(Oenomaus, was then a land of wine; its pride in its vineyards is displayed in Oeneus.) the name of its mythic kings. But in the later ages of Greek history all this is changed. We find Aetolia regarded as a half barbarous country, the abode of men who speak indeed a Greek tongue, but have lagged ages and ages behind the rest of Greece in science and civilisation. And we find the neighbouring countries in the same case. Epirus, or the greater part of it, had been hellenized when the worship of Zeus was introduced at Dodona, to become famous and venerable throughout the Greek world. Suddenly it lapses into comparative barbarism, and the sanctuary of Dodona remains a lonely outpost. The explanation of this falling away is the irruption and conquest of Illyrian invaders. It was not through laziness or degeneracy, or through geographical disadvantages, that the Greeks of Epirus and Aetolia fell out of the race; it was because they were overwhelmed by a rude and barbarous people, who swamped their civilisation instead of assimilating it. The Aetolians and Epirots of later history are mainly of Illyrian stock. The Eleans. This invasion naturally drove some of the Greek inhabitants to seek new homes elsewhere. It was easy to cross the gulf, and Aetolian emigrants made their way to the river Peneus, where they settled and took to themselves the name of Eleans or "Dalesmen." They won dominion over the Epeans, the first Greek settlers, and gradually extended their power to the Alpheus. Their land was a tract of downs with a harbourless coast, and they never became a maritime power. The people in this western plain of the peninsula were distinguished by their veneration of the hero Pelops. His worship had taken deep root at Pisa on the banks of the river Alpheus. It was a spot which in a later age, when the Greeks had spread over-seas into distant lands, was to become one of the holiest seats of Greek religion, where the greatest of the Aryan, the supremest of the Hellenic, gods was to draw to his sacred precinct men from all quarters of the Greek world to do him honour with sacrifices and games. But even when Pisa had come to be illustrious as Olympia, even when the temple and altar of the Olympian Zeus had eclipsed all other associations of the place, Origin of Pelops still received his offering. But though Pelops himself was the name Peloponnesus. remembered only as a legendary figure, except in one or two places like Olympia where his old worship survived, his name is living still in one of the most familiar geographical names of Greece.1 It is in the regions near the mouth of the Corinthian Gulf, where the existence of the bridge at Corinth may be easily unremembered, 1 Some suppose that Pelops is the eponymous ancestor of a people called the Pelopes, and that Peloponnesus meant the island of the Pelopes. This seems unlikely. The inference from Cecrops in Attica is on a different footing. that men would be most tempted to call the great peninsula an island. And so, when Pelops was still widely worshipped, the name "island of Pelops" may have originated on that side-not, probably, in the peninsula itself, but on the opposite shores, in Aetolia for example; and then it made its way into universal use and clung henceforward to southern Greece. invasion The pressure of the Illyrians in Epirus may be associated with II. The two movements of great consequence, the Thessalian and the Thessalian Boeotian migration. A backward Greek folk named Petthǎloi, but and the for called by men of other dialects Thessaloi, crossed the hills and mation of settled in the western corner of the land which is bounded by Pelion Thessaly. and Pindus. They gained the upper hand and spread their sway over the whole plain. They drove the Achaeans southwards into the mountains of Phthia, and henceforward these Achaeans play no part of any note in the history of Greece. The Thessalian name soon spread over the whole country, which is called Thessaly to the present day. Crannon, Pagasae, Larisa, and Pherae, became the seats of lords who reared horses and governed the surrounding districts. The conquered people were reduced to serfdom and were known as the Labourers; they cultivated the soil, at their own Penestai. risk, paying a fixed amount to their lords; and they had certain privileges; they could not be sold abroad or arbitrarily put to death. But they gained one victory over their conquerors; the Achaean language prevailed. The Thessalians gave up their own idiom and learned, not indeed without modifying, the speech of their subjects, so that the dialect of historic Thessaly bears a close resemblance to the tongue which we find spoken by the Achaean settlers in Asia Minor. When they had established themselves in the lands of the Peneus, the Thessalians pressed northward against the Perrhaebi, eastward against the Magnetes, and southward against the Achaeans of Phthia, and reduced them all to