sieging
Ilium, the homes of the besiegers were falling into an evil plight.
Their youth revolted; and when the soldiers returned to their own cities
and families, they did not receive them properly, and as they ought to
have done, and numerous deaths, murders, exiles, were the consequence.
The exiles came again, under a new name, no longer Achaeans, but
Dorians,--a name which they derived from Dorieus; for it was he
who gathered them together. The rest of the story is told by you
Lacedaemonians as part of the history of Sparta.

MEGILLUS: To be sure.

ATHENIAN: Thus, after digressing from the original subject of laws into
music and drinking-bouts, the argument has, providentially, come back to
the same point, and presents to us another handle. For we have reached
the settlement of Lacedaemon; which, as you truly say, is in laws and
in institutions the sister of Crete. And we are all the better for
the digression, because we have gone through various governments and
settlements, and have been present at the foundation of a first, second,
and third state, succeeding one another in infinite time. And now
there appears on the horizon a fourth state or nation which was once in
process of settlement and has continued settled to this day. If, out of
all this, we are able to discern what is well or ill settled, and what
laws are the salvation and what are the destruction of cities, and what
changes would make a state happy, O Megillus and Cleinias, we may
now begin again, unless we have some fault to find with the previous
discussion.

MEGILLUS: If some God, Stranger, would promise us that our new enquiry
about legislation would be as good and full as the present, I would go
a great way to hear such another, and would think that a day as long as
this--and we are now approaching the longest day of the year--was too
short for the discussion.

ATHENIAN: Then I suppose that we must consider this subject?

MEGILLUS: Certainly.

ATHENIAN: Let us place ourselves in thought at the moment when
Lacedaemon and Argos and Messene and the rest of the Peloponnesus were
all in complete subjection, Megillus, to your ancestors; for afterwards,
as the legend informs us, they divided their army into three portions,
and settled three cities, Argos, Messene, Lacedaemon.

MEGILLUS: True.

ATHENIAN: Temenus was the king of Argos, Cresphontes of Messene, Procles
and Eurysthenes of Lacedaemon.

MEGILLUS: Certainly.

ATHENIAN: To these king