Throughout his whole journey to the point last mentioned, from the borders of Bœotia and Megaris, the traveller would only step from one Dorian state into another. But on crossing from the south to the north bank of the river Neda, at a point near to its mouth, he would find himself out of Doric land altogether: first, in the territory called Triphylia,—next, in that of Pisa, or the Pisatid,—thirdly, in the more spacious and powerful state called Elis; these three comprising the coast-land of Peloponnesus from the mouth of the Neda to that of the Larissus. The Triphylians, distributed into a number of small townships, the largest of which was Lepreon,—and the Pisatans, equally destitute of any centralizing city,—had both, at the period of which we are now speaking, been conquered by their more powerful northern neighbors of Elis, who enjoyed the advantage of a spacious territory united under one government; the middle portion, called the Hollow Elis, being for the most part fertile, though the tracts near the sea were more sandy and barren. The Eleians were a section of Ætolian emigrants into Peloponnesus, but the Pisatans and Triphylians had both been originally independent inhabitants of the peninsula,—the latter being affirmed to belong to the same race as the Minyæ who had occupied the ante-Bœotian Orchomenos: both, too, bore the ascendency of Elis with perpetual murmur and occasional resistance.

Crossing the river Larissus, and pursuing the northern coast of Peloponnesus south of the Corinthian gulf, the traveller would pass into Achaia,—a name which designated the narrow strip of level land, and the projecting spurs and declivities, between that gulf and the northernmost mountains of the peninsula,—Skollis, Erymanthus, Aroania, Krathis, and the towering eminence called Kyllênê. Achæan cities,—twelve in number at least, if not more,—divided this long strip of land amongst them, from the mouth of the Larissus and the north-western Cape Araxus on one side, to the western boundary of the Sikyonian territory on the other. According to the accounts of the ancient legends and the belief of Herodotus, this territory had once been occupied by Ionian inhabitants whom the Achæans had expelled.

In making this journey, the traveller would have finished the circuit of Peloponnesus; but he would still have left untrodden the great central region, inclosed between the territories just enumerated,—approaching nearest to the sea on the borders of Triphylia, but never touching it anywhere. This region was Arcadia, possessed by inhabitants who are uniformly represented as all of one race, and all aboriginal. It was high and bleak, full of wild mountain, rock, and forest, and abounding, to a degree unusual even in Greece, with those land-locked basins from whence the water finds only a subterraneous issue. It was distributed among a large number of distinct villages and cities. Many of the village tribes,—the Mænalii, Parrhasii, Azanes, etc., occupying the central and the western regions, were numbered among the rudest of the Greeks: but along its eastern frontier there were several Arcadian cities which ranked deservedly among the more civilized Peloponnesians. Tegea, Mantineia, Orchomenus, Stymphalus, Pheneus, possessed the whole eastern frontier of Arcadia from the borders of Laconia to those of Sikyôn and Pellênê in Achaia: Phigaleia at the south-western corner, near the borders of Triphylia, and Heræa, on the north bank of the Alpheius, near the place where that river quits Arcadia to enter the Pisatis, were also towns deserving of notice. Towards the north of this cold and thinly-peopled region, near Pheneos, was situated the small town of Nonakris, adjoining to which rose the hardly accessible crags where the rivulet of Styx[496] flowed down: a point of common feeling for all Arcadians, from the terrific sanction which this water was understood to impart to their oaths.

The distribution of Peloponnesus here sketched, suitable to the Persian invasion and the succeeding half century, may also be said (with some allowances) to be adapted to the whole interval between about B. C. 550-370; from the time of the conquest of Thyreatis by Sparta to the battle of Leuktra. But it is not the earliest distribution which history presents to us. Not presuming to criticize the Homeric map of Peloponnesus, and going back only to 776 B. C., we find this material difference,—that Sparta occupies only a very small fraction of the large territory above described as belonging to her. Westward of the summit of Mount Taygetus are found another section of Dorians, independent of Sparta: the Messenian Dorians, whose city is on the hill of Stenyklêrus, near the south-western boundary of Arcadia, and whose possessions cover the fertile plain of Messêne along the river Pamisus to its mouth in the Messenian gulf: it is to be noted that Messênê was then the name of the plain generally, and that no town so called existed until after the battle of Leuktra. Again, eastward of the valley of the Eurotas, the mountainous region and the western shores of the Argolic gulf down to Cape Malea are also independent of Sparta; belonging to Argos, or rather to Dorian towns in unison with Argos. All the great Dorian towns, from the borders of the Megarid to the eastern frontier of Arcadia, as above enumerated, appear to have existed in 776 B. C.: Achaia was in the same condition, so far as we are able to judge, as well as Arcadia, except in regard to its southern frontier, conterminous with Sparta, of which more will hereafter be said. In respect to the western portion of Peloponnesus, Elis (properly so called) appears to have embraced the same territory in 776 B. C. as in 550 B. C.: but the Pisatid had been recently conquered, and was yet imperfectly subjected by the Eleians; while Triphylia seems to have been quite independent of them. Respecting the south-western promontory of Peloponnesus down to Cape Akritas, we are altogether without information: reasons will hereafter be given for believing that it did not at that time form part of the territory of the Messenian Dorians.

