The History of Greece from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Hellenistic Age. John Bagnell Bury
Parnassus, there were dislocations of a less simple kind. Hither came the Dorians, who, though we cannot set our finger on their original home, belonged to the same “north-western” group of the Greek race as the Thessalians and Boeotians. For a while, it would seem, a large space of mountainous country between Mount Oeta and the Corinthian Gulf, including a great part of Phocis, became Dorian land. But it is not certain that the Dorians, when they came, had any purpose of making an abiding home in these regions; they were perhaps only travelling to find a goodlier country in the south, and were unable to cross to the Peloponnesus, because the Achaeans barred the way. At all events the greater part of them soon went forth to seek fairer abodes in distant places. But a few remained behind in the small 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 that the Dorians also took possession of Delphi, the “rocky threshold” of Apollo, and planted some families there who devoted themselves to the service of the god. After the departure of the Dorian 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 the Phocians wedged in between. One division, the Ozolian Locrians, are on the Corinthian Gulf, to the west of Phocis; the other two divisions are on the Euboean sea, to the north-east of Phocis. The Ozolians were one of the most backward peoples of Greece, and perhaps we may ascribe their retarded civilisation to the same cause which ruined Aetolia—an influx of Illyrian barbarians. This would at the same time account for the Locrian dislocation. The Ozolian was the original Locris; and some of its inhabitants, when the danger came, sought new abodes on the northern sea. But they were unable to hold a continuous strip, as the Phocians wanted an outlet to the sea, and so they were severed into the Locrians of Thronion and the Locrians of Opus.
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. The first band of adventurers brought a new element to Crete, the island of many races; others settled in Thera, and in Melos. Others sailed away eastward, beyond the limits of the Aegean, and found a home on the southern coast of Asia Minor, where, surrounded by barbarians and forgotten by the Greek world, they lived a life apart, taking no share in the history of Hellas. But 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 of the Eurotas, overthrew the lords of Amyclae, and, keeping their own Dorian stock pure from the mixture of alien blood, reduced all the inhabitants to the condition of subjects. We cannot say how far the fusion between the Hellene and the pre-Hellenic folk had progressed before the Dorian came; but we may suppose that the princes of Amyclae were then of Greek stock. 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 a pure Dorian. How far the Laconian dialect represents the original dialect of the Dorians we cannot decide. But the Dorians of Laconia are perhaps the only people in Greece who can be said to have preserved in any measure the purity of their Greek blood.
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 no traces of the conquest remained. It is to the time of this conquest that the overthrow of Mycenae is probably to be referred; and here, as in the case of Amyclae, it seems probable that the old native dynasty had already given place to Greek lords. Certain it is that both Mycenae and Tiryns were destroyed suddenly and set on fire. Henceforward Argos under her lofty citadel was to be 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.
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 skillful traders. At first Corinth seems to have been dependent on Argos, whose power was predominant in the eastern Peloponnesus for more than three hundred years.
The Aegean civilization declined and seemed almost to die out in the Peloponnesus, in Thessaly, and in Boeotia. It would be rash to ascribe this entirely to the havoc of war brought upon these countries by the Dorian, Thessalian, and Boeotian conquests, or to the rude spirit of the conquerors. These causes were indeed operative, and it is probable that they were especially effective in Laconia; but it must be remembered that in Attica too, where no invaders came, there was a brake with the old civilisation. We are not in a position to attempt to explain the change; but we may believe that more causes than one were at work. We may suspect that the civilisation of the Peloponnesus and the western Aegean was already declining at the time of the Dorian conquest, and that the conquest was facilitated by the decline. And we may see one cause of the decline in the Achaean and Ionian movements from the western to the eastern shores of the Aegean. This migration, beginning before, and continuing after, the Dorian conquest, must have taken some of the most quickening and vigorous elements from the older country. Moreover there was a decline of the Aegean sea-power about the time of the Dorian invasion; and trade was beginning to pass, not entirely but partially, into the hands of the merchants of Phoenicia. On the other hand the break in civilisation might easily be exaggerated; and it is well to bear in mind such a striking point of continuity in art as the derivation of the entablature of the Doric temple, with its characteristic arrangement of metopes and triglyphs, from the frieze of the heroic age, like that which decorated the palace of Tiryns. The Doric column can also be derived from the column of the Mycenaean builders; and the plan of the Greek temple corresponds to the arrangement of hall and portico in the palaces of the heroic age.
From Argos the Dorians made two important settlements in the north, on the river Asopus—Sicyon on its lower, and Phlius 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 hill had been crowned by a royal palace in the heroic age, and so the place came to be called Megara, “the Palace”, and in historical times no other name was known, though the old name lurked in the name of the harbour Nisaea. In later days, Dorian Megara was associated politically with the Peloponnesus rather than with northern Greece, but in early days it was reckoned as part of Boeotia, separated though it was from that country by the western portion of the massive range of Cithaeron.
The island, whose conical mountain in the midst of the Saronic waters is visible to all the coasts around, was also destined to a Dorian land. Aegina was conquered by Dorian settlers from Epidaurus, but the conquest was perhaps not effected for two hundred years or more after the subjugation of Argolis. In Aegina too there was doubtless a fusion of the old inhabitants and the new settlers; and we may be sure that it had been before, as it was after, the change, an island of bold and adventurous sailors.
In Crete and Laconia we meet, as we shall see, some peculiar institutions, which seem to have been characteristically Dorian, but are not found in Argos or Corinth. Yet all the Dorian settlements remembered their common Dorian origin; and the conquerors of Laconia at least looked with emotions of filial piety towards the