6. After this battle, won by the aid of the Athenians, the Heraclidæ are said (and with good reason, as they were assisted by the Athenians) to have obtained possession of all Peloponnesus, and to have ruled undisturbed for one year (or some fixed period); at the expiration of which, a pestilence (like a tragical catastrophe) drove them back again to Attica. The mythologists make use of this time to send Tlepolemus the Heraclide to Rhodes, in order that he may arrive there before the Trojan war. Of all this, however, Pherecydes could have known nothing, as he relates that Hyllus, having conquered Eurystheus, went to Thebes,(205) without subduing Peloponnesus, and there with the other Heraclidæ formed a settlement near the gate of Electra, a circumstance which we shall advert to hereafter.(206) In Peloponnesus, however, according to the traditions chronologically arranged, Eurystheus was succeeded by the Pelopidæ, who accordingly appear as the expellers of the legitimate sovereigns of the race of Perseus.(207) Whether any such circumstance was known to the early poets is very much to be doubted; but it is at least clear, that in this case we are not in possession of the real tradition itself, but of scientific combinations of it. Against these new sovereigns were directed the expeditions of the Heraclidæ, of which it is generally stated that there were three. The account given of them follows the general idea of an entire dependence of the Dorians on the Delphian oracle;(208) but the misconception of its injunctions, which embarrasses and perplexes the whole question, may, we think, be attributed entirely to the invention of the Athenians. The oracle mentioned the _third fruit_, and the _narrow passage by sea_ (στενυγρὰ), as the time and way of the promised return, which the Athenians falsely interpreted to mean the third _year_, and the _Isthmus of Corinth_. But the account given in Apollodorus, nearly falling into Iambic or Trochaic metre, leaves no doubt that he took his account of the oracle from the Attic tragedians,(209) as was remarked above. Deceived by these predictions, Hyllus forced his way into Peloponnesus in the third year, and found at the Isthmus the Arcadians, Ionians, and Achæans of the peninsula already assembled. In a single combat with Echemus the son of Aëropus, the prince of Tegea, Hyllus fell, and was buried in Megara; upon which the Heraclidæ promised not to renew the attempt for fifty or one hundred years from that time.(210) Here every one will recognise the battle of the Tegeate with the Hyllean as an ancient tradition. But in the arrangement, by which it was contrived that the expeditions of the Heraclidæ should not be placed during the Trojan war and the youth of Orestes, we do not hesitate to suspect the industry of ancient systematic mythologists.