The adventures of Xuthus, the third son of Helen, are not recorded by the legends of Thessaly, and he seems merely a fictitious creation, invented to bring into affinity with the Hellenes the families, properly Pelasgic, of the Achaeans and Ionians.

It is by writers comparatively recent that we are told that Xuthus was driven from Thessaly by his brothers--that he took refuge in Attica, and on the plains of Marathon built four towns--Oenoe, Marathon, Probalinthus, and Tricorythus [75], and that he wedded Creusa, daughter of Erechtheus, king of Attica, and that by her he had two sons, Achaeus and Ion.

By some we are told that Achaeus, entering the eastern side of Peloponnesus, founded a dominion in Laconia and Argolis; by others, on the contrary, that he conducted a band, partly Athenian, into Thessaly, and recovered the domains of which his father had been despoiled [76].

Both these accounts of Achaeus, as the representative of the Achaeans, are correct in this, that the Achaeans, had two settlements from remote periods--the one in the south of Thessaly--the other in the Peloponnesus.
The Achaeans were long the most eminent of the Grecian tribes.
Possessed of nearly the whole of the Peloponnesus, except, by a singular chance, that part which afterward bore their name, they boasted the warlike fame of the opulent Menelaus and the haughty Agamemnon, the king of men.

The dominant tribe of the heroic age, the Achaeans form the kindred link between the several epochs of the Pelasgic and Hellenic sway--their character indeed Hellenic, but their descent apparently Pelasgic.