The legend of a Dorian invasion appears first in Tyrtaeus, a 7thcentury poet, in the service of Sparta, who brings the Spartan Heracleids to Peloponnese from Erineon in the northern Doris; and the lost Epic of Aegimius, of about the same date, seems to have presupposed the same story.
Busolt, who suggests that Tyrtaeus was a native of Aphidnae in Laconia, conjectures that the entire legend may have been concocted in connexion with the expedition sent to the assistance of Sparta in her struggle with the revolted Helots at Ithome (464).
They are mainly elegiac and in the Ionic dialect, written partly in praise of the Spartan constitution an King Theopompus (Ebvoµia), partly to stimulate the Spartan soldiers to deeds of heroism in the field (`T7roOi icacthe title is, however, later than Tyrtaeus).
It will be enough to observe that in the earliest elegiac poets, such as Archilochus, Tyrtaeus and Theognis, reminiscences of Homeric language and thought meet us on every page.
From very early times the Homeric poems found a home and admirers there; and to Ephesus belong the earliest elegiac poems of Greece, the war songs of Callinus, who flourished in the 7th century B.C. and was the model of Tyrtaeus.