Return of the Heracleidae

Hyllus, who led the first abortive return of the Heraclidae, held by his father Hercules, with his mother Deianira and the centaur Nessus

The Return of the Heracleidae is an ancient Greek myth concerning the return of the descendants of the hero Heracles to the Peloponnese, Heracles's homeland, and their conquest of various realms in the region. In the myth, Heracles was assisted by the Dorians: the story served as an aetiological myth for the Dorian communities of the Peloponnese, particularly Sparta.

According to the myth, Heracles's children (the Heracleidae) were forced from the Peloponnese by Eurystheus, and settled in the northern Greek region of Thessaly, where Hyllus, Heracles's eldest son, formed an allegiance with the Dorians. The Heracleidae killed Eurystheus, with Athenian support and protection, but Hyllus's attempt to retake the Peloponnese ended in failure and his own death in battle. Following the advice of the Oracle of Delphi, Hyllus's great-grandson, Temenos, led his relatives in a successful invasion, fifty years later, with the help of the Dorians and Oxylus. Temenos then divided the kingdoms of the Peloponnese between himself (receiving Argos), his brother Cresphontes (who received Messenia), and Eurysthenes and Procles, the sons of his brother Aristodemus, who had been killed before the Heracleidae reached the Peloponnese. Eurysthenes and Procles jointly received the kingdom of Sparta, founding the city's dual royal lineage.

The myth is likely to have originated either in Sparta or in the Argolid, at the end of the Early Iron Age, and to have coalesced in its essential form by the fifth century BCE. It combined the originally unrelated stories of the Heracleidae and the Dorian migration into the Peloponnese. Over time, the distinctions between these two narratives were blurred, and the Heracleidae were sometimes imagined to have been Dorians themselves. Ancient Greeks believed the events of the myth to have occurred around the end of the age of heroes, shortly after the Trojan War.

The Return of the Heracleidae played an important ideological role in several Greek cities, particularly Sparta, where the city's kings claimed descent and legitimacy from the Heracleidae, and other aristocratic families believed themselves to share Heraclid ancestry. The story also served to assert Sparta's right to its territory in the Peloponnese, and to justify its conquest of the Messenia. In Athens, the protection shown to the exiled Heracleidae became a point of civic patriotism, and was invoked by orators, playwrights and the polymath Aristotle. Elsewhere, royal families in Macedonia, Argos, Messene, Lydia and Corinth were considered to be descendants of the Heracleidae, as was the Roman king Lucius Tarquinius Priscus.

Outline of the myth

According to the myth, the children of the hero Heracles (the Heracleidae) were driven after his death from their native Peloponnese by Eurystheus, Heracles's cousin, who is named as king variously of Argos, Mycenae or Tiryns. They settled in Trachis, in the northern Greek region of Thessaly. In one version of the story, Aegimius, the king of the Lapiths and ancestor of the Dorians, adopted Hyllus, Heracles's eldest son, and gave him a third of his kingdom; Hyllus subsequently became king of the Dorians after Aegimus's sons voluntarily pledged allegiance to him upon their father's death. The Heracleidae left Trachis after Eurystheus forced the local king, Ceyx, to expel them. Thereafter, they were taken in by the Athenians, either ruled by Theseus or his son Demophon, and allowed to settle in the town of Trikorythos near Marathon. Eurystheus attacked Athens in response, and was killed. In some versions, he was killed by Iolaus, Heracles's nephew; in another, Hyllus killed him at the Scironian Rocks on the Isthmus of Corinth as Eurystheus fled, while a third held that Eurystheus was captured alive and killed, despite the Athenians' protests, on the orders of Heracles's mother, Alcmene. According to the fifth-century poet Pindar, Hyllus and Aigimus founded the island city of Aegina, near Athens.

