Argos, with its two neighbours Mycenæ and Tiryns, was in some respects unlike the other Greek communities. Elsewhere in Greece during the heroic age each community occupied the whole of a natural division of the country, and had its territory fenced round with natural barriers. In the Argolic plain three Achæan communities had found room to settle, exactly as in Italy many communities found room to settle in and around the plain of Latium: and thus the Argolic communities rather resembled the Latin cities than the Greek tribes. Their city walls were of exceptional strength, as the remains of them testify: their kings were richer and were exalted to a greater eminence above their subjects than the other Greek kings, for the palace of the king at Tiryns occupies nearly the whole of the upper citadel and is such as to demand a most prodigal expenditure of labour for its construction[49], and Agamemnon king of Mycenæ is represented by the poet of the Iliad as a powerful monarch. It cannot be doubted that the three cities had the same reasons for making their walls strong and their kings powerful as the Romans had in the days of Servius Tullius: they feared that they might be conquered by their neighbours, and hoped that they might themselves be the conquerors. [49] Professor Gardner, _New Chapters in Greek History_, pp. 96-101. After the Dorian conquest the three cities still continued to exist: Argos was the strongest of them, but Mycenæ acted independently of Argos so late as the year 480 B.C. in sending a contingent to fight against the Persians at Thermopylæ[50]. The great power of the Dorian monarchy was conspicuous in the reign of Pheidon, who at some time between 750 B.C. and 600 B.C. became so powerful that he was able to conduct an expedition from his own city in the east of the Peloponnesus to Olympia in the west and to deprive the Eleians by force of their prerogative of presiding over the Olympic festival[51]. He also established a hegemony or lordship over a number of Greek peoples in the neighbourhood of Argos, which had long been independent. The tradition of his conquest says simply that he "recovered the whole lot of Têmenus which had been broken up into many parts[52]." Têmenus, according to the legends of the Heracleids, was one of the leaders of the Dorians in their invasion of the Peloponnesus: and it seems that his "lot" must have included the tribes that lived at Cleonæ, Phlius, Sicyon, Epidaurus, Trœzen, and Ægina. Pheidon's conquest of these tribes was a remarkable achievement, since all of them were protected against Argos by mountain ranges or by sea: and it gave him such despotic authority over his own subjects at Argos that he is counted among the τύραννοι[53]. But it seems that he ought not, strictly speaking, to be reckoned among them, being unlike to the rest of them in two important particulars: first, that his despotic authority at Argos was no doubt necessary in order to enable Argos to keep control