At the same time great changes were taking place on the remote west coast. The states north and south of the Alpheus with which Homer is acquainted, were overthrown and Ætolian families, who honoured Oxylus as their ancestor, founded new lordships on the territory of the Epeans and Pylæans. These foundations had no apparent connection with the marches of the Dorian armies, and it is only a legendary poem of later date which speaks of Oxylus as having stipulated for the western land as his share in reward for services rendered to the Dorians. This betrays that it was a subsequent invention, by the fact that the new settlements on the peninsula are represented in this and similar fables as a result of a great and carefully planned undertaking; a representation which stands in complete contradiction to the facts of history. And when it is further related that the Dorians were conducted by their crafty leader, not along the flat coast road but across country through Arcadia, so that they might not be roused to envy or tempted to break their compact altogether, by the sight of the tracts of land conceded to Oxylus; this is but a tale invented with the object of explaining the erection of a state in Elis independently of the Dorian immigration, and the grounds for it are to be sought in the circumstance that the whole west coast, from the straits by Rhium down to Navarino, is distinguished by easy tracts of level country, such as are scarcely found elsewhere in Greek territory.
The best cornland lies at the foot of the Erymanthus Mountains, a broad plain through which the Peneus flows and which is surrounded by vine-clad hills stretching towards the neighbouring groups of islands. At the spot where the Peneus issues from the Arcadian mountains and flows into the coast-plain there rises on the left bank a stately height which looks clear over land and island sea and on this account was called in the Middle Ages, Calascope, or Belvidere. This height was selected by the Ætolian immigrants as their chief citadel; it became the royal fortress of the Oxylidæ and their following, into whose hands fell the best estates.
From here the Ætolian state, under the territorial name of Elis spread southward over the whole low country, where on the banks of the Alpheus the Epeans and Pylæans had once fought out those petty feuds of which Nestor was so fond of telling. On the decay of that maritime kingdom of the Neleidæ which was attacked on the south by the Messenian Dorians and on the north by the Epeans, Ætolian tribes pressed forward from the interior of the island; these were the Minyans who being expelled from Taygetus took possession of the mountains which run farthest in the direction of the Sicilian Sea from Arcadia. Here they settled themselves in six fortified towns, united by a common worship of Poseidon; Macistus and Lapreus, were the most distinguished. Thus between the Alpheus and the Neda, in what was afterwards the so-called Triphylia, or “country of three tribes,” a new Minyan state was formed.
Finally the nucleus of a new state was also planted in the valley of the Alpheus, where scattered families of Achæans under Agorius of Helice allied themselves with Ætolian houses, and founded the state of Pisa.
[ca. 1000 B.C.]
Thus on the western coast, partly through conquest by the northern tribes and partly by arrivals from other parts of the peninsula, three new states arose, namely Elis, Pisa, and Triphylia; and in this way the whole coast district of the Peloponnesus was gradually newly populated and partitioned out afresh. Only in the district in the heart of the peninsula, did the country remain undisturbed in its existing state.
Arcadia was regarded by the ancients as a pre-eminently Pelasgian country, and here it was thought the autochthonic condition of the aboriginal inhabitants had been longest preserved and had suffered the least disturbance. Nevertheless the native legends themselves distinctly indicate that here also immigrations took place, interrupting the uniform condition of Pelasgian life, and occasioning a fusion of races, of different character and origin. Here too there is no mistaking the epoch at which, as in all other Greek states, the historical movement began.
After Pelasgus and his sons, Arcas, as ancestor of the Arcadians, stands at the beginning of a new era in the prehistoric life of the country. But Arcadians were to be found in Phrygia and Bithynia as well as in Crete and Cyprus, and the fact that colonists from the islands and shores of the eastern sea ascended into the highlands of the Peloponnesus that they might settle there in the beautiful valleys, is manifested by many tokens. The Cretan myths about Zeus are repeated in the closest manner of the Arcadian Lycæum; Tegea and Gortys are Cretan as well as Arcadian towns, with identical forms of worship, ancient legends connect Tegea and Paphos and the Cyprian dialect, which has only very recently been learnt from the native monuments, shows a great likeness to the Arcadian. Arcadians were known as navigators both in the western and in the eastern sea, and Nauplius, the hero of the oldest Peloponnesian seaport town appears as the servant of the Tegeatic kings, to whose house Argonauts like Ancæus also belong.
There are remains of old traditions, which show that even the interior of the Peloponnesus was not so remote or isolated as is commonly supposed; that here too there were immigrations and that in consequence in the rural districts, and particularly in the fruitful ravines of the eastern side, a series of towns grew up, which, on account of the natural barriers of their frontiers, early formed isolated city domains; such as those of Pheneus, Stynphalus, Orchomenus, Cleitor and afterwards the towns of Mantinea, Alea, Caphyæ, and Gortys. In the southwest portion of Arcadia, in the forest range of Lycæum, and in the valley of the Alpheus were also to be found ancient fortress towns, such as Lycosura; but these fortresses never became political centres of the districts. The mass of the people remained scattered and were only connected with the community by very slight bonds.
Thus the whole of Arcadia consisted of a numerous group of municipal and rural cantons. It was only the former which could attain historical importance, and among them especially Tegea, which lying as it did in the most fertile part of the great Arcadian plateau, must from the earliest times have assumed something of the position of a capital city. Thus it was a Tegeatic king, Echemus, the “steadfast,” who is said to have prevented the Dorians from entering the peninsula. Yet the Tegeatæ never succeeded in giving a unity to the whole island. Its natural conformation was too multi-form, too diversified, and too much cut up by high mountain ridges into numerous and sharply defined portions for it to be able to attain to a common territorial history. It was only certain forms of worship, with which customs and institutions were bound up, that were universal among the whole Arcadian people. These were, in the north country the worship of Artemis Hymnia, and in the south that of Zeus Lycæus, on the Lycæum, whose summit had been honoured as the holy mountain of Arcadia from primeval Pelasgian times.