Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/322

 ;}06 HISTORY OF GREECE. In point of fact they are insufficient even for the former purpose, as the dissensions among learned critics attest. We have a succession of names, still more barren of facts, in the case of the Dorian sovereigns of Corinth. This city had its ov n line of Herakleids, descended from Herakles, but not through Hyllus. Hippotes, the progenitor of the Corinthian Herakleids, was reported in the legend to have originally joined the Dorian invaders of the Peloponnesus, but to have quitted them in conse- quence of having slain the prophet Karnus. 1 The three brothers, when they became masters of the peninsula, sent for Aletes, the son of Hippotes, and placed him in possession of Corinth, over which the chronologists make him begin to reign thirty years after the Herakleid conquest. His successors are thus given - - Aletes reigned 38 years, Ixion " 38 " Agelas " 37 " Prymnis u 35 " Bacchis " 35 " Agelas " 30 " Eudemus " 25 " Aristomedes " 35 " Agemon " 16 " Alexander " 25 " Telests " 12 " Automenes i( 1 " 327 1 This story that the heroic ancestor of the great Corinthian Bacchiadae had slain the holy man Karnus, and had been punished for it by long ban- ishment and privation leads to the conjecture, that the Corinthians did not celebrate the festival of the Karneia, common to the Dorians generally. Herodotus tells us, with regard to the Ionic cities, that all of them cele- brated the festival of Apaturia, except Ephesus and Kolophon ; and that these two cities did not celebrate it, " because of a certain reason of murder committed," OVTOI -yap pouvoi 'luvuv OVK uyovaiv 'ATraTovpia /co2 ovroi Kara 6vov nva OKT/IJJIV (Herod, i. 147). The murder of Karnus by Hippotes was probably the tyov ov aur/ipi? which forbade the Corinthians fronr celebrating the Karneia; at least, this supposi- tion gives to the legend a special pertinence which is otherwise wanting to it Respecting the Karneia and Hyacinthia, see Schoell De Origine Grseci ramatis, pp. 70-78. Tubingen, 1828. There were varicus singular customs connected with the Grecian festival*,