Appendix Onethe thesis seems to have resulted from a misunderstanding of
these traditions. Chadwick denied the possibility of an "inva-
sion" primarily because he saw no place from which the invad-
ers could have come. After disqualifying the other areas of the
Greek mainland, he concluded that the invaders could only
have come from northwest Greece—the mountainous country
north and west of Aetolia—that was never densely settled.
"Where in north-western Greece," he asked, "was there room
enough for the tens of thousands of migrants" who must be
imagined as participating in the invasion?' 6 It is true that one
can hardly imagine invaders pouring out of northwest Greece,
but there should be little difficulty in picturing them coming
from Thessaly, where North Greek speakers seem to have been
thickly settled. Despite Chadwick's surprising claim that
Greek traditions did not associate the Dorians with Thessaly, 17
it was precisely in Thessaly that Herodotus (i .56) said the Do-
rians had lived before they came to the Peloponnese. The tra-
dition about a Dorian migration into the Peloponnese is an oral
tradition, and not a fact, but a migration tradition can not be
easily dismissed. At the least, before dismissing it, one would
need to explain why the Dorians told this story, and the story
of the Return of the Heraclidae, if they could in fact have made
the same claims to "autochthony" made by the Arcadians and
Athenians.
Finally, Chadwick's explanation for the destruction of the
Mycenaean centers is anachronistic: the lower-class Dorians
turned on their South Greek masters because they "had for so
long lived under the heel of the Mycenaean aristocracy"' 8 (in
an identical upheaval, according to Chadwick, the South
Greeks of Knossos had been overthrown by the Doric-speaking
lower classes ca. 1400 B.C.). Such a class revolution is unat-
- "Who were the Dorians?" 109.
- In ibid., Chadwick argues that the Dorians could not have
come from Thessaly, since that area "shared the uniform Mycenaean cul-
ture; nor are there traditions linking the Dorians with Thessaly" (p. 108). - Ibid., 115.
212