l structure_ of the Dorian states of Peloponnese
presupposes likewise a conquest of an older highly civilized population
by small bands of comparatively barbarous raiders. Sparta in particular
remained, even after the reforms of Lycurgus, and on into historic
times, simply the isolated camp of a compact army of occupation, of some
5000 families, bearing traces still of the fusion of several bands of
invaders, and maintained as an exclusive political aristocracy of
professional soldiers by the labour of a whole population of
agricultural and industrial serfs. The serfs were rigidly debarred from
intermixture or social advancement, and were watched by their masters
with a suspicion fully justified by recurrent ineffectual revolts. The
other states, such as Argos and Corinth, exhibited just such compromises
between conquerors and conquered as the legends described, conceding to
the older population, or to sections of it, political incorporation more
or less incomplete. The Cretan cities, irrespective of origin, exhibit
serfage, militant aristocracy, rigid martial discipline of all citizens,
and other marked analogies with Sparta; but the Asiatic Dorians and the
other Dorian colonies do not differ appreciably in their social and
political history from their Ionian and Aeolic neighbours. Tarentum
alone, partly from Spartan origin, partly through stress of local
conditions, shows traces of militant asceticism for a while.

_Archaeological evidence_ points clearly now to the conclusion that the
splendid but overgrown civilization of the Mycenaean or "late Minoan"
period of the Aegean Bronze Age collapsed rather suddenly before a rapid
succession of assaults by comparatively barbarous invaders from the
European mainland north of the Aegean; that these invaders passed partly
by way of Thrace and the Hellespont into Asia Minor, partly by Macedon
and Thessaly into peninsular Greece and the Aegean islands; that in east
Peloponnese and Crete, at all events, a first shock (somewhat later than
1500 B.C.) led to the establishment of a cultural, social and political
situation which in many respects resembles what is depicted in Homer as
the "Achaean" age, with principal centres in Rhodes, Crete, Laconia,
Argolis, Attica, Orchomenus and south-east Thessaly; and that this
regime was itself shattered by a second shock or series of shocks
somewhat earlier than 1000 B.C. These latter events correspond in
character and date with the traditiona