rgolis, Laconia and Messenia to
the Heracleid leaders, Temenus, Aristodemus and Cresphontes
respectively; of Elis to their Aetolian allies; and of the north coast
to the remnants of the conquered Achaeans. The conquest of Corinth and
Megara was placed a generation later: Arcadia alone claimed to have
escaped invasion. This conquest was dated relatively by Thucydides (i.
12) at eighty years after the Trojan War and twenty years after the
conquest of Thessaly and Boeotia by the similar "invaders from Arne";
absolutely by Hellanicus and his school (5th century) at 1149 B.C.; by
Isocrates and Ephorus (4th century B.C.) at about 1070 B.C.; and by
Sosibius, Eratosthenes (3rd century), and later writers generally, at
the generations from 1125 to 1100 B.C.

The invasion was commonly believed to have proceeded by way of Aetolia
and Elis, and the name Naupactus was interpreted as an allusion to the
needful "shipbuilding" on the Corinthian Gulf. One legend made Dorus
himself originally an Aetolian prince; the participation of Oxylus, and
the Aetolian claim to Elis, appear first in Ephorus (4th century). The
conquest of Laconia at least is represented in 5th-century tradition as
immediate and complete, though one legend admits the previous death of
the Heracleid leader Aristodemus, and another describes a protracted
struggle in the case of Corinth. Pausanias, however (following
Sosibius), interprets a long series of conflicts in Arcadia as stages in
a gradual advance southward, ending with the conquest of Amyclae by King
Teleclus (c. 800 B.C.) and of Helos by King Alcamenes (c. 770 B.C.).

Of the invasion of Argolis a quite different version was already current
in the 4th century. This represents the Argive Dorians as having come by
sea (apparently from the Maliac Gulf, the nearest seashore to Parnassian
Doris), accompanied by survivors of the Dryopes (former inhabitants of
that Doris), whose traces in south Euboea (Styra and Carystus), in
Cythnus, and at Eion (Halieis), Hermione and Asine in Argolis, were held
to indicate their probable route.

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 diffe