tributary subjection. We know almost nothing of the history of the Thessalian kingdoms; in later times we find the whole country divided into four great divisions: Thessaliotis, in the south-west, the quarter which may have been the first settlement and home of the Thessalian invaders; Phthiotis of the Achaeans in the south; Pelasgiotis, a name which records the survival of the Pelasgians, one of the older peoples1; and Histiaeotis, the land of the Histiaeans, who have no separate identity in history. All the lordships of the land were combined 1 The origin and significance of the name Pelasgian have not yet been cleared up. In Greece we find it in connexion with Epirus (Dodona), Thessaly, Attica, and the Peloponnesus. There are two main views. (1) The Pelasgians were a pre-Greek people. (2) They were pre-Achaean Greeks. Against (2) is the fact that the Leleges and other subjects of the Trojans are described as Pelasgians (see above, p. 48). in a very loose political organisation, which lay dormant in times of peace; but through which, to meet any emergency of war, they could elect a common captain, with the title of tāgos. But all the folk did not remain to fall under the thraldom imposed The settle- by the new lords. A portion of the Achaeans migrated southward ment of the to the Peloponnesus and founded settlements along the strip of coast southern which forms the southern side of the Corinthian Gulf, and was henceAchaeans forth called Achaea. Thus there were two Achaean lands, the old Achaea in the north, now shrunk into the mountains of Phthia, and the new Achaea in the south. There was also apparently a movement to Euboea, in consequence of the Thessalian invasion: according to tradition, Histiaea in the north of the island and Eretria in the centre owed their origin to settlers from Thessaly, and there is founded by Histiaeans independent evidence that there was truth in this tradition. in the Peloponnesus. Histiaea and Eretria in Euboea, and others. Boeotian conquest. The lands of Helicon and Cithaeron experienced a similar shock III. The to that which unsettled and changed the lands of Olympus and Othrys; but the results were not the same. The old home of the Boeotians was in Mount Boeon in Epirus; the mountain gave them their name. Their dialect was probably closely akin to the original dialect of the Thessalians, being marked by certain characters which enable us to distinguish roughly a "north-western" group of dialects from those spoken by the earliest invaders of Greece. Coming from the west, or north, the Boeotians first occupied places in the west of the land which they were to make their own.1 From Chaeronea and Coronea they won Thebes, the city of the Cadmeans. Thence they sought to spread their power over the whole land. They spread their name over it, for it was called Boeotia, but they did not succeed in winning full domination as rapidly as the Thessalians succeeded in Thessaly. The rich lords of Orchomenus preserved their independence for hundreds of years, and it was not till the sixth century that anything like a Boeotian unity was established. The policy of the Boeotian conquerors, who were perhaps comparatively few in number, was unlike that of the Thessalians; the conquered communities were not reduced to serfdom. On the other hand they did not, like the Thessalians, adopt or adapt the speech of the older inhabitants; but the idioms of the conquerors and conquered coalesced and formed a new Boeotian dialect. Impulse given by the Boeotian 1 The Greeks, when they came to meditate on their history, neatly connected conquest to the Boeotian with the Thessalian conquest as effect with cause. They thought, migration, and attempted to prove, that the Boeotians lived in Thessaly and moved south The Boeotian conquest, there can be little doubt, caused some of ward under the pressure of the Thessalians. There is certainly something to be said for the view that the Boeotians, before they reached Boeotia, sojourned for a while in Thessaly. the older peoples to wander forth to other lands; and it may explain the participation of the Cadmeans and the men of Lebadea and others in some of the Ionian settlements in Asia Minor. Moreover, the coming of the Boeotians probably unsettled some of the neighbouring peoples and drove them to change their abodes.1 West of Boeotia, in the land of the Phocians amid the regions of Mount Parnassus, there were dislocations of a less simple kind. Hither came the Dorians. For a while, it would seem, a large IV. The space of mountainous country between Mount Oeta and the DORIANS. Corinthian Gulf, including a great part of Phocis, became Dorian land. The greater part of them soon went forth to seek fairer abodes in distant places. But a few remained behind in the small Doris. basin-like district between Mount Oeta and Mount Parnassus, where they preserved the illustrious Dorian name throughout the course of Grecian history