Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/43

 THEKA AND THE MINY/E. 27 change clothes with their husbands, who thus escaped and fled again to Mount Taygetus. The greater number of them quitted Laconia, and marched to Triphylia, in the western regions of Peloponnesus, from whence they expelled the Paroreatae and the Kaukones, and founded six towns of their own, of which Lepreum was the chief. A certain proportion, however, by permission of the Lacedaemonians, joined Theras, and departed with him to the island of Kalliste, then possessed by Phoenician inhabitants, who were descended from the kinsmen and companions of Kadmus, and who had been left there by that prince, when he came forth in search of Europa, eight generations preceding. Arriving thus among men of kindred lineage with himself, Thsras met with a fraternal reception, and the island derived from him the name, under which it is historically known, of Thera. 1 Such is the foundation-legend of Thera, believed both by the Lacedaemonians and by the Therasans, and interesting as it brings before us, characteristically as well as vividly, the persons and feelings of the mythical world, the Argonauts, with the Tynda- rids as their companions and Minyae as their children. In Le- preum, as in the other towns of Triphylia, the descent from the Minyae of old seems to have been believed in the historical times, and the mention of the river Minyeius in those regions by Homer tended to confirm it. 2 But people were not unanimous as to the legend by which that descent should be made out ; while some adopted the story just cited from Herodotus, others imagined that Chloris, who had come from the Minyeian town of Orchomenus as the wife of Neleus to Pylus, had brought with her a body of her countrymen.- 1 Herodot. iv. 145-149; Valer. Maxim, iv. c. 6; Polyzp.n. vii. -49, who, however, gives the narrative differently by mentioning " Tyrrhenians from Lemnos aiding Sparta during the Helotic war :" another narrative in his col lection (viii. 71 ), though imperfectly preserved, seems to approach mon, closely to Herodotus. Homer, Iliad, xi. 721. 3 Strabo, viii. p. 347. M. Racul Rochctte, who treats the legends for the most part as if they were so much authentic history, is much displeased with Strabo for admitting this diversity of stories (Histoire des Colonies Grecques, t. iii. ch. 7, p. 54) : " Apres des details si clairs et si positifs, comment est-il possible quc cc memo Strabon, bouleveraant toute la chronologic, fisst