Aletesreigned38years,
Ixion”38”
Agelas”37”
Prymnis”35”
Bacchis”35”
Agelas”30”
Eudêmus”25”
Aristomêdês”35”
Agêmôn”16”
Alexander”25”
Telestês”12”
Automenês”1”
327

Such was the celebrity of Bacchis, we are told, that those who succeeded him took the name of Bacchiads in place of Aletiads or Herakleids. One year after the accession of Automenês, the family of the Bacchiads generally, amounting to 200 persons, determined to abolish royalty, to constitute themselves a standing oligarchy, and to elect out of their own number an annual Prytanis. Thus commenced the oligarchy of the Bacchiads, which lasted for ninety years, until it was subverted by Kypselus in 657 B. C.[503] Reckoning the thirty years previous to the beginning of the reign of Alêtês, the chronologists thus provide an interval of 447 years between the Return of the Herakleids and the accession of Kypselus, and 357 years between the same period and the commencement of the Bacchiad oligarchy. The Bacchiad oligarchy is unquestionably historical; the conquest of the Herakleids belongs to the legendary world; while the interval between the two is filled up, as in so many other cases, by a mere barren genealogy.

When we jump this vacant space, and place ourselves at the first opening of history, we find that, although ultimately Sparta came to hold the first place, not only in Peloponnesus, but in all Hellas, this was not the case at the earliest moment of which we have historical cognizance. Argos, and the neighboring towns connected with her by a bond of semi-religious, semi-political union,—Sikyôn, Phlius, Epidaurus, and Trœzên,—were at first of greater power and consideration than Sparta; a fact which the legend of the Herakleids seems to recognize by making Têmenus the eldest brother of the three. And Herodotus assures us that at one time all the eastern coast of Peloponnesus down to Cape Melea, including the island of Cythêra, all which came afterwards to constitute a material part of Laconia, had belonged to Argos.[504] Down to the time of the first Messenian war, the comparative importance of the Dorian establishments in Peloponnesus appears to have been in the order in which the legend placed them,—Argos first,[505] Sparta second, Messênê third. It will be seen hereafter that the Argeians never lost the recollection of this early preëminence, from which the growth of Sparta had extruded them; and the liberties of entire Hellas were more than once in danger from their disastrous jealousy of a more fortunate competitor.

At a short distance of about three miles from Argos, and at the exact point where that city approaches nearest to the sea,[506] was situated the isolated hillock called Temenion, noticed both by Strabo and Pausanias. It was a small village, deriving both its name and its celebrity from the chapel and tomb of the hero Têmenus, who was there worshipped by the Dorians; and the statement which Pausanias heard was, that Têmenus, with his invading Dorians, had seized and fortified the spot, and employed it as an armed post to make war upon Tisamenus and the Achæans. What renders this report deserving of the greater attention, is, that the same thing is affirmed with regard to the eminence called Solygeius, near Corinth: this too was believed to be the place which the Dorian assailants had occupied and fortified against the preëxisting Corinthians in the city. Situated close upon the Sarônic gulf, it was the spot which invaders landing from that gulf would naturally seize upon, and which Nikias with his powerful Athenian fleet did actually seize and occupy against Corinth in the Peloponnesian war.[507] In early days, the only way of overpowering the inhabitants of a fortified town, generally also planted in a position itself very defensible, was,—that the invaders, entrenching themselves in the neighborhood, harassed the inhabitants and ruined their produce until they brought them to terms. Even during the Peloponnesian war, when the art of besieging had made some progress, we read of several instances in which this mode of aggressive warfare was adopted with efficient results.[508] We may readily believe that the Dorians obtained admittance both into Argos and Corinth in this manner. And it is remarkable that, except Sikyôn (which is affirmed to have been surprised by night), these were the only towns in the Argolic region which are said to have resisted them; the story being, that Phlius, Epidaurus, and Trœzên had admitted the Dorian intruders without opposition, although a certain portion of the previous inhabitants seceded. We shall hereafter see that the non-Dorian population of Sikyôn and Corinth still remained considerable.