in which they never played a part. It would seem The that the Dorians also took possession of Delphi, the "rocky threshold" Dorian of Apollo, and planted some families there who devoted themselves priesthood of Delphi. to the service of the god. After the departure of the Dorian Phocis. wanderers the Phocians could breathe again; but Doris was lost to them, and Delphi, which, as we shall see, they often essayed to recover. And the Phocians had to reckon with other neighbours. In later times we find the Locrians split up into three divisions, and Locris,the Phocians wedged in between. One division, the Ozolian (1) Locrians, are on the Corinthian Gulf, to the west of Phocis; the Ozolian, other two divisions are on the Euboean sea, to the north-east of (2) Phocis. The Özolians were one of the most backward peoples of (3) EpiThe Locrians of the north play a part in the Iliad, under cnemidian. the leadership of their hero Ajax, who ruled over Thronion as well as over Opus; and Locris was probably a continuous strip along the coast of the Euboean straits. The Phocians wanted an outlet to the sea and severed it into two parts. Greece. Opuntian, The departure of the Dorians from the regions of Parnassus was probably gradual, and it was accomplished by sea. They built ships --perhaps the name of Naupactus, "the place of the ship-building,” is a record of their ventures; and they sailed round the Peloponnesus to the south-eastern parts of Greece. One band of adventurers brought Dorian a new element to Crete, the island of many races; others settled in settlements Thera and in Melos. Others sailed away eastward, beyond the limits in Crete of the Aegean, and found a home on the southern coast of Asia Minor, islands. where, surrounded by barbarians and forgotten by the Greek world, Pamthey lived a life apart, taking no share in the history of Hellas. But phylia. The Abantes are said to have moved from Phocis to north Euboea, the Dryopes from the regions of Mount Oeta to south Euboea, whence they colonised Asine and Hermione on the Argolic coast. and (Pamphyloi.) Dorian Laconia. they preserved their Hellenic speech, and their name, the Pamphylians, recorded their Dorian origin, being the name of one of the three tribes by which the Dorians were everywhere recognised. The next conquests of the Dorians were in the Peloponnesus. They had found it impossible to attack on the north and west; they now essayed it on the south and east. There were three distinct conquests the conquest of Laconia, the conquest of Argolis, the conquest of Corinth. The Dorians took possession of the rich vale conquest of of the Eurotas, and, keeping their own Dorian stock pure from the mixture of alien blood, reduced all the inhabitants to the condition of subjects. It seems probable that the Dorian invaders who subdued Laconia were more numerous than the Dorian invaders elsewhere. The eminent quality which distinguished the Dorians from other branches of the Greek race was that which we call "character"; and it was in Laconia that this quality most fully displayed and developed itself, for here the Dorian seems to have remained more purely Dorian. Conquest of In Argolis the course of things ran otherwise. The invaders, who landed under a king named Temenos, had doubtless a hard fight; but their conquest took the shape not of subjection but of amalgamation. The Argive state was indeed organised on the Dorian system, with the three Dorian tribes-the Hylleis, Pamphyli, and Dymanes; but otherwise few traces of the conquest remained. It is to the time of this conquest that the overthrow of Mycenae is Destruction probably to be referred. Certain it is that both Mycenae and of fortresses Tiryns were destroyed suddenly and set on fire. Henceforward of Mycenae Argos under her lofty citadel was to be undisputed queen of the Argive plain. Greater, indeed, was the feat which the Dorians wrought in their southern conquest, the feat of making lowly Sparta, without citadel or wall, the queen of the Laconian vale. and Tiryns. Conquest of Sicyon and Phlius. Nisa= Megara. Dorian ships were also rowed up the Saronic Gulf. It was the adventure of a prince whom the legend calls Errant, the son of Rider. He landed in the Isthmus and seized the high hill of Acrocorinth, the key of the peninsula. This was the making of Corinth. Here, as in Argolis, there was no subjection, no distinction between the conquerors and the conquered. The geographical position of Corinth between her seas determined for her people a career of commerce, and her history shows that the Dorians had the qualities of bold and skilful traders. From Argos the Dorians made two important settlements in the north, on the river Asopus-Sicyon on its lower, and Phliûs on its upper banks. And beyond Mount Geraneia another Dorian city arose, we know not how, on the commanding hill which looks down upon the western shore of Salamis. Its name was Nisa. But the |