In one version of the myth, Atreus, Eurystheus's successor as king of Mycenae, sent a second army to fight the Heracleidae; Hyllus proposed single combat with any of Atreus's warriors, with the conditions that he would receive the kingdom of Mycenae if he won, and that the Heracleidae would leave the Peloponnese for fifty years if he lost. In this version, he was killed, and the surviving Heracleidae honoured his promise to withdraw. Another version had Hyllus and his brothers invade the Peloponnese, only to be forced to retreat by a plague. In a third version, Hyllus received a prophecy from of the Oracle of Delphi that the Heracleidae would be able to return to the Peloponnese "after the third harvest", and "by a narrow passage". He misinterpreted this as referring to the third year and the Isthmus of Corinth, and invaded Argos. There, he was killed in single combat by Echemus, king of Tegea, and the Heracleidae were forced to retreat to central Greece. Two further unsuccessful returns followed, led by Hyllus's son Cleodaeus and Cleodaeus's son Aristomachus.

Drawing of a Graeco-Roman engraved gemstone, showing the drawing of lots between Cresphontes, Eurysthenes and Procles

Hyllus's great-grandson, Temenos, received the same prophecy as Hyllus, but correctly interpreted it as meaning that the Heracleidae would return three generations after Hyllus received it, and the "narrow passage" as being the Gulf of Corinth. The Heracleidae built a fleet at Naupaktos, but it was destroyed, their army was hit by a famine, and Temenos's brother Aristodemus was killed (either by lightning or by the god Apollo), because one of the Heracleidae had killed a prophet. Temenos followed the oracle's instructions to make amends by offering a sacrifice and banishing the murderer for ten years, and was also told to seek out "a man with three eyes" to act as his guide. Returning from Delphi, Temenos met Oxylus, a one-eyed man riding a horse, and correctly interpreted that he was the three-eyed man of which the oracle had spoken. Accompanied by Oxylus, the Heracleidae rebuilt their ships and invaded the Peloponnese with the assistance of the Dorians; they defeated Tisamenus, the king of Mycenae, Argos and Sparta, and so conquered the Peloponnese, fifty years after Hyllus's withdrawal.

Temenos became king of Argos, while his brother Cresphontes became king of Messenia and Eurysthenes and Procles, the sons of Aristodemus, became kings of Sparta, founding that city's dual royal line. At least two versions of the story of the division of the Peloponnese are known: in one, Oxylus, who had received the kingdom of Elis, divided them, with the best kingdom of Argos going to Temenos as the eldest; in another, the younger brothers voluntarily gave Argos to Temenos, and assigned the remaining two kingdoms by lot. A version of the latter myth known in Athens and Ionia in the fifth century BCE held that Cresphontes cheated in the draw, which consisted of drawing lots from an urn filled with water. In the variation preserved by the second-century CE writer Pausanias, two clay lots were available, one dried in the sun and one dried by fire: Cresphontes persuaded Temenos to grant him the fire-dried lot, which was not dissolved by the water while the air-dried lot was, and therefore was granted first choice. In an alternative retelling made in the Bibliotheca, a mythological compendium dated to the first or second century CE, Cresphontes swapped his stone lot for a clod of earth, which dissolved in the water, and therefore left him with his desired Messenia after the other lots were drawn for Argos and Sparta.

Development during the classical period

Drawing by Eduard Gerhard of a late sixth-century BCE Greek amphora, showing Heracles (left) with Athena. Behind Heracles is a column of the Doric order; behind Athena is one of the Ionic order, showing the association between Heracles and Dorian identity.

The myth of the Return of the Heracleidae appears to have originated at the end of the Early Iron Age, either in Sparta or the Argolid, and to have combined earlier mythic traditions concerning the Dorians and the descendants of Heracles. At least initially, the stories of the Dorian migration and the Return of the Heracleidae formed separate traditions, which were combined by the time of Herodotus (that is, the mid-fifth century BCE) at the latest.

The myth is first attested in the work of the seventh-century Spartan poet Tyrtaeus, who wrote of the Spartans as having arrived in the land of Laconia from Erineus, in northern Greece, with the Heracleidae. William Allan suggests that the part of the myth where the Heracleidae seek refuge in Athens was developed later, as a means by which Athens could appropriate the story and the prestige associated with the connection to Heracles. The episode with Ceyx, in which Eurystheus forces the Heracleidae to leave Trachis, is first attested in the work of Hecataeus of Miletus around 500 BCE. The story of the Heracleidae appears to have existed in its essential aspects by the fifth century BCE, though the fullest surviving treatments of it are that of the Bibliotheca and of Diodorus Siculus, who wrote in the first century BCE.

