Prometheus and Pandora had Deucalion.
Deucalion and Pyrrha had Hellen.
Hellen had Dorus, Xuthus, and Æolus.
Xuthus had Achæus and Ion.]
Now the passage of Hesiod only mentions the three brothers, Dorus, Xuthus, and Æolus, without naming the sons of Xuthus; but it is evident that in this series Xuthus must also represent some race or races; and since no tribe ever bore the title of Xuthi, this name must have been used by Hesiod to signify the Ionians and Achaæns, as in Apollodorus, and other writers.[2140] According to another tradition, perhaps of equal antiquity, Zeus, the father of gods and men, was, instead of Deucalion, the husband of Pyrrha.[2141]
It is evident that the above genealogy was intended to represent the chief races of the Hellenes, or Greeks, as belonging to one nation; and consequently could not have been made before the name Hellenes was applied to the whole nation; which in the Iliad[2142] is only the name of a small tribe in Phthia.[2143] The more extended use of the name falls in the period of the poems which went under the name of Hesiod:[2144] it is first thus used in the “Works and [pg 491] Days” of the real Hesiod,[2145] before which time, therefore, the above genealogy cannot have been formed. But that the author of it did not make an arbitrary fiction is evident from the circumstance that he put Xuthus instead of Achæus and Ion; by which he greatly deranged the symmetry of his genealogy. It is clear that he thought himself bound to respect the tradition, that Achæus and Ion were the sons of Xuthus; which prevented him from making Hellen their father. As yet, therefore, the other brothers were not recognised in tradition as having any fathers; and some obscure legends, such as that of Dorus, the son of Apollo,[2146] had not obtained a general belief. There can be no doubt that Hellen was recognised in the most ancient tradition. Now in the fictions of mythology the invention was bound by a sort of fanciful regularity; and in a fabulous genealogy the part was deduced from the whole, the species from the genus, as an inferior and subordinate being: thus in the Theogony the hills are the children of the earth, and the sun and the moon of light.[2147] Accordingly the poet (or whoever was his authority) sang of Æolus, Dorus, and Xuthus, the progenitors of nations, being the sons of Hellen, the son of Zeus, or grandson of Prometheus. It is possible that before this entire genealogy others had been invented, e.g., that Dorus was a son of Hellen; since, as early as the time of Lycurgus, the Spartans were commanded by the Pythian oracle to worship Zeus Hellanius and Athene Hellania;[2148] and since both the judges in the Spartan army[2149] and the judges of the Olympic games were called Hellanodicæ. And when I consider the celebrated oracle just quoted, and the close connexion of Sparta and Olympia with Delphi, the sacred families of the Delphians (the ὅσιοι), who referred their origin to Deucalion,[2150] and on [pg 492] the other hand remember that a Bœotian poem, composed in the neighbourhood of the Pythian oracle, first uses the word “Hellenes” in this extended sense; I cannot help conjecturing that this national sanctuary of the Hellenic name had a large share in the formation of that really beautiful legend; by which all the different races of Greece, separated for so many centuries by violent and unceasing contention, were united into the peaceable fellowship of brotherly affection and concord.
Appendix III. The migration of the Dorians to Crete.
Cnosus,[2151] the Minoian Cnosus, was, even so late as the time of Plato, the first city in Crete, and the chief domicile of the Cretan laws and customs: and Plato, in his Treatise on Laws, takes a Cnosian as the representative and defender of the Cretan laws in general;[2152] although Cnosus about his time had declined from internal corruption, and the fame of having preserved the good laws of ancient Crete soon passed from her to Gortyna and Lyctus.[2153] In earlier times, however, the Cretan laws (Κρητικοὶ νόμοι), which Archilochus even mentions as being of a distinct character,[2154] were preserved in the greatest purity at Cnosus. Now when modern writers admit indeed that the Cretan laws were founded upon the customs of the Doric race, but affirm that this race did not penetrate into Crete before the expedition of the Heraclidæ, and that migrations subsequently took place from Peloponnesus; it is necessary for them first of all to show that Cnosus received its Doric inhabitants from that country, that is, probably either from Argos or Sparta. But had such been the case, the memory of these migrations would assuredly never have been lost: Argos and Sparta would have been too proud to possess such a colony. Cnosus must therefore have received its Doric inhabitants at an earlier date, in the dark ages of mythology; and the subsequent colonies from Peloponnesus to Lyctus, Gortyna, and other places, helped to increase the Doric population, which in Homer's time[2155] was confined to a part of the island, over the whole of Crete; as was the case in [pg 494] late ages. And at the time which Homer describes, not only the language, but the customs and laws were probably also different; whereas Archilochus appears to mention the Cretan laws as prevalent over the whole island. Upon the whole, the Dorians in Crete—and this is a fact of great importance—never seem to stand, with regard to the Dorians of Peloponnesus, in the relation of a colony to its mother country. In Greece, the parent state—so great was the pride of higher antiquity—never condescended to take the institutions of a colony as models for its own, as was the case with Sparta and Crete; nor did the mother country ever procure priests from its colony, as was the case when the Pythian Apollo sent Cretan priests to Sparta.[2156] In short, everything seems to prove that the Doric institutions were of great antiquity in Crete, and that the distinction which has lately been taken between the laws of Minos and the Doric institutions and customs of Crete—a distinction directly opposed to the unanimous testimony of antiquity—is false and untenable.