Appendix Onements in Peloponnesian Doric indicates that the Dorian im-
migrants were not infiltrators into a predominantly South
Greek population.
The third argument focuses on the distribution of the Do-
rians, across a wide area from the Corinthian Isthmus to
Rhodes. If the Dorians came to these lands as infiltrators and
squatters, one wonders why and how they went so far. Most of
the Peloponnese, as Desborough so convincingly showed, was
sharply underpopulated in the eleventh century, even after the
supposed arrival of the cist-grave Dorians. Surely, if all that
the Dorians wanted was a bit of land for farming and grazing,
all of them could have been accommodated in a small part of
the Greek mainland. And if we can find a reason why some of
the Dorians would have chosen to cross the seas in search of
land when plenty of land was available nearby, we shall next
need to imagine how an island could have been Doricized by
infiltrators. If the Dorians came only a few at a time to Thera,
for example, surely the straggle would have been continually
swallowed up by the indigenous majority, and the island
would never have been Doricized. On the other hand, if the
Dorians came en masse, and slaughtered or expelled the indig-
enous population, their arrival should have been detectable in
the material record. The infiltration theory does not work.
Let us look then at Snodgrass's theory—that the Dorians
were the destroyers of the Mycenaean world in the late thir-
teenth and twelfth centuries, and that they settled down in its
ruins. As it stands, the theory attributes contradictory behav-
ior to the Dorians. Aggressors who intend to take over a region
do not destroy the established settlements and towns of the
region, unless the aggressors are so primitive that they would
prefer life among the ruins to life in a town. That proviso,
however, can not be used here, for an indispensable element in
Snodgrass's theory is that the Dorians' life style was indistin-
guishable from that of the Mycenaean Greeks. And even if we
grant, for the sake of the argument, that the Dorians had good
reason to destroy the Mycenaean settlements that they in-
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