According to these presumptions, Danaus is contemporary with Dardanus[631]: and also is just such a person as Homer’s poetic use of the name Δαναοὶ would lead us to expect; one who came from abroad, and is on that account kept in majestic shadow; one who founded a throne, but did not introduce a race: one who may have given his people the name of Δαναοὶ, as Cadmus gave that of Καδμεῖοι, for the time while his dynasty was in power, but whose name disappeared, together with its sway. We have, it will be remembered in Homer, no Homeric legends of the period of the Danaids, so that we do not know whether the name Δαναοὶ was then in any degree national or not. According to the post-Homeric tradition, Danaus was an Egyptian[632], brother of Ægyptus. He migrated into Greece, and became king of Argos. Acrisius and Prœtus were reputed to be his great-grandsons. In Homer, too, we have an Acrisius and a Prœtus: but Prœtus is contemporary with Bellerophon, two generations before the _Troica_, so that he is later by four generations than Acrisius, and later by at least four than Danaus. The more recent tradition, contradicting Homer positively in this, as in so many instances, carries Prœtus back to the time of Acrisius, and then, paying some respect to the interval between Prœtus and Danaus, gives compensation by thrusting Danaus himself three generations further back. Of the posterity of the Homeric Prœtus we hear nothing, and with him the Danaid line, prolonged in a junior branch, may have expired. Tradition places him on the throne of Tiryns. His holding a separate sovereignty in Argolis is not of itself in conflict with the Homeric account of the Perseids, who reigned at Mycenæ; because we find in Argos itself a separate sovereignty under Diomed at the epoch of the _Troica_. But the terms used are peculiar. Prœtus ruled over Ἀργεῖοι; πολὺ φέρτερος ἦεν Ἀργείων· Ζεὺς γάρ οἱ ὑπὸ σκηπτρῷ ἐδάμασσεν[633]. The account of Eurystheus in the Nineteenth Book may, however, imply that he was king of all the Ἀργεῖοι: and at first sight there is some conflict here, because both Eurystheus and Prœtus may be said to date two generations before the _Troica_. The solution is probably as follows. The passion of Antea, wife of Prœtus, for Bellerophon, suggests that her husband was more advanced in life than Bellerophon, whom, as the grandfather of Glaucus, we may take as justly representing in time the second generation before the war. On the other hand, as Eurystheus was the contemporary of Hercules, and Hercules had a son, as well as grandsons in the war, we may assume Eurystheus to have been junior to the generation, as Prœtus was its senior; so that they need not have been contemporary princes.