[231] Pausan. vii. 1, 1-3. Herodotus also mentions (ii. 97) Archander, son of Phthius and grandson of Achæus, who married the daughter of Danaus. Larcher (Essai sur la Chronologie d’Hérodote, ch. x. p. 321) tells us that this cannot be the Danaus who came from Egypt, the father of the fifty daughters, who must have lived two centuries earlier, as may be proved by chronological arguments: this must be another Danaus, according to him.
Strabo seems to give a different story respecting the Achæans in Peloponnêsus: he says that they were the original population of the peninsula, that they came in from Phthia with Pelops, and inhabited Laconia, which was from them called Argos Achaicum, and that on the conquest of the Dôrians, they moved into Achaia properly so called, expelling the Iônians therefrom (Strabo, viii p. 365). This narrative is, I presume, borrowed from Ephorus.
Euripidês also deviates very materially from the Hesiodic genealogy in respect to these eponymous persons. In the drama called Iôn, he describes Iôn as son of Kreüsa by Apollo, but adopted by Xuthus: according to him, the real sons of Xuthus and Kreüsa are Dôrus and Achæus,[232]—eponyms of the Dôrians and Achæans in the interior of Peloponnêsus. And it is a still more capital point of difference, that he omits Hellên altogether—making Xuthus an Achæan by race, the son of Æolus, who is the son of Zeus.[233] This is the more remarkable, as in the fragments of two other dramas of Euripidês, the Melanippê and the Æolus, we find Hellên mentioned both as father of Æolus and son of Zeus.[234] To the general public even of the most instructed city of Greece, fluctuations and discrepancies in these mythical genealogies seem to have been neither surprising nor offensive.
[234] See the Fragments of these two plays in Matthiae’s edition; compare Welcker, Griechisch. Tragöd. v. ii. p. 842. If we may judge from the Fragments of the Latin Melanippê of Ennius (see Fragm. 2, ed. Bothe), Hellên was introduced as one of the characters of the piece.
THE ÆOLIDS, OR SONS AND DAUGHTERS OF ÆOLUS.
If two of the sons of Hellên, Dôrus and Xuthus, present to us families comparatively unnoticed in mythical narrative, the third son, Æolus, richly makes up for the deficiency. From him we pass to his seven sons and five daughters, amidst a great abundance of heroic and poetical incident.