The Dorians were one of the Greek clans pushed down from further north into central Greece in prehistoric times. They have left, as the memorial of this period, their name attached to little Doris wedged in between Parnassus and Mount Œta. When they were impelled to move still further south, whether by external pressure or the desire to send out colonies, the Achæans already held the land approach to the Peloponnesus and also the littoral of Achæa on the opposite side of the Corinthian Gulf. They were thus forced to take to the sea, and the Dorian settlements in Crete, Thera, Melos, and Asia Minor seem to have been followed by Dorian invasions of the Peloponnesus from the south and east, especially in Laconia and Argolis. In Laconia the invaders established themselves as conquerors and retained their own character almost unchanged, while in Argolis they amalgamated with the people already in possession. In readjusting pedigrees it was more agreeable to native pride to assume that these invaders were themselves of good old Peloponnesian stock, rather than foreign Dorians, and incidentally to localize the spreading fame of Heracles. Both of these objects were provided for in Argolis when Heracles proved to be of the Perseid line, the original and most distinguished Argive dynasty. Under his grandchildren the invaders merely came back to their own. Thus the Dorian invasions came to be described by the senseless and confusing name of the Return of the Heracleidæ. With this event is perhaps to be associated the sudden destruction of Mycenæ and Tiryns by fire and the reinstatement of Argos and the Larisa citadel as supreme. By way of acquiring the chief poet as well as the chief hero of Greece, Argos claimed, with other cities, to be the birthplace of Homer—an echo, doubtless, of the dimly remembered sagas of Achæan Argos in Thessaly. In reality, Argolis, like other Dorian cantons, contributed more subject matter for poets than poetry itself. Yet it was not wholly parasitical. It partially balanced the Dorian debt by sending to Athens two poet-musicians whose activity cannot be justly appraised from the meagre fragments that have come down to us. The Dorian contributions to music must be kept in mind. The Argives, we are told, furnished many of the famous musicians of Greece.