Return of the Heracleidae

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.

The myth is likely to have originated at the end of the Early Iron Age, either in Sparta or in the Argolid, and to have coalesced in its essential form by the fifth century BCE.

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.

[3] 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",[8] and "by a narrow passage".

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.

[17][b] The myth of the Return of the Heracleidae appears to have originated at the end of the Early Iron Age,[19] either in Sparta or the Argolid,[20] 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.

[25][26] [27] 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.

[28] 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.

[33] 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.

[28] 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.

[35] 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.

Hyllus , who led the first abortive return of the Heraclidae, held by his father Hercules , with his mother Deianira and the centaur Nessus
Three men, in armour, stand around a large urn: one stoops to draw a lot from the urn.
Drawing of a Graeco-Roman engraved gemstone, showing the drawing of lots between Cresphontes , Eurysthenes and Procles [ 11 ]
Drawing of a black-figure vase: Heracles, to the left, holds his club and wears a lion-skin, while Athena faces him with a shield, spear and helmet, a deer at her feet.
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. [ 18 ]