The Homeric Dorians of Crete were also interpreted by Andron and others (3rd century) as an advance-guard of this sea-borne migration, and as having separated from the other Dorians while still in Histiaeotis. The 5th-century tradition that the Heracleid kings of Macedon were Temenid exiles from Argos may belong to the same cycle.
The fate of the Dorian invaders was represented as differing locally. In Messenia (according to a legend dramatized by Euripides in the 5th century, and renovated for political ends in the 4th century) the descendants of Cresphontes quarrelled among themselves and were exterminated by the natives. In Laconia Aristodemus (or his twin sons) effected a rigid military occupation which eventually embraced the whole district, and permitted (a) the colonization of Melos, Thera and parts of Crete (before 800 b.c.), (b) the reconquest and annexation of Messenia (about 750 b.c.), (c) a settlement of half-breed Spartans at Tarentum in south Italy, 700 b.c. In Argos and other cities of Argolis the descendants of the Achaean chiefs were taken into political partnership, but a tradition of race-feud lasted till historic times. Corinth, Sicyon and Megara, with similar political compromises, mark the limits of Dorian conquest; a Dorian invasion of Attica (c. 1066 b.c.) was checked by the self-sacrifice of King Codrus: “Either Athens must perish or her king.” Aegina was reckoned a colony of Epidaurus. Rhodes, and some Cretan towns, traced descent from Argos; Cnidus from Argos and Sparta; the rest of Asiatic Doris from Epidaurus or Troezen in Argolis. The colonies of Corinth, Sicyon and Megara, and the Sicilian offshoots of the Asiatic Dorians, belong to historic times (8th-6th centuries).
Criticism of the Traditional History.—The following are the problems:—(1) Was there a Dorian invasion as described in the legends; and, if not, how did the tradition arise? (2) Who were the Dorian invaders, and in what relation did they stand to the rest of the population of Greece? (3) How far do the Dorian states, or their characteristics, represent the descendants, or the culture, of the original invaders?
The Homeric poems (12th-10th centuries) know of Dorians only in Crete, with the obscure epithet τριχάϊκες, and no hint of their origin. All those parts of Peloponnese and the islands which in historic times were “Dorian” are ruled by recently established dynasties of “Achaean” chiefs; the home of the Asiatic Dorians is simply “Caria”; and the geographical “catalogue” in Iliad ii. ignores the northern Doris altogether.
The almost total absence from Homer not only of “Dorians” but of “Ionians” and even of “Hellenes” leads to the conclusion that the diagrammatic genealogy of the “sons of Hellen” is of post-Homeric date; and that it originated as an attempt to classify the Doric, Ionic and Aeolic groups of Hellenic settlements on the west coast of Asia Minor, for here alone do the three names correspond to territorial, linguistic and political divisions. The addition of an “Achaean” group, and the inclusion of this and the Ionic group under a single generic name, would naturally follow the recognition of the real kinship of the “Achaean” colonies of Magna Graecia with those of Ionia. But the attempt to interpret, in terms of this Asiatic diagram, the actual distribution of dialects and peoples in European Greece, led to difficulties. Here, in the 8th-6th centuries, all the Dorian states were in the hands of exclusive aristocracies, which presented a marked contrast to the subject populations. Since the kinship of the latter with the members of adjacent non-Dorian states was admitted, two different explanations seem to have been made, (1) on behalf of the non-Dorian populations, either that the Dorians were no true sons of Hellen, but were of some other northerly ancestry; or that they were merely Achaean exiles; and in either case that their historic predominance resulted from an act of violence, ill-disguised by their association with the ancient claims of the Peloponnesian Heraclidae; (2) on behalf of the Dorian aristocracies, that they were in some special sense “sons of Hellen,” if not the only genuine Hellenes; the rest of the European Greeks, and in particular the anti-Dorian Athenians (with their marked likeness to Ionians), being regarded as Hellenized barbarians of “Pelasgian” origin (see [Pelasgians]). This process of Hellenization, or at least its final stage, was further regarded as intimately connected with a movement of peoples which had brought the “Dorians” from the northern highlands into those parts of Greece which they occupied in historic times.
So long as the Homeric poems were believed to represent Hellenic (and mainly Ionian) beliefs of the 9th century or later, the historical value of the traditions of a Dorian invasion was repeatedly questioned; most recently and thoroughly by J. Beloch (Gr. Geschichte, i., Strassburg, 1893), as being simply an attempt to reconcile the political geography of Homer (i.e. of 8th-century Ionians describing 12th-century events) with that of historic Greece, by explaining discrepancies (due to Homeric ignorance) as the result of “migrations” in the interval. Such legends often arise to connect towns bearing identical or similar names (such as are common in Greece) and to justify political events or ambitions by legendary precedents; and this certainly happened during the successive political rivalries of Dorian Sparta with non-Dorian Athens and Thebes. But in proportion as an earlier date has become more probable for Homer, the hypothesis of Ionic origin has become less tenable, and the belief better founded (1) that the poems represent accurately a well-defined phase of culture in prehistoric Greece, and (2) that this “Homeric” or “Achaean” phase was closed by some such general catastrophe as is presumed by the legends.