Of the different races or people whom Herodotus knew in Peloponnesus, he believed three to be aboriginal,—the Arcadians, the Achæans, and the Kynurians. The Achæans, though belonging indigenously to the peninsula, had yet removed from the southern portion of it to the northern, expelling the previous Ionian tenants: this is a part of the legend respecting the Dorian conquest, or Return of the Herakleids, and we can neither verify nor contradict it. But neither the Arcadians nor the Kynurians had ever changed their abodes. Of the latter, I have not before spoken, because they were never (so far as history knows them) an independent population. They occupied the larger portion[497] of the territory of Argolis, from Orneæ, near the northern[498] or Phliasian border, to Thyrea and the Thyreatis, on the Laconian border: and though belonging originally (as Herodotus imagines rather than asserts) to the Ionic race—they had been so long subjects of Argos in his time, that almost all evidence of their ante-Dorian condition had vanished.

But the great Dorian states in Peloponnesus—the capital powers in the peninsula—were all originally emigrants, according to the belief not only of Herodotus, but of all the Grecian world: so also were the Ætolians of Elis, the Triphylians, and the Dryopes at Hermionê and Asinê. All these emigrations are so described as to give them a root in the Grecian legendary world: the Triphylians are traced back to Lemnos, as the offspring of the Argonautic heroes,[499] and we are too uninformed about them to venture upon any historical guesses. But respecting the Dorians, it may perhaps be possible, by examining the first historical situation in which they are presented to us, to offer some conjectures as to the probable circumstances under which they arrived. The legendary narrative of it has already been given in the first chapter of this volume,—that great mythical event called the Return of the Children of Hêraklês, by which the first establishment of the Dorians in the promised land of Peloponnesus was explained to the full satisfaction of Grecian faith. One single armament and expedition, acting by the special direction of the Delphian god, and conducted by three brothers, lineal descendants of the principal Achæo-Dorian heroes through Hyllus, (the eponymus of the principal tribe,)—the national heroes of the preëxisting population vanquished and expelled, and the greater part of the peninsula both acquired and partitioned at a stroke,—the circumstances of the partition adjusted to the historical relations of Laconia and Messenia,—the friendly power of Ætolian Elis, with its Olympic games as the bond of union in Peloponnesus, attached to this event as an appendage, in the person of Oxylus,—all these particulars compose a narrative well calculated to impress the retrospective imagination of a Greek. They exhibit an epical fitness and sufficiency which it would be unseasonable to impair by historical criticism.

The Alexandrine chronology sets down a period of 328 years from the Return of the Herakleids to the first Olympiad (1104 B. C.-776 B. C.,),—a period measured by the lists of the kings of Sparta, on the trustworthiness of which some remarks have already been offered. Of these 328 years, the first 250, at the least, are altogether barren of facts; and even if we admitted them to be historical, we should have nothing to recount except a succession of royal names. Being unable either to guarantee the entire list, or to discover any valid test for discriminating the historical and the non-historical items, I here enumerate the Lacedæmonian kings as they appear in Mr. Clinton’s Fasti Hellenici. There were two joint kings at Sparta, throughout nearly all the historical time of independent Greece, deducing their descent from Hêraklês through Eurysthenês and Proklês, the twin sons of Aristodêmus; the latter being one of those three Herakleid brothers to whom the conquest of the peninsula is ascribed:—

Line of Eurysthenês. Line of Proklês.
Eurysthenêsreigned42years. Proklêsreigned51years.
Agis”31” Söus”—”
Echestratus”35” Eurypôn”—”
Labôtas”37” Prytanis”49”
Doryssus”29” Eunomus”45”
Agesilaus”44” Charilaus”60”
Archelaus”60” Nikander”38”
Teleklus”40” Theopompus”10”
Alkamenês”10”
328

Both Theopompus and Alkamenês reigned considerably longer, but the chronologists affirm that the year 776 B. C. (or the first Olympiad) occurred in the tenth year of each of their reigns. It is necessary to add, with regard to this list, that there are some material discrepancies between different authors even as to the names of individual kings, and still more as to the duration of their reigns, as may be seen both in Mr. Clinton’s chronology and in Müller’s Appendix to the History of the Dorians.[500] The alleged sum total cannot be made to agree with the items without great license of conjecture. O. Müller observes,[501] in reference to this Alexandrine chronology, “that our materials only enable us to restore it to its original state, not to verify its correctness.” In point of fact they are insufficient even for the former purpose, as the dissensions among learned critics attest.

We have a succession of names, still more barren of facts, in the case of the Dorian sovereigns of Corinth. This city had its own line of Herakleids, descended from Hêraklês, but not through Hyllus. Hippotês, the progenitor of the Corinthian Herakleids, was reported in the legend to have originally joined the Dorian invaders of the Peloponnesus, but to have quitted them in consequence of having slain the prophet Karnus.[502] The three brothers, when they became masters of the peninsula, sent for Alêtês, the son of Hippotês, and placed him in possession of Corinth, over which the chronologists make him begin to reign thirty years after the Herakleid conquest. His successors are thus given:—