Herodotus[804], in treating of the Peloponnesus, describes the Arcadians and Cynurians as αὐτόχθονες, who had never changed their habitation; four other races, including the Dorians, as ἐπήλυδες, and the Achæans as having migrated about the Peloponnesus, but never left it. He does not explicitly place the Achæans in either class; and this tradition does not throw much light on the origin of the Achæans, which would seem not to have been within his knowledge, but only deals with matter subsequent to their entry into Peloponnesus.
Pausanias[805], again, would seem rather to draw the Thessalian Achæans from Peloponnesus than vice versa. He tells us that, after the death of Xuthus, Achæus went with an army from Ægialus, and established himself in Thessaly. But with Homer before us, we may boldly say, that there was no such person as either the Xuthus or the Achæus of the later tradition, and that there were, on the other hand, Achæans in Thessaly long before the time assigned to this Achæus, namely, the epoch when the race took refuge in Ægialus. This tradition, then, is late and worthless, and, even if it directly contradicted that of Strabo, which it does not, could not be put in competition with it.
The tradition which made Phthiotis in Southern Thessaly the cradle of the Achæan race, where it first grew into conscious life, seems to have been an undying one.
Duration of the name in Thessaly.
Here again history comes in to our aid. Throughout the historic times of Greece, and down to the era of Polybius, there were Achæans of Phthiotis. When, 205 years before Christ, Quintius, the Roman general, examined into the origin of the Greek cities, and made a classification of them[806], the Achæans of Phthiotis were declared to be Thessalians: and he appears to use the name for all Phthians, since he calls Phaxidas[807] an Achæan, seemingly for no other reason than that he was an inhabitant of Melitea, a city of Phthiotis.
I take it then to be sufficiently proved, that Agamemnon and his house were the proper heads of the Achæan race, which rose with them. The proof is doubled by the fact that they fell with it: for in the post-Homeric literature, all of which follows the Dorian conquest, the Achæan name has ceased to be a living name for the nation of the Greeks.
And as the Pelopids were the leaders of the Achæans, so I now assume it to be sufficiently shown from Homer, that the Achæans were in his time at the head of all the Hellenic families and tribes; of the Dorians, the Æolids, the Cephallenes, and whatever others came from the same stock, and were in fact, for their age, the proper type of Hellenism itself.
That most remarkable supremacy of Agamemnon over the Greek nation, which is so strongly marked on the page of Homer, and to the force of which Thucydides ascribes the wonderful movement of the Trojan war, left behind it a tradition which it was thought worth while by the ruling race of Dorians to appropriate, even after the shipwreck of the old political system.
Orestes came to the throne of Agamemnon, and Tisamenus to that of Orestes. He was cast out by the Heraclids with the Dorians, and they made Sparta the chief seat of their power. Thus established in the primacy of Greece, they held it, under the name of Ἡγεμονία, contested sometimes, but only after the lapse of several ages, by Athens: never absolutely taken away, until it passed, as Polybius says, unexpectedly, into the hands of the Thebans, in the fourth century before the Christian era.
Tisamenus and his Achæans went into Ægialus, and gave it their own name. But the imperial Spartans found it for their interest to put in their claim to the old Agamemnonian title. So, as Pausanias[808] informs us, even down to his day, the Tomb of Tisamenus was shown in Sparta, and hard by it the Lycurgian feast of Pheiditia was kept; with a tradition that their fathers, admonished by an oracle, had fetched the remains of the last Pelopid sovereign from Helice in Achæa. On the other hand, the Achæans, who in the time of Polybius[809] had not yet ceased to keep the image of their legendary ancestor Achæus, and whose claim to that image was recognised by the Roman general, likewise cherished a tradition that the family of Tisamenus had been continued, and had reigned among them down to the time of Ogygus[810], when their League was formed upon the basis of democratic institutions.