Dorians

Dorians, one of the great Hellenic races who took their name from the mythical Dorus, the son of Hellen, who settled in Doris; but Herodotus says that in the time of King Deucalion they inhabited the district Phthiotis; and in the time of Dorus, the son of Hellen, the country called Histiaeotis, at the foot of Ossa and Olympus. But the statement of Apollodorus is more probable, according to which they would appear to have occupied the whole country along the northern shore of the Corinthian Gulf. Indeed, Doris Proper was far too small and insignificant a district to furnish a sufficient number of men for a victorious invasion of the Peloponnus. In this remarkable achievement they were conjoined with the Heracleidæ, and ruled in Sparta. Doric colonies were then founded in Italy, Sicily, and Asia Minor. Strikingly as all the four nations of Greece differed from each other in language, manners, and form of government, the Dorians in particular differed from the Ionians. They preserved a certain primitive solidity and earnestness, in contrast with the effeminacy and grace of the latter.—The Doric dialect bore the same character; it was archaic, deliberate, emphatic, broad, and rough, while the Ionian was soft and polished; yet the former had a venerable character from its antiquity, and was employed in hymns and in the choruses of dramas themselves written in Attic. It is easy, therefore, to understand how the Scottish dialect has come, in contrast to literary English, to be called Doric. Barnes called the Dorset dialect 'the bold and broad Doric of England.' In philosophy, the influence of the Doric character was particularly visible in the Pythagorean school and its attachment to the idea of an aristocracy. It is no less traceable in architecture in the strong unadorned Doric pillars, which form so marked a contrast to the slender and decorated Ionic columns. For the Dorian mode, see HARMONY.