Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/136

 104 HISTORY OF GREECE. established ascendancy and universal reverence throughout Greece. Respecting Dorus the son of Hellen, we find neither legends nor legendary genealogy ; respecting Xuthus, very little beyond the tale of Kreiisa and Ion, which has its place more naturally among the Attic fables. Achseus however, who is here represent- ed as the son of Xuthus, appears in other stories with very different parentage and accompaniments. According to the state- ment which we find in Dionysius of Halicamassus, Achaeus, Phthius and Pelasgus are sons of Poseidon and Larissa. They migrate from Peloponnesus into Thessaly, and distribute the Thessalian territory between them, giving their names to its principal divisions : their descendants in the sixth generation were driven out of that country by the invasion of Deukalion at the head of the Kurgtes and the Leleges. 1 This was the story of those who wanted to provide an eponymus for the Achasans in the southern districts of Thessaly : Pausanias accomplishes the same object by different means, representing Achaeus, the son of Xuthus as having gone back to Thessaly and occupied the portion of it to which his father was entitled. Then, by way of explain- ing how it was that there were Achaeans at Sparta and at Argos, he tells us that Archander and Architeles, the sons of Archseus, came back from Thessaly to Peloponnesus, and married two daughters of Danaus : they acquired great influence at Argos and Sparta, and gave to the people the name of Achaeans after their father Achoeus. 2 Euripides also deviates very materially from the Hesiodic 1 Dionys. H. A. E.i. 17. 2 Pausan. vii. 1, 1-3. Herodotus also mentions (ii. 97) Archander, son of Phthius and grandson of Achaeus, who married the daughter of Danaus. Larcher (Essai sur la Chronologic d'Herodote, ch. x. p. 321) tells us that this cannot be the Danaus who came from Egypt, the father of the fifty daughters, who must have lived two centuries earlier, as may be proved by chronological arguments : this must be another Danaus, according to him. Strabo seems to give a different story respecting the Achoeans in Pclepon- nsus : he says that they were the original population of the peninsula, that they came in from Phthia with Pelops, and inhabited Laconia, which was from them called Argos Aehaicuin, and that on the conquest of the Dorians, they moved into Achaia properly so called, expelling the lonians therefrone (Strabo, viii p. 365^. This narrative is, I presume, borrowed from Ephorus