e common in Greece) and to justify political events or
ambitions by legendary precedents; and this certainly happened during
the successive political rivalries of Dorian Sparta with non-Dorian
Athens and Thebes. But in proportion as an earlier date has become more
probable for Homer, the hypothesis of Ionic origin has become less
tenable, and the belief better founded (1) that the poems represent
accurately a well-defined phase of culture in prehistoric Greece, and
(2) that this "Homeric" or "Achaean" phase was closed by some such
general catastrophe as is presumed by the legends.

The legend of a Dorian invasion appears first in Tyrtaeus, a 7th-century
poet, in the service of Sparta, who brings the Spartan Heracleids to
Peloponnese from Erineon in the northern Doris; and the lost Epic of
Aegimius, of about the same date, seems to have presupposed the same
story. In the 5th century Pindar ascribes to Aegimius the institutions
of the Peloponnesian Dorians, and describes them as the "Dorian folk of
Hyllus and Aegimius," and as "originating from Pindus" (_Pyth._ v. 75:
cf. Fr. 4). Herodotus, also in the 5th century, describes them as the
typical (perhaps in contrast to Athenians as the _only_ genuine)
Hellenes, and traces their numerous wanderings from (1) an original home
"in Deucalion's time" in Phthiotis (the Homeric "Hellas") in south
Thessaly, to (2) Histiaeotis "below Ossa and Olympus" in north-east
Thessaly (note that the _historic_ Histiaeotis is "below _Pindus_" in
north-_west_ Thessaly): this was "in the days of Dorus," i.e. it is at
this stage that the Dorians are regarded as becoming specifically
distinct from the generic "Hellene": thence (3) to a residence "in
Pindus," where they passed as a "Macedonian people." Hence (4) they
moved south to the Parnassian Doris, which had been held by Dryopes: and
hence finally (5) to Peloponnese. Elsewhere he assigns the expulsion of
the Dryopes to Heracles in co-operation not with Dorians but with
Malians. Here clearly two traditions are combined:--one, in which the
Dorians originated from Hellas in south Thessaly, and so are "children
of Hellen"; another, in which they were a "Macedonian people" intruded
from the north, from Pindus, past Histiaeotis to Doris and beyond. It is
a noteworthy coincidence that in Macedonia also the royal family claimed
Heracleid descent; and that "Pindus" is the name both of the mountains
above Histiaeotis and of a stream in Doris. It is notewo