A Dictionary of Greek and Roman biography and mythology

(Δωριεύς), eldest son of Anaxandrides, king of Sparta, by his first wife [ANAXANDRIDES], was however born after the son of the second marriage, Cleomenes, and therefore excluded from immediate succession. He was accounted the first in personal qualities of Sparta's young men, and feeling it an indignity to remain under the rule of one so inferior to him in worth, and so narrowly before him in claim to the throne, he left his country hastily, and without consulting the oracle of Delphi, to establish for himself a kingdom elsewhere. He led his colony first, under the guidance of some Theraeans, to Libya : the spot he here chose, Cinyps by name, was excellen t; but he was driven out ere long by the Libyans and Carthaginians, and led the survivors home. He now, under the sanction of the oracle, set forth to found a Heracleia in the district pronounced to be the property of Hercules, and to have been reserved by him for any descendant who might come to claim it, Eryx, in Sicily. In his passage thitherward, along the Italian coast, he found the people of Croton preparing (B. C. 510) for their conflict with Sybaris, and induced, it would seem, by the connexion between Croton and Sparta (Müller, Dor. bk. 10.7.12), he joined in the expedition. and received, after the fall of the city, a plot of land, on which he built a temple to Athena, of the Crathis. Such was the story given to Herodotus by the remnants of the Sybarites, who were his fellow-citizens at Thurii, denied however by the Crotoniats, on the evidence, that while Callias, the Elean prophet, had received from them various rewards, still enjoyed there by his posterity, in return of his service in the war, nothing of the sort recalled the name of Dorieus. This, however, if Dorieus was bent on his Sicilian colony, is quite intelligible. He certainly pursued his course to Eryx, and there seems to have founded his Heracleia ; but ere long, he and all his brother Spartans with him, a single man excepted [EURYLEON], were cut off in a battle with the Egestaeans, and, as it seems, the Carthaginians. He left however

behind him a son, Euryanax, who accompanied his cousin Pansanias in the campaign (B. C. 479) against Mardonius. Why this son did not succeed rather than Leonidas, on the death of Cleomenes, is not clear; Müller suggests, comparing Plut. Agis 100.11, that a Heracleid, leaving his country to settle elsewhere lost his rights at home. (Hdt. 5.41_66; 9.10, 53, 55; Diod. 4.23; Paus. 3.16.4, and 3.8.)

[A.H.C]