7 - Promises unfulfilled: Dorieus between North Africa and Sicily

Summary

Around 514 BC a Spartiate Herakleid of the royal house by the name of Dorieus asked the state for a group of colonists to take with him to Africa, where he established a colony on the estuary of the Kinyps. Two years later the colony was driven off by a coalition of Libyan tribes (the Makai and others) and Carthage. Dorieus returned home and departed again to colonize Eryx in western Sicily. Again he failed, this time dying in combat with Elymians and Phoenicians. The Herakleid charter myth for the land of Eryx is as explicit as one may expect in the world of Greek colonization, and it is particularly Spartan in that it employs the motif of the Return of the Herakleidai for the benefit of a Spartan Herakleid of the royal house. It also demonstrates the viability of the challenge theory of Spartan territorial charter myths. Kinyps was the last site in North Africa free of either Carthaginian or Greek colonization, and western Sicily was the last corner of the island not colonized by Greeks. Late sixth-century Sparta was a latecomer; the fewer the lands available for the taking, the more ambition burned and the more explicit the charter myths.