Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/343

 DORIAN SETTLEMENTS AT SPARTA. 327 most easily by the same route. Dismissing the idea of a grea collective Dorian armament, powerful enough to grasp at once the entire peninsula, we may conceive two moderate detach- ments of hardy mountaineers, from the cold regions in and near Doris, attaching themselves to the JEtolians, their neighbors, who were proceeding to the invasion of Elis. After having aided the JEtolians, both to occupy Elis and to subdue the Pisatid, these Dorians advanced up the valley of the Alpheius in quest of settlements for themselves. One of these bodies ripens into the stately, stubborn, and victorious Spartans ; the other, into the short-lived, trampled, and struggling Messenians. Amidst the darkness which overclouds these original settle- ments, we seem to discern something like special causes to deter- mine both of them. With respect to the Spartan Dorians, we are told that a person named Philonomus betrayed Sparta to them, persuading the sovereign in possession to retire with his people into the habitations of the lonians, in the north of the peninsula, and that he received as a recompense for this accept- able service Amyklae, Avith the district around it. It is farther stated, and this important fact there seems no reason to doubt, that Amyklse, though only twenty stadia or two miles and a half distant from Sparta, retained both its independence and its Achrcan inhabitants, long after the Dorian emigrants had ac- quired possession of the latter place, and was only taken by them under the reign of Teleklus, one generation before the first Olympiad. 1 Without presuming to fill up by conjecture incurable gaps in the statements of our authorities, we may from hence reasonably presume that the Dorians were induced to invade, and enabled to acquire, Sparta, by the invitation and assistance of a party in the interior of the country. Again, with respect to the Messenian Dorians, a different, but not less effectual temp- tation was presented by the alliance of the Arcadians, in the south-western portion of that central region of Peloponnesus. Kresphontes, the Herakleid leader, it is said, espoused the daugh- ter 2 of the Arcadian king, Kypselus, which procured for him the 1 Strabo, viii. pp. 364, 365 ; Pausan. iii. 2 5 : compare the atory of Kjiua, Fausan. iii. 13, 3.
 * Tausan. iv. 3, 3 ; viii. 29. 4.