The Return of the Herakleidai is an ancient Greek myth concerning the return of the descendants of the hero Herakles (the Herakleidai) to the Peloponnese, Herakles's homeland, and their conquest of various realms in the region. In the myth, Herakles 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, Herakles's children were forced from the Peloponnese by Herakles's cousin and enemy Eurystheus; they settled in the northern Greek region of Thessaly, where Hyllos, Herakles's eldest son, formed an allegiance with the Dorians. The Herakleidai killed Eurystheus, with Athenian support and protection, but Hyllos's attempt to retake the Peloponnese ended in failure and his own death in battle. Following the advice of the Oracle of Delphi, Hyllos's great-grandson, Temenos, led his relatives in a successful invasion, fifty years later, with the help of the Dorians and Oxylos. Temenos then divided the kingdoms of the Peloponnese between himself (receiving Argos), his brother Kresphontes (who received Messenia), and Eurysthenes and Prokles, the sons of his brother Aristodemos, who had been killed before the Herakleidai reached the Peloponnese. Eurysthenes and Prokles jointly received the kingdom of Sparta, founding the city's dual royal lineage.
The myth combined the originally unrelated stories of the Herakleidai and the Dorian migration to the Peloponnese. It is likely to have originated at the end of the Early Iron Age (around the eighth century BCE), either in Sparta or in the Argolid, and to have coalesced in its essential form by the fifth century BCE. By the fifth century, the distinctions between these two narratives were blurred, and the Herakleidai 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 Herakleidai played an important ideological role in several Greek cities, particularly Sparta, where the city's kings claimed descent and legitimacy from the Herakleidai, 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 Messenia. In Athens, the protection shown to the exiled Herakleidai 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 Herakleidai, as was Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, traditionally numbered among the kings of Rome.
Outline of the myth
Exile of the Herakleidai from the Peloponnese The main narrative of the myth is transmitted by the , a mythological compendium dated to the first or second century CE, and the works of the first-century BCE historian Diodorus Siculus; details and variants are found in several other fragments of ancient Greek literature. According to the myth, the children of the hero Herakles (the first generation of Herakleidai) were driven after his death from their native Peloponnese by Eurystheus, Herakles's cousin and enemy, 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, Aigimios, the king and progenitor of the Dorians, adopted Hyllos, Herakles's eldest son, and gave him a third of his kingdom; Hyllos became king of the Dorians after Aigimios's sons voluntarily pledged allegiance to him upon their father's death.
The Herakleidai left Trachis after Eurystheus forced the local king, Keux, to expel them. Thereafter, they claimed sanctuary in Athens by sitting upon the altar of Eleos (the personification of mercy). The Athenians, ruled either by Theseus or his son Demophon, took them in, and allowed them to settle in the town of Trikorythos near Marathon. When the Athenians refused to hand the Herakleidai over to Eurystheus, he attacked Athens in response; following the pronouncement of an oracle that her death would ensure an Athenian victory, Herakles's daughter, Makaria, either offered herself for sacrifice or killed herself. Eurystheus was accordingly defeated; all of his sons were killed, and he retreated towards the Peloponnese.
In some versions, Eurystheus was killed by Iolaos, Herakles's nephew, who pursued him and killed him at the Skironian Rocks on the Isthmus of Corinth. By this point, Iolaos would have been an old man: in the version of the myth told by Euripides's fifth-century BCE play (), he was rejuvenated for a day by the deities Zeus and Hebe (respectively Herakles's father and wife). In another version, known from ancient commentaries on the works of the fifth-century BCE poet Pindar, he had already died, but was resurrected in order to kill Eurystheus. Pindar recounts that Iolaus killed Eurystheus near Thebes, while later accounts, such as that of the , generally make Hyllos the killer. Euripides's version has Iolaos capture Eurystheus alive and bring him back to Athens, where he is killed, despite the Athenians' protests, on the orders of Herakles's mother, Alkmene. According to Pindar, Hyllos and Aigimios founded the island city of Aegina, near Athens.