The separate statements which we thus find, and the position of the Temenion and the Solygeius, lead to two conjectures,—first, that the acquisitions of the Dorians in Peloponnesus were also isolated and gradual, not at all conformable to the rapid strides of the old Herakleid legend; next, that the Dorian invaders of Argos and Corinth made their attack from the Argolic and the Saronic gulfs,—by sea and not by land. It is, indeed, difficult to see how they can have got to the Temenion in any other way than by sea; and a glance at the map will show that the eminence Solygeius presents itself,[509] with reference to Corinth, as the nearest and most convenient holding-ground for a maritime invader, conformably to the scheme of operations laid by Nikias. To illustrate the supposition of a Dorian attack by sea on Corinth, we may refer to a story quoted from Aristotle (which we find embodied in the explanation of an old adage), representing Hippotês the father of Alêtês as having crossed the Maliac gulf[510] (the sea immediately bordering on the ancient Maleans, Dryopians, and Dorians) in ships, for the purpose of colonizing. And if it be safe to trust the mention of Dorians in the Odyssey, as a part of the population of the island of Crete, we there have an example of Dorian settlements which must have been effected by sea, and that too at a very early period. “We must suppose (observes O. Müller,[511] in reference to these Kretan Dorians) that the Dorians, pressed by want or restless from inactivity, constructed piratical canoes, manned these frail and narrow barks with soldiers who themselves worked at the oar, and thus being changed from mountaineers into seamen,—the Normans of Greece,—set sail for the distant island of Krête.” In the same manner, we may conceive the expeditions of the Dorians against Argos and Corinth to have been effected; and whatever difficulties may attach to this hypothesis, certain it is that the difficulties of a long land-march, along such a territory as Greece, are still more serious.

The supposition of Dorian emigrations by sea, from the Maliac gulf to the north-eastern promontory of Peloponnesus, is farther borne out by the analogy of the Dryopes, or Dryopians. During the historical times, this people occupied several detached settlements in various parts of Greece, all maritime, and some insular;—they were found at Hermionê, Asinê, and Eiôn, in the Argolic peninsula (very near to the important Dorian towns constituting the Amphiktyony of Argos,[512])—at Styra and Karystus in the island of Eubœa,—in the island of Kythnus, and even at Cyprus. These dispersed colonies can only have been planted by expeditions over the sea. Now we are told that the original Dryopis, the native country of this people, comprehended both the territory near the river Spercheius, and north of Œta, afterwards occupied by the Malians, as well as the neighboring district south of Œta, which was afterwards called Doris. From hence the Dryopians were expelled,—according to one story, by the Dorians,—according to another, by Hêraklês and the Malians: however this may be, it was from the Maliac gulf that they started on shipboard in quest of new homes, which some of them found on the headlands of the Argolic peninsula.[513] And it was from this very country, according to Herodotus,[514] that the Dorians also set forth, in order to reach Peloponnesus. Nor does it seem unreasonable to imagine, that the same means of conveyance, which bore the Dryopians from the Maliac gulf to Hermionê and Asinê, also carried the Dorians from the same place to the Temenion, and the hill Solygeius.

The legend represents Sikyôn, Epidaurus, Trœzên, Phlius, and Kleônæ, as all occupied by Dorian colonists from Argos, under the different sons of Têmenus: the first three are on the sea, and fit places for the occupation of maritime invaders. Argos and the Dorian towns in and near the Argolic peninsula are to be regarded as a cluster of settlements by themselves, completely distinct from Sparta and the Messenian Stenyklêrus, which appear to have been formed under totally different conditions. First, both of them are very far inland,—Stenyklêrus not easy, Sparta very difficult of access from the sea; next, we know that the conquests of Sparta were gradually made down the valley of the Eurotas seaward. Both these acquisitions present the appearance of having been made from the land-side, and perhaps in the direction which the Herakleid legend describes,—by warriors entering Peloponnesus across the narrow mouth of the Corinthian gulf, through the aid or invitation of those Ætolian settlers who at the same time colonized Elis. The early and intimate connection (on which I shall touch presently) between Sparta and the Olympic games as administered by the Eleians, as well as the leading part ascribed to Lykurgus in the constitution of the solemn Olympic truce, tend to strengthen such a persuasion.

