c and
Aeolic groups of Hellenic settlements on the west coast of Asia Minor,
for here alone do the three names correspond to territorial, linguistic
and political divisions. The addition of an "Achaean" group, and the
inclusion of this and the Ionic group under a single generic name, would
naturally follow the recognition of the real kinship of the "Achaean"
colonies of Magna Graecia with those of Ionia. But the attempt to
interpret, in terms of this Asiatic diagram, the actual distribution of
dialects and peoples in European Greece, led to difficulties. Here, in
the 8th-6th centuries, all the Dorian states were in the hands of
exclusive aristocracies, which presented a marked contrast to the
subject populations. Since the kinship of the latter with the members of
adjacent non-Dorian states was admitted, two different explanations seem
to have been made, (1) on behalf of the non-Dorian populations, either
that the Dorians were no true sons of Hellen, but were of some other
northerly ancestry; or that they were merely Achaean exiles; and in
either case that their historic predominance resulted from an act of
violence, ill-disguised by their association with the ancient claims of
the Peloponnesian Heraclidae; (2) on behalf of the Dorian aristocracies,
that they were in some special sense "sons of Hellen," if not the only
genuine Hellenes; the rest of the European Greeks, and in particular the
anti-Dorian Athenians (with their marked likeness to Ionians), being
regarded as Hellenized barbarians of "Pelasgian" origin (see
PELASGIANS). This process of Hellenization, or at least its final stage,
was further regarded as intimately connected with a movement of peoples
which had brought the "Dorians" from the northern highlands into those
parts of Greece which they occupied in historic times.

So long as the Homeric poems were believed to represent Hellenic (and
mainly Ionian) beliefs of the 9th century or later, the historical value
of the traditions of a Dorian invasion was repeatedly questioned; most
recently and thoroughly by J. Beloch (_Gr. Geschichte_, i., Strassburg,
1893), as being simply an attempt to reconcile the political geography
of Homer (i.e. of 8th-century Ionians describing 12th-century events)
with that of historic Greece, by explaining discrepancies (due to
Homeric ignorance) as the result of "migrations" in the interval. Such
legends often arise to connect towns bearing identical or similar names
(such as ar