Towards the coast of the Saronic Gulf marched two hosts from Argos, under Deïphontes and Agaios, who transformed the old Ionian Epidaurus and Trœzen into Dorian towns; but from Epidaurus the march was continued to the isthmus, where, in the strong and important city of Corinth, whose citadel was the key of the whole peninsula, the series of Temenid settlements found its limit. These settlements unquestionably form the most brilliant part of the warlike march of the Dorians through the Peloponnesus. By the energy of these Dorians and their leaders of the race of Hercules, who must have joined in these undertakings in specially large numbers, all parts of the many sections into which the country was split up were successfully occupied, and the new Argos, stretching from the island of Cythera as far as the Attic frontiers, far exceeded the bounds of the modest settlements on the Pamisus and Eurotas. For even if the leaders of the armies had not everywhere founded new states, still those existing had all become homogeneous by the acceptance of a Dorian element, which formed the military and preponderating section of the population. This transformation had started from Argos, and consequently all these settlements stood in a filial relation to the mother city, so that we may regard Argos, Phlius, Sicyon, Trœzen, Epidaurus, and Corinth as a Dorian hexapolis forming a confederation like that in Caria. Moreover this organisation was not an entirely new one. In Achæan times Mycenæ had formed with Heræum the centre of the country; in the Heræum Agamemnon had received the oath of fealty from his vassals. This was why the goddess Hera [Juno] is said to have preceded the Temenidæ to Sicyon, when they sought to revive the union between the towns which had become estranged from one another. Thus here also the remodelling was connected with the ancient tradition. But now a central point for the confederacy was found in the worship of Apollo, which the Dorians had found established in Argos and had merely reconstituted, in the guise of the Delphic or Pythian god, through whose influence they had become an active people and under whose auspices they had hitherto been led. The towns sent their yearly offerings to the temple of Apollo Pythæus, which stood in Argos at the foot of the Larissa, but the mother city possessed the rights of a chief town as well as the government of the sanctuary. In the meantime the size of Argos and the splendour of her new foundations, constituted a dangerous superiority. For the extension of power implied its division, and this was in the highest degree increased by the natural peculiarities of the Argive territory, which is more broken than any other Peloponnesian country.