3. There is hardly any part of the traditional history of Greece whose real sources are so little known to us as the expedition of the Heraclidæ. No one can fail to perceive that it possesses the same mythical character as the Trojan war; and yet we are deprived of that which renders the examination of a mythical narrative so instructive, viz. the traditional lore scattered in such abundance throughout the ancient epic poems. This event, however, early as it was, lay without the range of the epic poetry; and therefore, whenever circumstances connected with it were mentioned, they must have been introduced either accidentally or in reference to some other subject. In no one large class of epic poems was this event treated at length, neither by the cyclic poets, nor the authors of the Νόστοι. In the Ἠοῖαι attributed to Hesiod, it appears only to have been alluded to in a few short passages.(189) Herodotus nevertheless mentions poets who related the migration of the Heraclidæ and Dorians into Laconia.(190) Perhaps these belonged to the class who carried on the mythical fables genealogically, as Cinæthon the Laconian, and also Asius, who celebrated the descent of Hercules, and appears, from the character of his poems, to have also commemorated his descendants.(191) Or they may have been the _historical poets_, such as Eumelus the Corinthian, although those alluded to by Herodotus cannot have composed a separate poetical history (as the former did of Corinth); since they would doubtless have followed the national tradition of Sparta; and this, with respect to the first princes of the Heraclidæ, differed from the accounts of all the poets with which Herodotus was acquainted, and was not the general tradition of Greece.(192) And doubtless many such local traditions were preserved amongst particular nations, concerning an event which for a long time determined the condition of Peloponnesus. Thus the Tegeatans(193) celebrated the combat of Echemus their general with Hyllus. Whether the early historians collected these accounts from oral record, or whether they derived them from the poets above mentioned (although the latter is more in their manner), cannot be determined; for there are only extant two fragments of these writers concerning the Heraclidæ, one of Hecatæus, the other of Pherecydes, which connect immediately with the death of Hercules, and therefore do not prove that these authors wrote any continuous account of the history of this migration. The early tradition received a fuller development in the Attic drama; but it was unavoidably represented in a very partial view. The Heraclidæ of Æschylus, and the Iolaus of Sophocles might, like the Heraclidæ of Euripides, have had on the whole the tendency to celebrate those merits which the Athenians are made to commend in Herodotus,(194) even before the battle of Platæa, viz., their good offices towards the Heraclidæ, at the time when they took refuge in Attica. The last-named tragedian, in his Temenidæ, Archelaus, and Cresphontes, went further into the history of the Doric states, and descended lower into the historical period, than any poet before his time; his reason having, perhaps, been, the exhaustion of the legitimate mythical materials.(195) Now these Attic tragedians manifestly took for their basis the narrative given by Apollodorus, himself an Athenian, as may be shown by some particular circumstances. Perhaps Ephorus rested more upon the earlier poets and historians, as far as we are acquainted with their statements; but his narrative, even if it were extant, could, no more than those of the former, be considered as proceeding from a critical examination; since, in the first place, from a total misapprehension of the character of tradition, he forced everything into history, and then endeavoured to restore the deficiencies of oral narrative by probable reasoning; of the fallaciousness of which method we will bring forward some proofs.