In considering the early affairs of the Dorians in Peloponnesus, we are apt to have our minds biased, first, by the Herakleid legend, which imparts to them an impressive, but deceitful, epical unity; next, by the aspect of the later and better-known history, which presents the Spartan power as unquestionably preponderant, and Argos only as second by a long interval. But the first view (as I have already remarked) which opens to us, of real Grecian history, a little before 776 B. C., exhibits Argos with its alliance or confederacy of neighboring cities colonized from itself, as the great seat of Dorian power in the peninsula, and Sparta as an outlying state of inferior consequence. The recollection of this state of things lasted after it had ceased to be a reality, and kept alive pretensions on the part of Argos to the headship of the Greeks as a matter of right, which she became quite incapable of sustaining either by adequate power or by statesmanlike sagacity. The growth of Spartan power was a succession of encroachments upon Argos.[515]

How Sparta came constantly to gain upon Argos will be matter for future explanation: at present, it is sufficient to remark, that the ascendency of Argos was derived not exclusively from her own territory, but came in part from her position as metropolis of an alliance of autonomous neighboring cities, all Dorian and all colonized from herself,—and this was an element of power essentially fluctuating. What Thêbes was to the cities of Bœotia, of which she either was, or professed to have been, the founder,[516] the same was Argos in reference to Kleônæ, Phlius, Sikyôn, Epidaurus, Trœzên, and Ægina. These towns formed, in mythical language, “the lot of Têmenus,”[517]—in real matter of fact, the confederated allies or subordinates of Argos: the first four of them were said to have been Dorized by the sons or immediate relatives of Têmenus; and the kings of Argos, as acknowledged descendants of the latter, claimed and exercised a sort of suzeraineté over them. Hermionê, Asinê, and Nauplia seem also to have been under the supremacy of Argos, though not colonies.[518] But this supremacy was not claimed directly and nakedly: agreeably to the ideas of the time, the ostensible purposes of the Argeian confederacy or Amphiktyony were religious, though its secondary and not less real effects, were political. The great patron-god of the league was Apollo Pythaëus, in whose name the obligations incumbent on the members of the league were imposed. While in each of the confederated cities there was a temple to this god, his most holy and central sanctuary was on the Larissa or acropolis of Argos. At this central Argeian sanctuary, solemn sacrifices were offered by Epidaurus as well as by other members of the confederacy, and, as it should seem, accompanied by money-payments,[519]—which the Argeians, as chief administrators on behalf of the common god, took upon them to enforce against defaulters, and actually tried to enforce during the Peloponnesian war against Epidaurus. On another occasion, during the 66th Olympiad (B. C. 514), they imposed the large fine of 500 talents upon each of the two states Sikyôn and Ægina, for having lent ships to the Spartan king Kleomenes, wherewith he invaded the Argeian territory. The Æginetans set the claim at defiance, but the Sikyonians acknowledged its justice, and only demurred to its amount, professing themselves ready to pay 100 talents.[520] There can be no doubt that, at this later period, the ascendency of Argos over the members of her primitive confederacy had become practically inoperative; but the tenor of the cases mentioned shows that her claims were revivals of bygone privileges, which had once been effective and valuable.

How valuable the privileges of Argos were, before the great rise of the Spartan power,—how important an ascendency they conferred, in the hands of an energetic man, and how easily they admitted of being used in furtherance of ambitious views, is shown by the remarkable case of Pheidôn, the Temenid. The few facts which we learn respecting this prince exhibit to us, for the first time, something like a real position of parties in the Peloponnesus, wherein the actual conflict of living historical men and cities, comes out in tolerable distinctness.