About the year 1493 B. C., Cadmus, a Phœnician, founded the city of Thebes in Bœotia; and among other useful things which he communicated to the Greeks, he is said to have taught them alphabetical writing, although it is certain that that art did not come into common use in Greece until several centuries after this period.
The city of Corinth, situated on the narrow isthmus which connects the Peloponnesus with the mainland of Greece, was founded in the year 1520 B. C., and from its very advantageous position on the arm of the sea to which it anciently gave its name, but which is now known as the Gulf of Lepanto, it very soon became a place of considerable commercial importance. Sparta or Lacedæmon, the celebrated capital of Laconia in the Peloponnesus, is said to have been founded about 1520 B. C. by Lelex, an Egyptian.
In the year 1485 B. C., an Egyptian named Danaus, accompanied by a party of his countrymen, arrived at Argos, the inhabitants of which must have been at that period in an exceedingly rude state, since it is said that he excited their gratitude so much by teaching them to dig wells, when the streams from which they were supplied with water were dried up with the heat, that they elected him as their king.
Fully more than a century after this period (about 1350 B. C.), Pelops, the son of a king of Phrygia, a country in Asia Minor, settled in that part of Greece which was afterwards called from him Peloponnesus, or the island of Pelops, where he married the daughter of one of the native princes, whom he afterwards succeeded on the throne. In the course of his long reign, he found means to strengthen and greatly extend his influence in Greece, by forming matrimonial alliances between various branches of his own house and the other royal families of the Peloponnesus. Agamemnon, king of Mycenæ, in Argolis, who was, according to the poet Homer, the commander-in-chief of the Greeks at the siege of Troy, and Menelaus, king of Sparta, on account of whose wrongs that war was undertaken, were descended from this Phrygian adventurer.
Hercules, a Theban prince, was another of the descendants of Pelops.
The numerous and extraordinary feats of strength and valor of Hercules excited the admiration of his cotemporaries, and being afterwards exaggerated and embellished by the poets, caused him at length to be regarded as a person endowed with supernatural powers, and even to be worshiped as a god.
Theseus succeeded his father on the Athenian throne (1234 B. C.), and by his wise regulations greatly consolidated the strength and increased the prosperity of his kingdom. Cecrops, the founder of Athens, had divided Attica into twelve districts, each of which possessed its own magistracy and judicial tribunals. As the country advanced in wealth and population, these districts became less closely connected with each other, and at the period of the accession of Theseus, they could hardly be regarded in any other light than as so many little independent communities, whose perpetual disputes kept the whole district in broils and confusion. But Theseus had influence enough with all parties to obtain their consent to the abolition of the separate jurisdictions, and to the fixing of all civil and judicial authority in the capital. He at the same time voluntarily resigned into their hands a portion of his own power. Having divided the people into three classes—the nobles, the artisans, and the cultivators of the soil—he intrusted the first of these with the administration of public affairs, and the dispensation of justice, while he conferred upon every freeman or citizen, without distinction of class, a vote in the legislative assemblies. The command of the army, and the presidency of the state, he retained in his own person.
To strengthen the political union of the various districts of his kingdom by the tie of a common religion, he instituted a solemn festival, to be celebrated annually at Athens by all the inhabitants of Attica, in honor of Minerva, the tutelary deity of the city. This festival he denominated Panathenæ, or the Feast of all the Athenians, the name by which the whole of the people of Attica were thenceforth called.
The wise and liberal policy of Theseus caused Attica to advance considerably beyond the other states of Greece in prosperity and civilization; and the ancient historian, Thucydides, informs us that the Athenians were the first of the Greeks who laid aside the military dress and arms, which till now had been constantly worn. The example of Athens was not lost on the other Grecian communities, all of which gradually adopted, to a greater or less extent, those political institutions which had conferred so many advantages upon Attica.
Notwithstanding the judicious and exemplary conduct of Theseus in the early part of the reign, he appears to have afterwards allowed his restless and adventurous disposition to hurry him into many extravagances, and even crimes, by which he forfeited the respect of his people, and brought disgrace and suffering on his latter years. If we may believe the traditionary accounts, he accompanied Hercules in some of his celebrated expeditions, and assisted by Pirithoüs, a king of Thessaly, engaged in many martial and predatory adventures, conformably rather with the very imperfect morality and rude manners of the age, than with his own previous character. There reigned in Lacedæmon at this period a king named Tyndarus, who had a beautiful daughter called Helen, and according to the ancient historians, Theseus and his friend Pirithous formed the design of stealing away this young lady, and a princess of Epirus named Proserpine. They succeeded in carrying off Helen; but in their attempt to obtain Proserpine, they fell into the hands of her father, by whom Pirithoüs was put to death, and Theseus thrown into prison. Meanwhile, Castor and Pollux, the twin-brothers of Helen, who were afterwards deified, and whose names have been bestowed upon one of the signs of the Zodiac (Gemini), rescued their sister from the men to whom Theseus had given her in charge, and ravaged Attica in revenge for the injury they had received from its king.