ring 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 [Greek: trichaikes], 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, Ioni