Doric" dialect, a peculiar calendar and cycle
of festivals of which the Hyacinthia and Carneia were the chief, and
certain political and social institutions, such as the threefold "Dorian
tribes." The worships of Apollo and Heracles, though not confined to
Dorians, were widely regarded as in some sense "Dorian" in character.

But those common characters are not to be pressed too far. The northern
Doris, for example, spoke Aeolic, while Elis, Phocis, and many
non-Dorian districts of north-west Greece spoke dialects akin to Doric.
Many Dorian states had additional "non-Dorian tribes"; Sparta, which
claimed to be of pure and typical Dorian origin, maintained institutions
and a mode of life which were without parallel in Peloponnese, in the
Parnassian and in the Asiatic Doris, and were partially reflected in
Crete only.

Most non-Dorian Greeks, in fact, seem to have accepted much as Dorian
which was in fact only Spartan: this was particularly the case in the
political, ethical and aesthetic controversies of the 5th and 4th
centuries B.C. Much, however, which was common (in art, for example) to
Olympia, Argolis and Aegina, and might thus have been regarded as
Dorian, was conspicuously absent from the culture of Sparta.

_Traditional History._--In the diagrammatic family tree of the Greek
people, as it appears in the Hesiodic catalogue (6th century) and in
Hellanicus (5th century), the "sons of Hellen" are Dorus, Xuthus (father
of Ion and Achaeus) and Aeolus. Dorus' share of the inheritance of
Hellen lay in central Greece, north of the Corinthian Gulf, between
Xuthus in north Peloponnese and Aeolus in Thessaly. His descendants,
either under Dorus or under a later king Aegimius, occupied Histiaeotis,
a district of northern Thessaly, and afterwards conquered from the
Dryopes the head-waters of the Boeotian Cephissus between Mount
Parnassus and Mount Oeta. This became "Doris" _par excellence_. Services
rendered to Aegimius by Heracles led (1) to the adoption of Hyllus, son
of Heracles, by Aegimius, side by side with his own sons Dymas and
Pamphylus, and to a threefold grouping of the Dorian clans, as Hylleis,
Dymanes and Pamphyli; (2) to the association of the people of Aegimius
in the repeated attempts of Hyllus and his family to recover their lost
inheritance in Peloponnese (see HERACLIDAE). The last of these attempts
resulted in the "Dorian conquest" of the "Achaeans" and "Ionians" of
Peloponnese, and in the assignment of A