Here we find the late genealogist inventing a pedigree to connect the traditional families of the Argolid, Thebes and Cnossos with the eponymous heroes of Phœnicia, Cilicia and Egypt, and tracing them all from Poseidon. This seems to indicate that popular tradition believed all these families and peoples to have been connected, and that they were worshippers of the sea-god. Let us now turn to the Danaan pedigree. That the fifty daughters of Danaus were mythical admits of no doubt, and the same is true of their fifty cousins, but it is possible that tradition is correct in claiming that one of them, Hypermnestra, married her cousin and succeeded her father. They are succeeded by Abas, who is followed by Acrisius, and then again we get a daughter Danaë, who is succeeded by her son Perseus. This hero is said to have left many sons, but here the pedigree gets mixed. It seems more likely to my mind that Perseus was succeeded by Electryon, whose daughter Alcmene married her cousin Amphitryon, though later writers, accustomed to a more strictly patrilinear succession, made Amphitryon succeed his father Alcæus as king of Mycenæ. But the times were troubled, the Pelopids were conquering the Peloponnese and the succession failed. It is well to remember, though, that Perseus is said to have had a daughter Gorgophane, whose name may well be fictitious and that her son or grandson Tyndareus was father of Clytemnestra. It would seem that both Agamemnon and Ægistheus claimed to reign not only by right of conquest but jure uxoris. Hartland has well cited from the _Eumenides_ that “when Orestes, pursued by the Erinyes for his mother’s death, pleads that he is not of kin to her and wins by the casting vote of Athena, the Erinyes are startled and shocked on finding that even the gods decide against them, declaring that these, the younger gods, have over-ridden the old laws and unexpectedly plucked Orestes out of their hands.”[532] Cadmus is said to have married Harmonia, daughter of Ares, again a fictitious name for a Thracian maiden. He had four daughters and one son, but it is not the latter who succeeds him, but the son of his fourth daughter Agaue. The Bacchæ of Euripides seems to show a struggle between the claims of the priestly or divine son of Semele, the eldest daughter, and the more mundane and regal son of Agaue, the youngest. The claim of Polydorus, the only son, does not arise until Dionysus has been banished and Pentheus slain.