The Historians' History of the World 03 [Greece to the Peloponnesian War]

Thus complicated were the results which followed the Dorian migration. They show sufficiently how little we have here to do with a transformation effected at one blow, like the result of a fortunate campaign. After the races had long wandered up and down in a varying series of territorial disputes and mutual agreements, the fate of the peninsula was gradually decided. Only when men had forgotten the tedious period of unrest and ferment, which memory can adorn with no incidents, could the reconstitution of the peninsula be regarded as a sudden turn of events by which the Peloponnesus had become Dorian.

Even in those districts which the invaders especially contended for and occupied, the transformation of the people into a Dorian population was only effected very gradually and in a very imperfect fashion. How could it have been otherwise? Even the conquering hosts themselves were not of purely Dorian blood, but intermixed with people of all sorts of races. Nor was it as Dorians but as relatives of the Achæan princes that the leaders of their armies laid claim to power and rule. Thus Plato saw in the march of the Heraclids a union between Dorians and Achæans, dating from the times of the movement of the Greek peoples, and how little unity originally existed between the commander and his men is shown by a series of undoubted facts. For no sooner had the force of the warriors won a firm footing in the districts, than the interests of Heraclids and Dorians diverged and such dissensions broke out as either endangered or nullified the whole success of the colony.

The leaders sought to effect amalgamation of the old and new populations, that they might thus attain a broader foundation for their power and place themselves in a position independent of the influence of the Dorian warriors. Everywhere do we find the same phenomena, and most distinctly in Messenia. But in Laconia also, the Heraclids made themselves detested by their warriors, by trying to assimilate the non-Dorian to the Dorian people, and in Argolis we see the Heraclid Deïphontes, whose name is thoroughly Ionic, allied with Hyrnetho, who is the representative of the original population of the coast district. It is this same Deïphontes who helps to establish the throne of the Temenids in Argos, to the indignation of the other Heraclids and of the Dorians: here, therefore, their new kingdom undoubtedly rests on the support of the pre-Dorian population.

Thus the bonds between the Heraclids and the Dorians were loosened in all three countries, soon after their occupation. The political institutions were established in spite of the Dorians, and if the newly imported popular force was to have a fruitful and beneficial effect on the soil of the country, it required the art of a wise legislation to conciliate opposition and regulate the forces which threatened to destroy it. The first example of such legislation was given, as far as we know, on the island of Crete.

DORIANS IN CRETE

Dorians in considerable numbers had passed over into Crete from Argos and Laconia, and if in other cases islands and seacoast were not a soil on which the Dorian races felt at home, here it was otherwise.

Crete is rather a continent than an island. With the wealth of resources of every kind which distinguishes the country, the Cretan towns were able to preserve themselves from the restlessness belonging to the life of a seaport, and quietly to unfold the new germs of life which the Dorians brought to the island. Here, too, they came as invaders: massed in great hosts they overpowered the island people, whom no bonds of union held together. We find Dorian tribes in Cydonia, the first place in which the new arrivals from Cythera established themselves. Then Knossos, and especially Lyctus, whose Dorian people hailed from Laconia, became the chief towns of the new settlement.

The Dorians had here reached the land of an ancient civilisation, whose fertility was not yet exhausted. They found towns with definite constitutions and families well versed in the art of rule. State government and religious worship had here, under quieter conditions, retained their original connection and in especial the religion of Apollo, administered by the old priestly families, displayed its organising, civilising, and intellectual influence in entirety. The Dorians brought nothing but their tempestuous courage and the strength of their spears; compared with the Cretan nobility they were the merest children in all that concerns the art of government and legislation. They demanded land and left it to others to find out the ways and means of satisfying their requirements, for the overthrow of the ancient government signified nothing to them. But that the Dorians nevertheless did not behave as reckless conquerors; that they did not overturn the ancient state and found new ones, is manifest from the mere fact that the organisation of Dorian Crete is nowhere referred to a Dorian originator.