Thus the whole of Arcadia consisted of a numerous group of municipal and rural cantons. It was only the former which could attain historical importance, and among them especially Tegea, which lying as it did in the most fertile part of the great Arcadian plateau, must from the earliest times have assumed something of the position of a capital city. Thus it was a Tegeatic king, Echemus, the “steadfast,” who is said to have prevented the Dorians from entering the peninsula. Yet the Tegeatæ never succeeded in giving a unity to the whole island. Its natural conformation was too multi-form, too diversified, and too much cut up by high mountain ridges into numerous and sharply defined portions for it to be able to attain to a common territorial history. It was only certain forms of worship, with which customs and institutions were bound up, that were universal among the whole Arcadian people. These were, in the north country the worship of Artemis Hymnia, and in the south that of Zeus Lycæus, on the Lycæum, whose summit had been honoured as the holy mountain of Arcadia from primeval Pelasgian times. The country was in this condition when the Pelopidæ founded their states; and so it still remained when the Dorians invaded the peninsula. A wild, impracticable mountain country, thickly populated by a sturdy people, Arcadia offered little prospect of easy success to races in search of territory, and could not detain them from their attempts on the river plains of the southern and western districts. According to the legend they were granted a free passage through the Arcadian fields. Nothing was changed except that the Arcadians were pushed farther and farther back from the sea, and therefore driven farther and farther from the advance Hellenic civilisation. If we take a glance at the peninsula as a whole, and the political government which, in consequence of the immigration, it acquired for all time, we shall find, first, the interior persisting in its former condition unshaken, secondly, three districts, Lacedæmon, Messenia, and Argos, which had undergone a thorough metamorphosis directly due to the immigrating races; and finally the two strips of land along the north and west coasts, which had been left untouched by the Dorians, but in part were resettled by the ancient tribes whom the Dorians displaced, as was the case with Triphylia and Achæa, and in part transformed by arrivals of another kind, as happened at Elis.