The migration of the Eleans is a similar case. Elis is an old district name, consequently no Eleans can ever have existed outside of Elis. But Homer mentions the Epeans as being inhabitants of the country; consequently it was stated that the Eleans did not enter the Peloponnesus until after the Trojan War, and that they came from Ætolia, where Oxylus, the mythical ancestor of the Elean royal house, was also worshipped as a hero. According to an opposite version Ætolia was settled by emigrants from Elis; and these two views were then combined, and the Eleans were made first to move to Ætolia and then, after ten generations, to move back again. As a matter of fact the Homeric Epeans are nothing else than the inhabitants of Epea in Triphylia, whose name was extended to include the inhabitants of the surrounding districts, like the name of the neighbouring Pylians, since the knowledge of the Ionic rhapsodists concerning the western part of the Peloponnesus is very scanty.
Further, since Homer knows of no Dorians in the Peloponnesus, it was clear that the peoples inhabiting Argolis and Laconia in historic times could have come in only after the Trojan War; it remained only to discover from whence. This was not difficult; there was in the middle part of Greece, between Œta and Parnassus, a small mountainous district whose inhabitants were called Dorians, quite like the Grecian colonists on the Carian coast. This is not at all remarkable, since in a widely extended linguistic territory the same local names must necessarily recur in different places, as may be seen from any topographical dictionary. Such homonyms by no means prove an especially close relationship between the inhabitants of such localities; in the formation of Greek racial tradition, however, they have played an important part.
The home of the Dorians was in this way established. People now wanted to know the reason which had led them to seek new abodes so far away. In close connection with this was the question as to how the descendants of Hercules had come to reign over Argos, Sparta, and Messene. The answer was given by the tradition of the return of the Heraclidæ. Hercules, it was related, had belonged to the royal family of Argos, but had been robbed of his rights to the throne and had died in exile; his sons, or grandsons as was stated later for chronological reasons, had made good their rights with the aid of the Dorians and had also established the claims which Hercules had to dominion over Laconia and Messenia. The regained lands were divided under the three brothers Temenus, Cresphontes, and Aristodemus, or between the twin sons of the latter, Procles and Eurysthenes. This was a tradition which could be put to admirable political use. Supported by this title, Argos could claim the hegemony over the whole of Argolis; Sparta could justify the subjection of the small cities of Laconia and Messenia. That was why this tradition, once come into existence, was quickly circulated and officially recognised.
But the mention of Messenia shows that we are here dealing with a comparatively recent stage in the growth of tradition, since this region could not be claimed as a heritage by the Heraclidæ until after the Spartan conquest between the eighth and seventh centuries.
Also the eponymi of the Spartan royal dynasties of Agis and Eurypon have no place in the tradition of the Doric migrations; a sure sign that they were first connected with Hercules artificially. And Temenus, from whom the Argive kings traced their descent, was, according to the Arcadian myth,—no doubt taken from Argos,—the son of Pelasgus, of Phegeus, or of the Argolian hero Phoroneus. It was also related that Temenus had been brought up by Hera—the goddess of the Argolian land. He was thus an old Argive hero who originally had nothing whatever to do with Hercules. Just as little was known about the Doric migration on the island of Cos at the time when the genealogy of its ruling dynasty was written, since the latter is not traced back to Temenus, but directly to Hercules through his son Thessalus. And anyway Hercules, as we have seen, is not a “Doric” divinity at all, but a Bœotian, whose cult was extended to the neighbouring countries of Bœotia, only after the colonisation of Asia Minor. The tradition concerning the return of the Heraclidæ is thus seen to have come into existence long after the immigration of the Dorians into the Peloponnesus, with which it is inseparably connected. This tradition is first mentioned by Tyrtæus towards the end of the seventh century and in the epic poem Ægimios, ascribed to Hesiod, which may have been written at the same time, or a little later. That was the period when the Homeric poems became popular in European Greece; both Tyrtæus and Hesiod are wholly under their influence. Moreover it is clear that an immigration of Dorians from middle Greece into the Peloponnesus could be talked of only after the Doric name had been carried from the colonies of Asia Minor to the west coast of the Ægean Sea, which did not happen until post-Homeric times. In the same way the legend of the Thessalian migration could have grown up only after the inhabitants of the Peneus river basin had become conscious of their racial unity and had begun to designate themselves by the common name of Thessalians. This must have taken place early in the eighth or seventh centuries, since, as has already been stated, Homer is not as yet acquainted with this name, whereas the latest part of the Iliad, the catalogue of ships, mentions the eponymic hero of the people. Finally, the dependence of all these legendary migrations upon the epic poems is shown by the fact that they are connected only with regions which in Homer had a different population than in historic times. The Arcadians and Athenians, on the other hand, who already in Homer are found in the same districts they occupied in later times, considered themselves autochthonous. Thus we see that Homer had not only given the Greeks their gods, as Herodotus says, but their ancient history also. We, however, do not need to be told that traditions which did not grow up until the eighth or seventh century are entirely worthless as helping to an understanding of conditions in Greece at a time preceding the colonisation of Asia Minor.
