ruler of all Argolis, but after him the state broke up into its parts. Several vassal princes then usurped the sovereignty, and for a time there existed in Argolis partly principalities and partly aristocracies. But Argos thereby became so weak as to be unable to defend the western coast of the Argolic gulf as far as Malea against Lacedaemon; Cythera also was lost, and not even the territory of Thyrea could be maintained. At the same time the Spartans extended their dominion farther and farther; the nominal dependence of Corinth and Sicyon had ceased long before, as well as that of the towns in the Acte and of Aegina, which had likewise belonged to Argos. Here we have another evidence showing that the Homeric Catalogue was composed after the Doric period, for it represents Aegina as belonging to the eastern part of Argos; Aegina was naturally foreign to Argos, and became connected with it only as a Doric colony. The country about Argos is a plain, fully deserving the name πολυδίψιον Ἄργος which it bears in Homer, for in the autumn it usually has no water at all. This is the natural consequence of the physical structure of Peloponnesus. In the interior of Arcadia the waters accumulate, and there are in that part large natural reservoirs, as, for example, the lake of Mantinea, which discharges its waters through passages in the mountains which separate Arcadia from Argolis, into the plain of Argos. These passages, however, are not always open, nay, people in the Morea assert, that the waters find their way through them only once in five years, and then plentifully supply the rivers and springs of Argolis. This alleged regularity is probably fabulous. But on the whole, the territory of Argolis, in its widest extent, as far as the northern slope of the hills, is scantily supplied with water; in the neighbourhood of Sicyon there are some small streams, whence the plain there is rich and fertile. The whole of the central part of Argolis, however, that is, the hills between Mycenae and Tiryns on the one side, and the towns of the Acte on the other, which are traversed by the pass of Tretos, consists of very barren and rocky heights, which admit to some extent of the cultivation of olives only in the lower valleys. Argos, therefore, when confined to Mycenae and Tiryns, was but a weak state, a circumstance which, together with the recollection of its former greatness, placed it, in later times, in a false position.