If, then, neither of the prior dynasties of Danaus and Perseus reigned over all Greece, it is unlikely that either of them could give a name to the whole nation: though they might give a name to the part of the country which, having in their time been particularly famous and powerful, became under the Pelopids a metropolis, supreme throughout the rest of the country; and whose people then not only took the name of Ἀχαιοὶ for itself, but extended it over the whole of Greece. _Use of the Danaan and Argeian names poetical._ It is thus more than probable that the scope of the name Danai, (if we are to assume that it was then a name in actual use,) under the Danaids, and of the name Ἀργεῖοι under the Perseids, was local, and confined in the main to Eastern Peloponnesus, where those princes ruled; with the addition of any other parts of the country, over which they might for the time have extended their power. And if so, then we have to suppose that Homer, having received the traditions of the Danaan and Argeian princes as having been at the head in their own time of Greek history or legend, gave to the nation by way of a poetical name, but of a poetical name only, the appellation which their subjects respectively had borne, and which had never before been, and never became by any other title than his poetical authority, applicable to all the Greeks. The Achæan name, on the other hand, differs from these, first, in denoting the extension of a particular race, though not over the whole country, yet through very many of its parts, and secondly, in the fact that the ruling house of those who bore the name enjoyed a real political supremacy over both the continent and the islands. So that it became the most legitimate exponent of Greek nationality, until it had lost both its extension and its power; the one by compression of its principal tribes into a narrow space: the other by the transfer of its political prerogatives to the great Dorian family of the Spartan kings, after the conquest of the Heraclidæ. When the Achæans had ceased to predominate, there could be no reason why their name should remain stamped upon their brethren, who boasted of the same descent, and who had attained to greater force.