In the year 1485 B. C., an Egyptian named Danaus, accompanied by a party of his countrymen, arrived at Argos, the inhabitants of which must have been at that period in an exceedingly rude state, since it is said that he excited their gratitude so much by teaching them to dig wells, when the streams from which they were supplied with water were dried up with the heat, that they elected him as their king. Fully more than a century after this period (about 1350 B. C.), Pelops, the son of a king of Phrygia, a country in Asia Minor, settled in that part of Greece which was afterwards called from him Peloponnesus, or the island of Pelops, where he married the daughter of one of the native princes, whom he afterwards succeeded on the throne. In the course of his long reign, he found means to strengthen and greatly extend his influence in Greece, by forming matrimonial alliances between various branches of his own house and the other royal families of the Peloponnesus. Agamemnon, king of Mycenæ, in Argolis, who was, according to the poet Homer, the commander-in-chief of the Greeks at the siege of Troy, and Menelaus, king of Sparta, on account of whose wrongs that war was undertaken, were descended from this Phrygian adventurer. Hercules, a Theban prince, was another of the descendants of Pelops. The numerous and extraordinary feats of strength and valor of Hercules excited the admiration of his cotemporaries, and being afterwards exaggerated and embellished by the poets, caused him at length to be regarded as a person endowed with supernatural powers, and even to be worshiped as a god. Theseus succeeded his father on the Athenian throne (1234 B. C.), and by his wise regulations greatly consolidated the strength and increased the prosperity of his kingdom. Cecrops, the founder of Athens, had divided Attica into twelve districts, each of which possessed its own magistracy and judicial tribunals. As the country advanced in wealth and population, these districts became less closely connected with each other, and at the period of the accession of Theseus, they could hardly be regarded in any other light than as so many little independent communities, whose perpetual disputes kept the whole district in broils and confusion. But Theseus had influence enough with all parties to obtain their consent to the abolition of the separate jurisdictions, and to the fixing of all civil and judicial authority in the capital. He at the same time voluntarily resigned into their hands a portion of his own power. Having divided the people into three classes――the nobles, the artisans, and the cultivators of the soil――he intrusted the first of these with the administration of public affairs, and the dispensation of justice, while he conferred upon every freeman or citizen, without distinction of class, a vote in the legislative assemblies. The command of the army, and the presidency of the state, he retained in his own person.