their new country the Boeotians retained their national unity under the form of a league, in which no one city had authority over another, though in process of time Thebes grew so much greater than her neighbours that she exercised a marked preponderance over the other thirteen members of the confederation. Orchomenus, whose Minyan inhabitants had been subdued but not exterminated by the invaders, remained dependent on the league without being at first amalgamated with it. {1567} A second tribe who were expelled by the irruption of the Thessalians were the Dorians, a race whose name is hardly heard in Homer, and whose early history had been obscure and insignificant. They had till now dwelt along the western slope of Pindus. Swept on by the invaders, they crossed Mount Othrys, and dwelt for a time in the valley of the Spercheius and on the shoulders of Oeta. But the land was too narrow for them, and, after a generation had passed, the bulk of the nation moved southward to seek a wider home, while a small fraction only remained in the valleys of Oeta. Legends tell us that their first advance was made by the Isthmus of Corinth, and was repulsed by the allied states of Peloponnesus, Hyllus the Dorian leader having fallen in the fight by the hand of Echemus, King of Tegea. But the grandsons of Hyllus resumed his enterprise, and met with greater success. Their invasion was made, as we are told, in conjunction with their neighbours the Aetolians, and took the Aetolian port of Naupactus as its base. Pushing across the narrow strait at the mouth of the Corinthian Gulf, the allied hordes landed in Peloponnesus, and forced their way down the level country on its western coast, then the land of the Epeians, but afterwards to be known as Elis and Pisatis. This the Aetolians took as their share, while the Dorians pressed further south and east, and successively conquered Messenia, Laconia, and Argolis, destroying the Cauconian kingdom of Pylos and the Achaian states of Sparta and Argos. There can be little doubt that the legends of the Dorians pressed into a single generation the conquests of a long series of years. … It is highly probable that Messenia was the first seized of the three regions, and Argos the latest … but of the details or dates of the Dorian conquests we know absolutely nothing. Of the tribes whom the Dorians supplanted, some remained in the land as subjects to their newly found masters, while others took ship and fled over sea. The stoutest-hearted of the Achaians of Argolis, under Tisamenus, a grandson of Agamemnon, retired northward when the contest became hopeless, and threw themselves on the coast cities of the Corinthian Gulf, where up to this time the Ionic tribe of the Aegialeans had dwelt. The Ionians were worsted, and fled for refuge to their kindred in Attica, while