Ancient Greeks dated the Return of the Heracleidae around the end of the age of heroes (roughly the Late Bronze Age or the late second millennium BCE), shortly after the Trojan War. The fifth-century historians Thucydides and Herodotus dated it to eighty years after the fall of Troy. Gregory Nagy has suggested that the story of Cresphontes and his fire-dried lot may be an echo of Bronze Age Mycenaean administrative practices, by which goods were recorded upon clay tablets and sealings.

The term used for the Heraclidae's return by Herodotus is kathodos, which can mean both "descent" and "return from exile". There were several versions of the myth, current in different Doric communities around the Greek world: all held that the Heracleidae had been given divine sanction to come into their kingdoms, though the narrative of return-from-exile appears to have been restricted to those in the Peloponnese, and to have been particularly prominent in Sparta. By the sixth century BCE, the ethnic divisions between the Heracleidae and the Dorians were often elided, such that the Heracleidae and Heracles himself were often imagined to be Dorians, and the Dorian invasion of the Peloponnese to be conceived of as a homeward journey. Similarly, the term "Return of the Heracleidae" was often used to refer to the mythical migration of the Dorians (the "Dorian invasion") into the Peloponnese.

Role in civic identity

In Sparta

The narrative of the Return of the Heracleidae was particularly important in Sparta, where it formed the city's foundation myth. The two Spartan royal lines – the Agiad and Eurypontid dynasties – claimed legitimacy through their descent from Heracles into the classical period. Other, non-royal aristocratic lineages, such as that of the fifth-century general Lysander, also claimed Heraclid descent as a mark of distinction, and Spartan aristocrats in general could be referred to as the "progeny of Heracles", though most Spartans did not consider themselves his direct descendants.

The version of the myth used in Sparta seems to have been a pastiche of various often-contradictory mythical narratives: the historian Nigel Kennell has called it "drastically underwritten" and likely to have developed in Laconia itself. Functionally, the involvement of the Heracleidae combined with the story of the Dorian invasion to assert Sparta's right to its territory in the Peloponnese, since the Dorians themselves had no ancestral connection to the Peloponnese. The accounts of Cresphontes's cheating in the drawing of lots, resulting in his rule over Messenia, has also been considered as a means of legitimising or excusing Sparta's conquest of the region in the historical period.

According to Herodotus, the myth played a prominent role in a debate before the Battle of Plataea in 479 BCE, where the Tegeans and Athenians argued over which should take the right-hand position – to which was accorded the greatest prestige – in the line of the Spartan-led force. In Herodotus's narrative, the Tegeans drew upon the victory of Echemus over Hyllus to demonstrate their ability to defend the Peloponnese from invaders, while the Athenians invoked the protection given to the Heracleidae by their ancestors: the Spartans decided in favour of the Athenians.

In Athens and elsewhere

In Athens, the myth became a focus of civic patriotism: the classicist Matthew Leigh has called it, along with the story of Theseus's recovery of the bodies of the Seven against Thebes, one of Athens's proudest stories. In the fourth century BCE, it was widely cited by orators and was mentioned as a paradigmatic story of Athens's glorious history by Aristotle. The myth was the subject of three plays by the fifth-century Athenian playwright Euripides: the extant Heracleidae ('Children of Heracles') and the lost Temenos and Temenidai ('Descendants of Temenos'). It may also have featured in now-lost epic poems known to Herodotus. The version of the myth where Eurystheus is captured alive and killed on Alcmene's orders may have been invented by Euripides.

The Temenid royal dynasty of Macedon also used the myth in their aetiological narratives, claiming descent via Temenos, as did the Temenid dynasty of Argos. Similar claims were made by the rulers of Messene. According to Herodotus, an ancient dynasty of kings of Lydia, beginning with Agron, were also descended from the Heracleidae. The Bacchiadae dynasty, which ruled Corinth until around 657 BCE, also claimed Heraclid descent, and were said to have been the ancestors of the kings of Lynkestis, a region of Upper Macedonia, and of the Roman king Lucius Tarquinius Priscus.

Bibliography

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