Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/32

 16 HISTORY OF GREECE. Thessaly, Thucydides records a statement which he had found of their migration from the latter into the former ; but in order to escape the necessity of flatly contradicting Homer, he inserts the parenthesis that there had been previously an outlying frac- tion of Boeotians in Boeotia at the time of the Trojan war,' from whom the troops who served with Agamemnon were drawn. .Nevertheless, the discrepancy with the Iliad, though less strik- ingly obvious, is not removed, inasmuch as the Catalogue is unusually copious in enumerating the contingents from Thessaly, without once mentioning Boeotians. Homer distinguishes Orcho- menus from Boeotia, and he does not specially notice Thebes in the Catalogue : in other respects his enumeration of the towns coincides pretty well with the ground historically known after- wards under the name of Boeotia. Pausanias gives us a short sketch of the events which he sup- poses to have intervened in this section of Greece between the Siege of Troy and the Return of the Herakleids. Peneleos, the leader of the Boeotians at the siege, having been slain by Eury- pylus the son of Telephus, Tisamenus, son of Thersander and grandson of Polynikes, acted as their commander, both during the remainder of the siege and after their return. Autesion, his son and successor, became subject to the wrath of the avenging Erinnyes of Laius and CEdipus : the oracle directed him to ex- patriate, and he joined the Dorians. In his place, Damasichthon, son of Opheltas and grandson of Peneleos, became king of the Boeotians : he was succeeded by Ptolenueus, who was himself followed by Xanthus. A war having broken out at that time between the Athenians and Boeotians, Xanthus engaged in sin- gle combat with Melanthus son of Andropompus, the champion of Attica, and perished by the cunning of his opponent. After the death of Xanthus, the Boeotians passed from kingship to popular government. 2 As Melanthus was of the lineage of the Neleids, and had migrated from Pylus to Athens in consequence of the successful establishment of the Dorians in Hessenia, the duel with Xanthus must have been of course subsequent to the Return of the Herakleids. 1 Thncyd. i. 12. qv 6e avruv KOI u^o6aa^f vporepov tv ry 79 ravry at uv lea* f *I/ljov ioTpdrfvoav. * Pausan ix. 5, 8.