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304 HISTORY OF GREECE. about them to venture upon any historical guesses. But respect- ing the Dorians, it may perhaps be possible, by examining the first historical situation in which they are presented to us, to offer some conjectures as to the probable circumstances under which they arrived. The legendary narrative of it has already been given in the Crst chapter of this volume, that great mythical event called the Return of the Children of Herakles, by which the first establishment of the Dorians in the promised land of Peloponnesus was explained to the full satisfaction of Grecian faith. One single armament and expedition, acting by the special direction of the Delphian god, and conducted by three brothers, lineal descendants of the principal Achajo-Dorian heroes through Hyllus, (the eponymus of the principal tribe,) the national heroes of the preexisting population vanquished and expelled, and the greater part of the peninsula both acquired and parti- tioned at a stroke, the circumstances of the partition adjusted to the historical relations of Laconia and Messenia, the friend- ly power of -(Etolian Elis, with its Olympic games as the bond of union in Peloponnesus, attached to this event as an appendage, in the person of Oxylus, all these particulars compose a narra- tive well calculated to impress the retrospective imagination of a Greek. They exhibit an epical fitness and sufficiency which it would be unseasonable to impair by historical criticism. The Alexandrine chronology sets down a period of 328 years from the Return of the Herakleids to the first Olympiad (1104 B.C. -776 B. c,), a period measured by the lists of the kings of Sparta, on the trustworthiness of which some remarks have already been offered. Of these 328 years, the first 250, at the least, are altogether barren of facts ; and even if we admitted them to be historical, we should have nothing to recount except a succession of royal names. Being unable either to guarantee the entire list, or to discover any valid test for discriminating the historical and the non-historical items, I here enumerate the Lacedaemonian kings as they appear in Mr. Clinton's Fasti Hel- lenici. There were two joint kings at Sparta, throughout nearly all the historical time of independent Greece, deducing their descent from Herakles through Eurysthenes and Prokles, the twin sons of Aristodemus ; the latter being one of those three