The subsequent prevalence of the Æolian as compared with the Achæan name, (the Hellenic, however, overlying and soon absorbing both,) appears to point to one of two suppositions. Either there was an original Æolian tribe, which has escaped notice altogether in Homer, as the Dorians have all but escaped it: or else, and more probably, it may have happened that part at least of these Æolian houses held their ground in Greece, while the Achæan name, which had been elevated by the political predominance of the Pelopid sovereigns, collapsed upon the loss of that predominance. It was to be expected that the name should share in the downfall of the race, when the Heraclid and Dorian invasion expelled the bearers of it from the seat of their power, and reduced them first to be fugitives, and then to settle in a mere strip of the Peloponnesus; a single region of narrow scope, and, as is remarked by Polybius[740] after many centuries, of small weight and influence, which from them was called Achæa. The fact that the Dorian name is all but unknown to Homer, while the Achæan one is at its zenith, not only heroically, as in the Iliad, but in the every day familiar use of Ithaca throughout the Odyssey, is to me one of several strong presumptions, not countervailed by any evidence of equal strength, that Homer could not have lived to see that great revolution, which so completely effaced the ethnical landmarks, and altered the condition, of Southern Greece. _The Heraclids in Homer._ There is certainly a striking analogy between the relation of the Æolid houses named in Homer to the afterwards prevalent and powerful Æolian race, and that of the Heraclid families, also named by him, to the Dorian race, which in like manner grew from obscurity in the Homeric period to such great after-celebrity. Hercules himself appears before us in the ancient legend as the great Dorian hero, ‘everywhere paving the road for his people and their worship, and protecting them from other races[741].’ The only Heraclids mentioned nominally by Homer are Tlepolemus, Pheidippus, Antiphus; and there are others without names specified[742]; none of these, or of the Greeks of the expedition, are called Dorians, while, again, none of the Heraclids of Homer are called by the Achæan or Æolid names. They may have been Dorian houses, like the Æolid houses; and the name may have become tribal afterwards, when they rose to power. The tradition of the reception of certain Heraclids in Attica appears to have been recognised by the Lacedæmonians in the historic ages[743], and in the supposition of a friendship thus established, we may perhaps find the true explanation of the Decelean privilege mentioned by Herodotus[744].