Since Herakles was considered to have died before the Trojan War, but the cities eventually ruled by the Herakleidai were believed to have been ruled by descendants of Pelops until several decades afterwards, it was believed that the Herakleidai's return was delayed by destiny. In one version of the myth, Atreus, Eurystheus's successor as king of Mycenae, sent a second army to fight the Herakleidai; Hyllos 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 Herakleidai would leave the Peloponnese for fifty years if he lost. In this version, he was killed, and the surviving Herakleidai honoured his promise to withdraw. Another version, recorded in the , had Hyllos and his brothers invade the Peloponnese and succeed in taking most of its major cities, only to be forced to retreat by a plague which started a year after their arrival, which was explained by an oracle as a punishment for returning too early. In this version, Hyllos received a prophecy from the Oracle of Delphi that the Herakleidai would be able to return to the Peloponnese "after the third harvest". He misinterpreted this as referring to the third year, and invaded Argos. There, he was killed in single combat by Echemos, king of Tegea, and the Herakleidai were forced to retreat to central Greece.
Return to the Peloponnese under Temenos Two further unsuccessful returns followed, led by Hyllos's son Kleodaios and Kleodaios's son Aristomachos. Aristomachos was told by the Oracle of Delphi that the Herakleidai would be able to return "by a narrow passage"; he interpreted this as the Isthmus of Corinth, and was defeated and killed. Aristomachos's son, Temenos, complained to the Delphic oracle that the prophecy had been false, and was told that the "third harvest" referred to had meant that the Herakleidai would return three generations after Hyllos, and that the "narrow passage" referred to the Gulf of Corinth. The Herakleidai built a fleet at Naupaktos, but before it sailed, one of the Herakleidai, Hippotes, killed a prophet of the god Apollo, named by the third-century BCE historian Theopompus as Karnos. As a result, the Herakleidai's fleet was destroyed, their army was hit by a famine, and Temenos's brother Aristodemos was killed (either by lightning, by Apollo, or by being murdered at Delphi). In most versions, Aristodemos was replaced on the expedition by his twin infant sons, Eurysthenes and Prokles, though the fifth-century BCE historian Herodotus reported a version current in Sparta that Aristodemos had not been killed, but led the Herakleidai to that city. Temenos followed the Delphic oracle's instructions to make amends by offering a sacrifice and banishing Hippotes for ten years, and was also told to seek out "the three-eyed one" to act as his guide. Returning from Delphi, Temenos met Oxylos, a man riding a one-eyed horse, correctly interpreted that he was the three-eyed man of which the oracle had spoken. Accompanied by the Dorians, the Herakleidai rebuilt their ships, and followed Oxylos's advice to cross the Gulf of Corinth further to the west, at Molykrion in Aitolia. Once across, they defeated Teisamenos, the king of Mycenae, Argos and Sparta, and so conquered the Peloponnese, fifty years after Hyllos's withdrawal. During the fighting, Aigimios's sons Pamphylos and Dymas were killed. The region of Arkadia was not claimed by the Herakleidai or settled by the Dorians; this was because its king, Kypselos, married his daughter to Temenos's brother Kresphontes to secure an alliance with the Herakleidai.
The Herakleidai claimed the throne of Argos, since Herakles had been a member of the House of Perseus to which Eurystheus and its former kings had belonged, and also claimed the right to rule Sparta and Messenia, since Herakles had previously restored the rightful kings of those cities to their thrones. Temenos became king of Argos, while Kresphontes became king of Messenia and Eurysthenes and Prokles (represented in the draw by their uncle Theras) became kings of Sparta, founding that city's dual royal line. The story of the division of the Peloponnesian kingdoms was told in at least two known versions. In one, Oxylos, who had received Elis as his reward for assisting the Herakleidai, allocated the two remaining regions, and gave the better kingdom of Argos to Temenos as the eldest. In another, the younger Herakleidai 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 Kresphontes 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: Kresphontes 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 , Kresphontes 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.
Origins and development
The myth of the Return of the Herakleidai combined earlier mythic traditions concerning the Dorians and the descendants of Herakles. Outside the Peloponnese (for example, on Rhodes, Kos, and Crete), narratives are known from the eighth century BCE which cast the sons of Herakles as the ancestral founders of communities, but did not connect them to the Dorians. The Peloponnesian version of the myth, in which the Herakleidai were seen as "returning" to their ancestral homeland, appears to have originated around the eighth century BCE, at the end of the Early Iron Age, either in Sparta or the Argolid. By the time of Herodotus (that is, the mid–fifth century BCE), the stories of the Dorian migration into the Peloponnese (the "Dorian invasion") and the Return of the Herakleidai had been fused into a single narrative.