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47 expedition of the Heraclidae and Pisistratus. Even the most celebrated of all, the two houses at Sparta, were not called after the two renowned epic names of the brothers Eurys- thenes and Procles, but their common appellation was Agiads and Eurypontids, from two princes who lived in the dimness of the earliest history, the son and grandson of Eurysthenes and Procles. 'Eurypon, it is said (Pausanias informs us, III. 7. 1.), reached such a height of glory, that this house took its name from him, which before his time had been called Proclids.' The historical fact contained in this state- ment amounts only to this : that the two Heraclide, and, if we will, kindred, royal houses of Sparta were always called Agiads and Eurypontids ; that is to say, as far back as the progenitors Agis and Eurypon, to whose time the true historical tradition ascends. Every thing beyond them belongs to the province of fabulous legends and epic poetry, and is the creature of that all-pervading spirit of historical fiction which derived the two ruling houses from two brothers, descendants of Hercules in the sixth degree." Mythol. Vol. p. 9.66. The same method of explaining the double names of the two royal houses is also adopted by Niebuhr, when, speaking of the number of the Spartan gerusia, he says that "thirty houses were represented, the Agiads and Eurypontids by the kings : these names, when the descent of the two houses from twins had become an article of popular belief, were derived from certain alleged descendants of those mythical brothers." Hist, of Rome, Vol. p. 333. Here Niebuhr does not, like Buttmann, make history ascend to Eurypon and Agis, though both writers agree in assigning the sons of Aristodemus to mythology ; and indeed it is difficult to find sufficient testimony to accredit the received accounts of the early Spartan kings, liable as they are to such numerous and weighty objections. "Ce n'est pas (I may say with Adrien de Valois) que je sois incrédule : mais en fait d'histoire je veux quelque bonne autorité, autrement je n'y ajoute point de foi."' (Valesiana, p. 339). Nevertheless the names of the Spartan, as of the Roman kings, are doubtless derived from popular tradition, and are not, like the lists of the Egyptian kings in Herodotus, and of the Argive and Sicyonian kings in Eusebius, mere fabrications