After all this the question as to the internal evidence of the truth of these traditions is really superfluous. Even a well-invented myth is yet by no means history. Here, however, we are asked to believe the most improbable things. The Doris on the Œta is a wild mountain valley, measuring scarcely two hundred square kilometers in area, which could not have contained more than a few thousand inhabitants, since farming and grazing formed their sole means of support. In Homer’s time the eastern Locrians were still so lightly armed that they were wholly unfitted for fighting with the hoplites at close range; the Dorians who lived farther inland than these Locrians cannot have been much further advanced several centuries earlier. And a few hundreds or even thousands of such poorly armed soldiers are to have conquered the old highly civilised districts of the Peloponnesus with their numerous strongholds, and the superior armour of their inhabitants? The very idea is an absurdity. No more can we understand why the Dorians should have migrated precisely to Argolis, and Laconia, and even to Messenia—places situated so far from their home. The legend does indeed give a satisfactory answer to this question, but anyone who cannot recognise Hercules, with his sons and grandsons, as historical characters, is obliged to find some other motive for the migration of the Dorians.
In other respects, also, there is absolutely no proof to support the supposition of a migration of peoples upon the Grecian peninsula. The “Mycenæan” civilisation was not, as has been supposed, suddenly destroyed by an incursion of uncivilised tribes, but was gradually merged into the civilisation of the classic period. Even Attica, in connection with which there is no tradition of a migration, had its period of Mycenæan culture. The so-called “Doric” institutions are limited to Crete and Laconia, and in the latter country they are not older than the Spartan conquest in the eighth century; hence they have nothing whatever to do with the Doric migration. In the same way the serfdom of the Thessalian peasants may very well have been the result of an economic development, like the colonia during the Roman empire or serfdom in Germany after the end of the Middle Ages. Also the differentiation of the Grecian dialects came about, as we saw, after the colonisation of Asia Minor, and hence should not be traced back to the migrations which took place within the Grecian peninsula at some time preceding this period. And, in any case, after the Dorians settled in the Peloponnesus they must have adopted the dialect of the original inhabitants of the country, who were so far superior to them in numbers and civilisation; just as no one doubts that the Thessalians did the same after their immigration into the Peneus river basin. A “religion of the Doric race,” however, exists only in the imagination of modern scholars; Hercules himself, the ancestral god of the Dorians, is of Bœotian origin. Finally, it is extremely doubtful if the Argives and Laconians were any more closely related to each other than to the other Grecian tribes—the so-called Doric Phyleans, at least, have until now been traced only in Argolis and in the Argolian colonies. But even if a closer relationship did exist between the two neighbouring tribes, it would by no means necessarily follow that the Argo-Laconian people first immigrated into the Peloponnesus at a time when the eastern part of the peninsula had already reached a comparatively high grade of civilisation. There is indeed no question but that the Peloponnesus got its Hellenic population from the north, that is directly from middle Greece; and it is very probable that, even after the Peloponnesus was already in the possession of the Greeks, tribal displacements still took place in Greece. But they occurred in so remote a period that they have left no distinguishable trace, even in tradition. If the Greeks of Asia Minor remembered only the bare fact of their immigration, how could a tradition have been maintained of tribal wanderings which took place long before this colonisation? It is an idle task to try to discover the direction of these migrations or the more particular circumstances under which they took place.
Hence it is a picture of the imagination which, since Herodotus,
e has been accepted as primitive Grecian history. But the problem which gave rise to the traditions of mythical migrations still remains for us to solve—the question as to why the epics present us with a different picture of the distribution of Grecian tribes, from that found in historic times. The answer to-day will naturally be different from the one given two thousand years ago.
The epic poem designates Agamemnon’s followers, and indeed all the Greeks before Troy, as Argives, Achæans, or Danaans—terms which are used wholly synonymously even in the oldest parts of the Iliad. Now we know that not only in Homeric times, but already centuries earlier, before the colonisation of Crete and Asia Minor, Argolis was inhabited by the same people that we find there in historic times. It would not of itself be impossible to suppose that this people, who afterwards had no common tribal name, should have called themselves Achæans or Danaans, in prehistoric times, although it would be difficult to understand how this tribal name could have been lost. But as a matter of fact a tribe called Danaan never did exist. Danaus is an old Argive hero who is said to have transformed the waterless Argos into a well-watered country; his daughters, the Danaides, are water nymphs; Danæ also, the mother of the solar hero Perseus, and herself a goddess, cannot be separated from Danaus. The Danaans, accordingly, are the “people of Danaus”; they belong like him to tradition, and have been transposed from heaven to earth like the Cadmeans and Minyæ to whom we shall return later on. The name Achæan, however, was applied in historic times to the inhabitants of the northern coast of the Peloponnesus and of the south of Thessaly, and it is hardly probable that it should have been more widely spread in historic times. Agamemnon seems rather, according to the oldest tradition, to have been a Thessalian prince, like Achilles, who continued to be regarded as such. At the time, however, when the epic was being formed in Ionia, the Peloponnesian Argos outshone all other parts of the Grecian peninsula, and the poets in consequence were obliged to transpose the governmental seat of the powerful ruler from Thessaly to the Peloponnesus. His Achæans of course migrated with him.