Use of the Danaan and Argeian names poetical.
It is thus more than probable that the scope of the name Danai, (if we are to assume that it was then a name in actual use,) under the Danaids, and of the name Ἀργεῖοι under the Perseids, was local, and confined in the main to Eastern Peloponnesus, where those princes ruled; with the addition of any other parts of the country, over which they might for the time have extended their power. And if so, then we have to suppose that Homer, having received the traditions of the Danaan and Argeian princes as having been at the head in their own time of Greek history or legend, gave to the nation by way of a poetical name, but of a poetical name only, the appellation which their subjects respectively had borne, and which had never before been, and never became by any other title than his poetical authority, applicable to all the Greeks.
The Achæan name, on the other hand, differs from these, first, in denoting the extension of a particular race, though not over the whole country, yet through very many of its parts, and secondly, in the fact that the ruling house of those who bore the name enjoyed a real political supremacy over both the continent and the islands. So that it became the most legitimate exponent of Greek nationality, until it had lost both its extension and its power; the one by compression of its principal tribes into a narrow space: the other by the transfer of its political prerogatives to the great Dorian family of the Spartan kings, after the conquest of the Heraclidæ.
When the Achæans had ceased to predominate, there could be no reason why their name should remain stamped upon their brethren, who boasted of the same descent, and who had attained to greater force.
As in the Homeric times, while the Achæans were the leaders of Greece, they might claim to represent the whole Hellenic stock, so, when the Dorians had dethroned them and occupied the seat of power, when the Æolian name was widely diffused, and, again, when Athens with its mixed race became great, and claimed, along with its vaunts of antiquity and continuity, to pass over, as Herodotus says, to the Hellenic class, but without an Achæan descent, then the Achæan name could no longer adequately represent the title to nationality, and the various races naturally fell back on the designation which gave no exclusive right or preeminence to any of them, and which they were all entitled to enjoy in common. They apparently however chose to be connected with the rich plains of Thessaly, where they first learned civilization, and organized their collective or national life, rather than with the rude and coarse manners of their more remote ancestors in the hills. They were therefore not Helli, but Hellenes.
This may be considered as the rationale of the common and palpably manufactured tradition respecting Hellen and his family, of which we have the earliest form in Hesiod.
Summary of the Evidence.
Our conclusions respecting the names by which Homer describes the inhabitants of Greece may now be summed up as follows:
1. We set out from the point at which Greece is, probably for the first time, settled by a race given to tillage and pacific habits, under the general name of Pelasgians, with subdivision under minor names of particular tribes, or partially and locally intermixed with fragments of other races.
2. A dynasty of foreign origin, in a portion of Greece which then became, and ever after continued to be most famous, leads the march of events; and, apparently without displacing the Pelasgians themselves, yet seems to have displaced, in a certain quarter, the Pelasgic by the Danaan name; at any rate, it attains to such celebrity, that its history, in the eye of Homer, fills the whole breadth of its own epoch, and its name stands in after time, poetically at least, for a national title.