The Dorians migrate into the Balkan Peninsula…

The Dorians migrate into the Balkan Peninsula through ancient Illyria, Epirus, and northeastern Macedonia.

A Greek-speaking people, the Dorians consist of three tribal groups: Hylleis, Dymanes, and Pamphyloi. (The Dorians themselves will come to consider Doris, north of modern Amfissa in central Greece, their homeland, and claim descent from the sons of Hercules.)

According to Thucydides, who professes little of Greece before the Trojan War except to say that it was full of barbarians and that there was no distinction between barbarians and Greeks, the Hellenes came from Phthiotis.

The whole country indulged in and suffered from piracy, and was not settled.

After the Trojan War, "Hellas was still engaged in removing and settling.” Some sixty years after the Trojan War, the Thessalians drove the Boeotians out of Arne into Boeotia and twenty years later "the Dorians and the Heraclids became masters of the Peloponnesus."

The lines were thus drawn between the Dorians and the Aeolians (here Boeotians) with the Ionians (former Peloponnesians).

People who speak the Doric dialect eventually come to live along the coast of the Peloponnesus, in Crete, southwest Asia Minor, various cities of Southern Italy and Sicily, all of which adds weight to the theory of Asia Minor as the origin of the Dorians.

Numerous historians link Doric, Northwestern Greek, and Ancient Macedonian.