Conquest 67
proud and systematic refusal of trust. Denys Page was less well-schooled in
social and anthropological theory than Moses Finley, but the work of Hittitol-
ogists has proven the plausibility of his suspicion that there really must have
been a Trojan War and that it somehow must have involved the Hittites as well
as the Trojans and their Mycenaean attackers.^11 Even tales that fly in the face
of common sense, such as the account of Theseus and the Minotaur, may
contain a kernel of truth, as was shown by the excavations at Knossos on Crete
undertaken by Sir Arthur Evans and the frescoes on the walls of the palace he
uncovered.
The Dorian Invasion
The legend that told of Lacedaemon’s founding was self-serving. Of that
there can be no doubt. But the manner in which it bolstered the interests of
the ruling order betrayed an uncomfortable truth: the Spartans were interlop-
ers in Laconia. They had no business being there, and they knew it. This fact
they evidently found a source of embarrassment, for the legend that they em-
braced was a tacit acknowledgment that might cannot make right and an
apology for conduct that otherwise, we can see, would have been hard to de-
fend. The means by which the Spartans justified their intrusion into a land not
originally theirs revealed the tenuous character of their claim that their sei-
zure of this land and their subjugation of a great many of its previous inhabi-
tants were defensible and just.
According to the calculations of Greeks living in the historical period who
attempted to make chronological sense of the ancient legends on the basis of
the genealogical lore preserved by the old Greek families, the Achaeans, Ar-
gives, and Danaans who fought the Trojan War brought that struggle to a
conclusion in 1184/3 and then sought to make their way home. A generation
before that war, tradition held, a son of the hero Heracles, intent on reclaiming
what he represented as his birthright, made an abortive attempt at the isthmus
of Corinth to force an entry into the Peloponnesus by land; and, subsequently,
one of the hero’s great-grandsons is said to have failed in another attempt. Two
generations after the Trojan War, tradition reported, great-great-grandsons of
the hero finally managed to achieve the same end by less conventional means,
taking to the sea and bringing with them into their promised land a Dorian
host, riding on rafts across the narrowest part of the Corinthian Gulf. From
the heirs of those putatively left in charge by Heracles, they then wrested the