ABSTRACT
Deucalion’s son Hellen was the mythical ancestor of the Hellenic race; for the nymph Orseis was said to have borne him three sons who in their turn begot the three main branches of the Greek people: Aeolus, the founder of the Aeolians, Xuthus, ancestor of the Achaeans and Ionians, and Dorus, from whom sprang the Dorians (in his play the lon, however, Euripides makes Dorus the son of Xuthus and Creusa daughter of Erechtheus, a genealogy that enhances the status of the Ionians, and so of the Athenians, who came of their stock). The traditional home of the Dorians, in Doris, to the north of Mount Parnassus, probably reflects the historical fact of their occupation of northern Greece before they invaded the Pelopon nese and Crete in the twelfth and succeeding centuries before Christ. They claimed alliance with the Heraclids, the descendants of Heracles, who supposedly had helped the early Dorian king Aegimius to take the land of the Lapiths, Thessaly.
