=The Ionians.=—­The peoples of Attica, the isles, and the coast of Asia were called Ionians; no one knows the origin of the name.  Unlike the Dorians, they were a race of sailors or traders, the most cultured of Greece, gaining instruction from contact with the most civilized peoples of the Orient; the least Greek, because they associated with Asiatics and had in part adopted their dress.  They were peaceful and industrious, living luxuriously, speaking a smooth dialect, and wearing long flowing garments like the Orientals.

=The Hellenes.=—­Dorians and Ionians—­these are the two opposing races, the most remarkable of Greece, and the most powerful:  Sparta is Dorian, Athens is Ionian.  But the majority of the Greeks are neither Dorians nor Ionians:  they are called AEolians, a vague name which covers very different peoples.

All the Greeks from early times take the name “Hellenes” which they have kept to this day.  What is the origin of the term?  They did not know any more than we:  they said only that Dorus and AEolus were sons of Hellen, and Ion was his grandson.

=Cities.=—­The Hellenes were still in little peoples as at the time of Homer.  The land of Greece, cut by mountains and sea, breaks naturally into a large number of small cantons, each isolated from its neighbor by an arm of the sea or by a wall of rocks, so that it is easy to defend the land and difficult to communicate with other parts.  Each canton constituted a separate state which was called a city.  There were more than a hundred of these; counting the colonies, more than a thousand.  To us a Greek state seems a miniature.  The whole of Attica was but little larger than the state of Delaware, and Corinth or Megara was much smaller.  Usually the state was only a city with a strip of shore and a harbor, or some villages scattered in the plain around a citadel.  From one state one sees the citadel, mountains, or harbor of the next state.  Many of them count their citizens only by thousands; the largest included hardly 200,000 or 300,000.

The Hellenes never formed one nation; they never ceased to fight and destroy one another.  And yet all spoke the same language, worshipped the same gods, and lived the same sort of a life.  In these respects they recognized the bonds of a common race and distinguished themselves from all other peoples whom they called barbarians and regarded with disdain.

THE HELLENES BEYOND SEA

=Colonization.=—­The Hellenes did not inhabit Greece alone.  Colonists from the Greek cities had gone forth to found new cities in all the neighboring countries.  There were little states in all the islands of the Archipelago, over all the coast of Asia Minor, in Crete and Cyprus, on the whole circumference of the Black Sea as far as the Caucasus and the Crimea, along the shore of Turkey in Europe (then called Thrace), on the shore of Africa, in Sicily, in south Italy, and even on the coasts of France and Spain.