El retorno de los heraclidas

El Retorno de los Heraclidas
ANTONIO LÓPEZ EIRE

RESUMEN: Un detenido examen de las leyendas que hacen referencia al «retorno de los Heraclidas», nos lleva a considerar que una de las estirpes griegas —los dorios— no se mantuvo alejada desde un principio de los restantes linajes helénicos. No parece pueda deducirse de la llamada «invasión doria» el consiguiente derrumbamiento del mundomicénico. El pertinente estudio de las distintas manifestaciones de la cultura permite afirmar que incluso el dialecto dorio-nordoccidental no se desarrolló independientemente de los demás dialectos griegos. En fin, se termina diciendo que junto a eteocretenses y cidones, cohabitan en Creta los dorios y aqueos.

SUMMARY: The so- called Dorian Invasion is one of the most controversial subjects of thehistory of ancient Greece. As it is well known, Ephorus regarded this event as the first historical fact in the. history of Greece. But the process in itself was expounded by the Greeks in the form of a myth called by them «The Return of the Heraclids». The first complete account of the «Return of the Heraclids» is given by Isocrates in his Archidamus, where also the term first appears. The story isrecounted by the Spartan king Arohidamus. He provides us with a detailed description of the adventures of the Heraclids from the death of Heracles till the conquest of the Péloponnèse by his heirs. The main purpose of the speech given by king Archidamus is that of proving the fairness of Dorian (and partly Spartan) dominion over the Péloponnèse. The Heraclids, being descendants of the heroicwarrior Heracles, have a right to keep Messenia under their control and to inhabit the country they dwell in. The same doctrine of the foundation of three Dorian kingdoms by the Heraclids is put forward by Plato in The haws.. The most extensive account of the «Return of the Heraclids» is given by Apollodorus in his work named The Library. In this version of the legend the Dorian invasion isemphatically spoken of as a return (kâthodos). Though Heracles was born at Thebes, he regarded Mycenae and Tiryns, the kingdom of his forefathers, as his true home. The word kâthodos used by Apollodorus is regularly employed by Greek writers to refer to the return of exiles from banishment. According to Apollodorus, the Heraclids made a first attempt at invasion of the Péloponnèse. As they did not succeed,they retired to Marathon and stayed there for fifty years. To sum up: The «Return of the Heraclids» is the story of the invasion and conquest of the Péloponnèse by the Dorians, who were a Greek people and who were always in contact with other Greeks during their exile. From the point of wiew of Archaeology —as J. Chadwick put it— the Dorians do not exist. They remain invisible. There is not aclear-cut division between Submycenaean and Proto^Geometric Style. There is not a sharp line of division at the end of the Mycenaean age, that could be interpreted as the result of the Dorian occupation of the Péloponnèse after the Mycenaean collapse. So we only have one way of answering the question of where the Dorian were before the end of the Mycenaean period: dialectological evidence.

288Antonio

López

Eire

Every dialect has sets of linguistic features that can be classified according to their relationship with the parent-language. So, for instance, -ti of some Greek dialects is an old feature; we call it an archaism. On the contrary, the shift of -ti to -si shared by some Greek dialects is an innovation. There is another type of dialectal feature: the election, that is,the pressence in a dialect of one of the two or more possibilities offered by the parent-language. For instance: Proto-Greek had both poti and proti, katá and meta; but some dialects have one form and others have the other one. It is quite clear that if the Dorian dialect was spoken outside of Greece, at some distance from the other Greek dialects, we could expect to see in it some innovation not...