THE EARLY AGE OF GREECE VOL.I by W.Ridgeway 1901

Having slain the aged Licymnius,
WHO WERE THE MAKERS? 199
the maternal uncle of his
father, he immediately built ships and gathered a large body
of his mother's people from the river Selleis, and after a
voyage of much suffering he reached Rhodes, where they settled
according to their tribes in three bodies in Lindus, lalysus and
the ' white ' Cameirus.
Modern scholars have almost universally assumed that this
was the Dorian colonization of Rhodes, but Strabo's argument
is conclusive against this view, even if it was not sufficiently
refuted by the Homeric poems. The Dorian colonists came
from Megara, others of the same body went to Crete with
Althamenes the Argive, the rest went to Halicarnassus, Cnidus,
and Cos. 'But these migrations,' says Strabo, "are more
recent than the events related by Homer, for
Cnidus and Halicarnassus
were not then in existence. Rhodes and Cos existed,
but were inhabited by Heracleidae." He points out that Homer
does not in the passage above referred to mention Dorians, but
that he means Aeolians and Boeotians, since Heracles and
Licymnius lived in Boeotia. ''
If, however, as others hold,
Tlepolemus set out from Argos and Tiryns, even so the colony
would not be Dorian, for it was settled before the return of the
Heracleids."
There is certainly no evidence to make either Acheans or
Dorians the creators of the Mycenoan remains found in Rhodes.
If they are the product of the settlers who went with Tlepolemus,
they are Pelasgian if they belong to the older island
;
j)opu!ation, who from the legend of the Telchines are intimately
connected with Crete and Cyprus, they also belong to the same
Pelasgic stock. The tradition of the skill of the Telchines as
artificers is especially note\v(jrthy.
It i.s
important to find that
these renowned workers in the metals are connected in story
with Rhodes, where such fine ]ro(luets
of Mveenean art have
been found so abundantly.
As it has been ])ointed out (]).
.").S) that the bronze swords
from lalysus are later than those found in the shaft gravi'S at
Mycenae, the evidence then, as far as it goes, points
to the
moveiiK.'nt of the Mvceiieau cultuic from the niainlaiid to
Rhodes rather than in tlu' rc\-ei-se direction.
200 WHO WERE THE MAKERS?
Crete.
We have seen, as we reviewed the early legends of Asia
Minor and the contiguous islands, that Crete was described
as the starting-point from which many bodies of emigrants
had sallied forth. From Crete went Teucer to the Troad,
Sarpedon to found for the Carians Miletus, named after his
mother city; the Caunians and their neighbours the Lycians
claimed her as their ancient home
; finally, the Telchines had
gone thence to Cyprus and Rhodes, although in the case of the
latter another legend reversed the story of the migration. All
these tales point to Crete as a great focus of the Aegean
culture, a conclusion entirely substantiated by the vast remains
of that civilization already within our knowledge.
When we proceed to examine the connection between Crete
and the other great foci of the same culture in Argolis and
Attica, we see that, whilst legends abound, Crete is not here
regarded as the centre of diffusion for Peloponnesus and Attica,
but, on the contrary, we hear only of settlements in Crete. Of
the five nationalities existing in the island in the time when
the Odyssey was composed, two certainly, the Dorians and
Acheans, were newcomers from the mainland of Greece,
the former being fiom Histiaeotis (p. 87 n.). There are left
the Pelasgi, the Cydones, and the Eteocretes. The Cyd(mians
had come from Arcadia, the land of the
Fk;. 3'.).
Coin of Cvdonia.
Pelasgians. The people of Tegea
said that
Cydon, Archedius, and Gortys, the surviving
sons of their king Tegeates, migrated voluntarily
to Crete, and that the cities
Cydt)nia,
Gortyna, and Catreus, were named after
them. Cretan pride was evidently hurt by
this story,
and it was held that Cydon was
the son of Hermes by Acacallis, daughter (jf
Minos, that Catreus was a son of Minos, and (Jortys was a son
of Rhadamanthus'. Miletus, the brother of Cydon, was said to
have been suckled by a wolf in Crete, but though no such story
'
I'aua. VIII. 53, 4.