68 Conquest
Argolid in the northeastern Peloponnesus, Laconia in the southeast, and Mes-
senia in the southwest as well.^12
The Lacedaemonians were by no means alone in this conviction. Their
tradition in this regard coincides in all of its crucial details with those of the
Argives and the Messenians. It dovetails with the legends told by the Arcadi-
ans and the inhabitants of Achaea on the southern shore of the Corinthian
Gulf, who claimed to be among the few indigenous peoples left in the Pelo-
ponnesus.^13 It fits the ancient lore of the Athenians, and, in other regards, it
actually makes rough sense.
There is, for example, archaeological evidence confirming that the great
Mycenaean kingdoms within the Peloponnesus built a wall at the isthmus of
Corinth, presumably to stave off an invasion, precisely as tradition asserts; and
there is similar evidence suggesting that, throughout Hellas, the Mycenaean
kingdoms subsequently fell to invasion from abroad over the course of two
or three decades at about the time stipulated in the legend.^14 Moreover, in the
classical period the Argives, the Spartans, and the Messenians are found to
be speaking a dialect of Greek unknown, as far as we can tell, in Bronze Age
Argos, Sparta, and Messenia; and, in the districts within the Peloponnesus
that came to be occupied by Dorian peoples, there are nearly always the re-
mains of another population, said by tradition to be old Achaean in origin,
who serve as their subjects.^15
Within the Peloponnesus, the regions of Arcadia and Achaea are, more-
over, exceptions that prove the rule. Their inhabitants in the classical age bear
a certain similarity to the Basques, the Welsh, and the Bretons of modern
times. They live in mountainous backlands less friendly to human habitation
than the well-watered plains nearby; they think of themselves, in contrast with
their neighbors, as a people indigenous to the land; and in the case of the Ar-
cadians, they speak a tongue directly descended from that reflected in the
syllabic script employed by the peoples known to have been dominant in an
earlier epoch in the fertile lowlands nearby. That, as their own traditions inti-
mate, the Arcadians of this later age included within their ranks a substantial
remnant descended from Mycenaean stock and driven as refugees from
friendlier lands—this one need not doubt; and, though the linguistic evidence
suggests that the history of Achaea was, from an ethnic perspective, more com-
plex than that of the Arcadia and that, as a consequence, a northwest Greek
dialect came to be there predominant, something of the sort may well be true
for the residents of that region as well.