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the original Aeolic population. Whence these Dorians came we know not, if they be not in reality the Arneans.[1] Doubtless they were Dorians who had crossed the Pindus—such ultramontane Doric tribes are not without parallel—and, forced by the later incursions of the Thesprotians under Thessalus, pressed southward to seek a new abode in Boeotia.[2] Or, perhaps, from the Dores who, on their expulsion from Thessaly, settled in Doris, may have come an offshoot, which forced its way into Boeotia. We must be content with a non liquet in the investigation of such an elusive problem, and rest satisfied with the results attained—that Boeotia was originally an Aeolic land, and that it was partially Dorized at an early period of its history. The possibility of Doric accretions from the west at a later period is not thereby excluded, though an examination of the dialect of the neighboring cantons justifies the conclusion that the Boeotians were more liberal in infusing peculiarities of their idiom into adjacent regions than ready to receive foreign loan-forms.
In Thessaly, as frequently where alien races come into contact, the speech of the conquerors yielded to that of the conquered. That the invaders were Dorians is clear from many considerations, one of which has heretofore been overlooked. The leader of the Thesprotians was Thessalus, grandson of Hercules; the leaders of the Dorians who overran the Achaean Sparta were the sons of Aristodemus, grandson of the same hero. In both Thessaly and Sparta the subdued inhabitants occupied a similar position,[3] the Achaeans and Magnetes in the north being reduced to a condition parallel to that of the περίοικοι, while the πενέσται were subjected to the fate of the Helots. Thessaly was divided into four, Laconia into six divisions. It need not excite our surprise that the tenacity of the Aeolic of the overpowered Thessalians was so vigorous as
- ↑ Too much stress should, perhaps, not be laid on kinship between tribes. It is, therefore, impossible to show that the Arneans were not Dorians, from the fact that they compelled Locrians and the Abantes of Abae in Phocis to leave their homes. That the Aegidae of Thebes took part in the return of the Heraclidae does not prove the original inhabitants of Boeotia to have been Dorians.
- ↑ Such tribes must have crossed the ridges of the Pindus at a period antedating the inroad of the Thesprotians, since Achilles calls upon the Zeus of the Epirotic Dodona as the ancestral divinity of his house. Had these Epirotes, it may be remarked, been barbarians, as a later age assumed, the preeminent position of Dodona and of the Achelous would be unexplainable.
- ↑ “When Αἰολίς became Thessaly its real national history was at an end”—Curtius.
