. In Messenia (according to a legend dramatized by Euripides in the 5th century, and renovated for political ends in the 4th century) the descendants of Cresphontes quarrelled among themselves and were exterminated by the natives. In Laconia Aristodemus (or his twin sons) effected a rigid military occupation which eventually embraced the whole district, and permitted (a) the colonization of Melos, Thera and parts of Crete (before 800 B.C.), (b) the reconquest and annexation of Messenia (about 750 B.C.), (c) a settlement of half-breed Spartans at Tarentum in south Italy, 700 B.C. In Argos and other cities of Argolis the descendants of the Achaean chiefs were taken into political partnership, but a tradition of race-feud lasted till historic times. Corinth, Sicyon and Megara, with similar political compromises, mark the limits of Dorian conquest; a Dorian invasion of Attica (c. 1066 B.C.) was checked by the self-sacrifice of King Codrus: “Either Athens must perish or her king.” Aegina was reckoned a colony of Epidaurus. Rhodes, and some Cretan towns, traced descent from Argos; Cnidus from Argos and Sparta; the rest of Asiatic Doris from Epidaurus or Troezen in Argolis. The colonies of Corinth, Sicyon and Megara, and the Sicilian offshoots of the Asiatic Dorians, belong to historic times (8th–6th centuries).
Criticism of the Traditional History.—The following are the problems:—(1) Was there a Dorian invasion as described in the legends; and, if not, how did the tradition arise? (2) Who were the Dorian invaders, and in what relation did they stand to the rest of the population of Greece? (3) How far do the Dorian states, or their characteristics, represent the descendants, or the culture, of the original invaders?
The Homeric poems (12th–10th centuries) know of Dorians only in Crete, with the obscure epithet τριχάϊκες, and no hint of their origin. All those parts of Peloponnese and the islands which in historic times were “Dorian” are ruled by recently established dynasties of “Achaean” chiefs; the home of the Asiatic Dorians is simply “Caria”; and the geographical “catalogue” in Iliad ii. ignores the northern Doris altogether.
The almost total absence from Homer not only of “Dorians” but of “Ionians” and even of “Hellenes” leads to the conclusion that the diagrammatic genealogy of the “sons of Hellen” is of post-Homeric date; and that it originated as an attempt to classify the Doric, Ionic and Aeolic groups of Hellenic settlements on the west coast of Asia Minor, for here alone do the three names correspond to territorial, linguistic and political divisions. The addition of an “Achaean” group, and the inclusion of this and the Ionic group under a single generic name, would naturally follow the recognition of the real kinship of the “Achaean” colonies of Magna Graecia with those of Ionia. But the attempt to interpret, in terms of this Asiatic diagram, the actual distribution of dialects and peoples in European Greece, led to difficulties. Here, in the 8th–6th centuries, all the Dorian states were in the hands of exclusive aristocracies, which presented a marked contrast to the subject populations. Since the kinship of the latter with the members of adjacent non-Dorian states was admitted, two different explanations seem to have been made, (1) on behalf of the non-Dorian populations, either that the Dorians were no true sons of Hellen, but were of some other northerly ancestry; or that they were merely Achaean exiles; and in either case that their historic predominance resulted from an act of violence, ill-disguised by their association with the ancient claims of the Peloponnesian Heraclidae; (2) on behalf of the Dorian aristocracies, that they were in some special sense “sons of Hellen,” if not the only genuine Hellenes; the rest of the European Greeks, and in particular the anti-Dorian Athenians (with their marked likeness to Ionians), being regarded as Hellenized barbarians of “Pelasgian” origin (see Pelasgians). This process of Hellenization, or at least its final stage, was further regarded as intimately connected with a movement of peoples which had brought the “Dorians” from the northern highlands into those parts of Greece which they occupied in historic times.
So long as the Homeric poems were believed to represent Hellenic (and mainly Ionian) beliefs of the 9th century or later, the historical value of the traditions of a Dorian invasion was repeatedly questioned; most recently and thoroughly by J. Beloch (Gr. Geschichte, i., Strassburg, 1893), as being simply an attempt to reconcile the political geography of Homer (i.e. of 8th-century Ionians describing 12th-century events) with that of historic Greece, by explaining discrepancies (due to Homeric ignorance) as the result of “migrations” in the interval. Such legends often arise to connect towns bearing identical or similar names (such as are common in Greece) and to justify political events or ambitions by legendary precedents; and this certainly happened during the successive political rivalries of Dorian Sparta with non-Dorian Athens and Thebes. But in proportion as an earlier date has become more probable for Homer, the hypothesis of Ionic origin has become less tenable, and the belief better founded (1) that the poems represent accurately a well-defined phase of culture in prehistoric Greece, and (2) that this “Homeric” or “Achaean” phase was closed by some such general catastrophe as is presumed by the legends.
The legend of a Dorian invasion appears first in Tyrtaeus, a 7th-century poet, in the service of Sparta, who brings the Spartan Heracleids to Peloponnese from Erineon in the northern Doris; and the lost Epic of Aegimius, of about the same date, seems to have presupposed the same story. In the 5th century Pindar ascribes to Aegimius the institutions of the Peloponnesian Dorians, and describes them as the “Dorian folk of Hyllus and Aegimius,” and as “originating from Pindus” (Pyth. v. 75: cf. Fr. 4). Herodotus, also in the 5th century, describes them as the
