Appendix Onetis (a Thessalian district on the Malian Gulf) during the reign
of Deucalion, but under Dorus moved to the lands just below
Olympus, and from there was driven to the Pindus. The Do-
rians worked their way back, however, to Dryopis (this place,
later called Doris, was on the southern coast of the Malian
Gulf, and so not far from where the Dorians had started off on
their perigrinations). It was from Dryopis that they came to
the Peloponnese.
Throughout most of classical antiquity, this rather colorless
and impersonal story was overshadowed by a more interesting
tale: the story of the Return of the Heraclidae. According to
this story, the progeny of Heracles were expelled from the Pel-
oponnese by Eurystheus. Hyllus attempted to lead them back,
but the attempt ended in the Heraclids' defeat and Hyllus's
death. Thereupon the Heraclidae settled down in central
Greece until Delphic Apollo informed them that the time had
come for their return to their ancestral lands. Brigaded in three
divisions, the Heraclidae conquered most of the Peloponnese:
Messenia fell to Cresphontes, Laconia to Aristodemus, and the
Argolid to Temenos. The story was an old one, and Herodotus
accepted at least parts of it.
Thucydides saw the two stories as facets of the same event.
In the eightieth year after the Trojan War, he said (1.12.3),
the Dorians "together with the Heraclidae" took over the Pel-
oponnese. Taking their cue from Thucydides, chronographers
fixed the date to the eightieth year after the Trojan War, being
the 329th year before the First Olympiad (i 104 B.C.).
In the first half of the nineteenth century, critical history
disengaged the two stories and threw out the story of the Re-
turn of the Heraclidae as so much fiction. Herodotus's pedes-
trian story of the migration, on the other hand, seemed worthy
of respect. George Grote accepted the tradition of a Dorian
migration from Doris. The migration was by sea and came to
the Argolid. From there, the Dorians eventually expanded to
Laconia and Messenia. But although Grote accepted Herodo-
tus's account, he did not assign a great deal of importance to
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