The invasion was commonly believed to have proceeded by way of Aetolia and Elis, and the name Naupactus was interpreted as an allusion to the needful "shipbuilding" on the Corinthian Gulf. One legend made Dorus himself originally an Aetolian prince; the participation of Oxylus, and the Aetolian claim to Elis, appear first in Ephorus (4th century). The conquest of Laconia at least is represented in 5th-century tradition as immediate and complete, though one legend admits the previous death of the Heracleid leader Aristodemus, and another describes a protracted struggle in the case of Corinth. Pausanias, however (following Sosibius), interprets a long series of conflicts in Arcadia as stages in a gradual advance southward, ending with the conquest of Amyclae by King Teleclus (c. 800 B.C.) and of Helos by King Alcamenes (c. 770 B.C.).
Of the invasion of Argolis a quite different version was already current in the 4th century. This represents the Argive Dorians as having come by sea (apparently from the Maliac Gulf, the nearest seashore to Parnassian Doris), accompanied by survivors of the Dryopes (former inhabitants of that Doris), whose traces in south Euboea (Styra and Carystus), in Cythnus, and at Eion (Halieis), Hermione and Asine in Argolis, were held to indicate their probable route.
The Homeric Dorians of Crete were also interpreted by Andron and others (3rd century) as an advance-guard of this sea-borne migration, and as having separated from the other Dorians while still in Histiaeotis. The 5th-century tradition that the Heracleid kings of Macedon were Temenid exiles from Argos may belong to the same cycle.
The fate of the Dorian invaders was represented as differing locally. In Messenia (according to a legend dramatized by Euripides in the 5th century, and renovated for political ends in the 4th century) the descendants of Cresphontes quarrelled among themselves and were exterminated by the natives. In Laconia Aristodemus (or his twin sons) effected a rigid military occupation which eventually embraced the whole district, and permitted (a) the colonization of Melos, Thera and parts of Crete (before 800 B.C.), (b) the reconquest and annexation of Messenia (about 750 B.C.), (c) a settlement of half-breed Spartans at Tarentum in south Italy, 700 B.C. In Argos and other cities of Argolis the descendants of the Achaean chiefs were taken into political partnership, but a tradition of race-feud lasted till historic times. Corinth, Sicyon and Megara, with similar political compromises, mark the limits of Dorian conquest; a Dorian invasion of Attica (c. 1066 B.C.) was checked by the self-sacrifice of King Codrus: "Either Athens must perish or her king." Aegina was reckoned a colony of Epidaurus. Rhodes, and some Cretan towns, traced descent from Argos; Cnidus from Argos and Sparta; the rest of Asiatic Doris from Epidaurus or Troezen in Argolis. The colonies of Corinth, Sicyon and Megara, and the Sicilian offshoots of the Asiatic Dorians, belong to historic times (8th-6th centuries).