The legend of a Dorian invasion appears first in Tyrtaeus, a 7th-century poet, in the service of Sparta, who brings the Spartan Heracleids to Peloponnese from Erineon in the northern Doris; and the lost Epic of Aegimius, of about the same date, seems to have presupposed the same story. In the 5th century Pindar ascribes to Aegimius the institutions of the Peloponnesian Dorians, and describes them as the “Dorian folk of Hyllus and Aegimius,” and as “originating from Pindus” (Pyth. v. 75: cf. Fr. 4). Herodotus, also in the 5th century, describes them as the typical (perhaps in contrast to Athenians as the only genuine) Hellenes, and traces their numerous wanderings from (1) an original home “in Deucalion’s time” in Phthiotis (the Homeric “Hellas”) in south Thessaly, to (2) Histiaeotis “below Ossa and Olympus” in north-east Thessaly (note that the historic Histiaeotis is “below Pindus” in north-west Thessaly): this was “in the days of Dorus,” i.e. it is at this stage that the Dorians are regarded as becoming specifically distinct from the generic “Hellene”: thence (3) to a residence “in Pindus,” where they passed as a “Macedonian people.” Hence (4) they moved south to the Parnassian Doris, which had been held by Dryopes: and hence finally (5) to Peloponnese. Elsewhere he assigns the expulsion of the Dryopes to Heracles in co-operation not with Dorians but with Malians. Here clearly two traditions are combined:—one, in which the Dorians originated from Hellas in south Thessaly, and so are “children of Hellen”; another, in which they were a “Macedonian people” intruded from the north, from Pindus, past Histiaeotis to Doris and beyond. It is a noteworthy coincidence that in Macedonia also the royal family claimed Heracleid descent; and that “Pindus” is the name both of the mountains above Histiaeotis and of a stream in Doris. It is noteworthy also that later writers (e.g. Andron in Strabo 475) derived the Cretan Dorians of Homer from those of Histiaeotis, and that other legends connected Cretan peoples and places with certain districts of Macedon.
Thucydides agrees in regarding the Parnassian Doris as the “mother-state” of the Dorians (i. 107) and dates the invasion (as above) eighty years after the Trojan War; this agrees approximately with the pedigree of the kings of Sparta, as given by Herodotus, and with that of Hecataeus of Miletus (considered as evidence for the foundation date of an Ionian refugee-colony). Thucydides also accepts the story of Heracleid leadership.
The legend of an organized apportionment of Peloponnese amongst the Heracleid leaders appears first in the 5th-century tragedians,—not earlier, that is, than the rise of the Peloponnesian League,—and was amplified in the 4th century; the Aetolians’ aid, and claim to Elis, appear first in Ephorus. The numerous details and variant legends preserved by later writers, particularly Strabo and Pausanias, may go back to early sources (e.g. Herodotus distinguished the “local” from the “poetic” versions of events in early Spartan history); but much seems to be referable to Ephorus and the 4th-century political and rhetorical historians:—e.g. the enlarged version of the Heracleid claims in Isocrates (Archidamus, 120) and the theory that the Dorians were mere disowned Achaeans (Plato, Laws, 3). Moreover, many independent considerations suggest that in its main outlines the Dorian invasion is historical.
The Doric Dialects.—These dialects have strongly marked features in common (future in -σεω -σιω -σῶ; 1st pers. plur. in -μες; κά for ἄν; -αε -αη = ῆ), but differ more among themselves than do the Ionic. Laconia with its colonies (including those in south Italy) form a clear group, in which -ε and -ο lengthen to -η and -ω as in Aeolic. Corinth (with its Sicilian colonies), the Argolid towns, and the Asiatic Doris, form another group, in which -ε and -ο become -ει and -ου as in Ionic. Connected with the latter (e.g. by -ει and -ου) are the “northern” group:—Phocis, including Delphi, with Aetolia, Acarnania, Epirus and Phthiotis in south Thessaly. But these have also some forms in common with the “Aeolic” dialect of Boeotia and Thessaly, which in historic times was spoken also in Doris; Locris and Elis present similar northern “Achaean-Doric” dialects. Arcadia, on the other hand, in the heart of Peloponnese, retained till a late date a quite different dialect, akin to the ancient dialect of Cyprus, and more remotely to Aeolic. This distribution makes it clear (1) that the Doric dialects of Peloponnese represent a superstratum, more recent than the speech of Arcadia; (2) that Laconia and its colonies preserve features alike, -η and -ω which are common to southern Doric and Aeolic; (3) that those parts of “Dorian” Greece in which tradition makes the pre-Dorian population “Ionic,” and in which the political structure shows that the conquered were less completely subjugated, exhibit the Ionic -ει and -ου; (4) that as we go north, similar though more barbaric dialects extend far up the western side of central-northern Greece, and survive also locally in the highlands of south Thessaly; (5) that east of the watershed Aeolic has prevailed over the area which has legends of a Boeotian and Thessalian migration, and replaces Doric in the northern Doris. All this points on the one hand to an intrusion of Doric dialect into an Arcadian-and-Ionic-speaking area; on the other hand to a subsequent expansion of Aeolic over the north-eastern edge of an area which once was Dorian. But this distribution does not by itself prove that Doric speech was the language of the Dorian invaders. Its area coincides also approximately with that of the previous Achaean conquests; and if the Dorians were as backward culturally as traditions and archaeology suggest, it is not improbable that they soon adopted the language of the conquered, as the Norman conquerors did in England. As evidence of an intrusion of northerly folk, however, the distribution of dialects remains important. See [Greek Language].