Homer's Odyssey

Book 19

"Crete awes the circling waves, a fruitful soil!

And ninety cities crown the sea-born isle:

Mix'd with her genuine sons, adopted names

In various tongues avow their various claims:

Cydonians, dreadful with the bended yew,

And bold Pelasgi boast a native's due:

The Dorians, plumed amid the files of war,

Her foodful glebe with fierce Achaians share;

Cnossus, her capital of high command;

Where sceptred Minos with impartial hand

Divided right: each ninth revolving year,

By Jove received in council to confer."

The Dorians were a tribe said to have invaded Greece, by all ancient accounts, a short time after the Trojan wars. The Greeks who inhabited all of the Peloponnese before the Dorian invasion, as well as areas of the mainland, were called everywhere “Danaans” (Danai) and “Achaians” by Homer. Modern historians assert that the Dorians came “from the north”, and point to the Dorian Tetrapolis, four cities (Erineus, Boeum, Pindus and Cytinium, for which see Strabo 9.4.10) which lie west of Phocis and north of Delphi on the Greek mainland, as evidence of this. These historians also claim that all Aryans came “from the north” into the ancient world at one time or another, yet they are consistently in error. Homer is given much credit by Strabo for his knowledge and accuracy in describing the peoples of the οἰκουμένη and the regions where they lived, and the poet is constantly cited by the geographer. Homer described all of the people of Greece, and the peoples and places known to the Greeks in the period which he wrote about. Yet Homer makes no mention of the cities of the Tetrapolis, of Dorians in Greece, or anywhere in the north. The Dorians, who invaded Greece by sea (hardly necessary if they came from the north) and pushed the Danaans out of the Peloponnese, and who also later founded their mainland cities, are only mentioned by Homer as being on Crete (in his Odyssey, Book 19).