Greeks and Barbarians

IT began in Ionia. It may in truth have been a reawakening. But if this be so (and it is entirely probable), it was after so long and deep a slumber that scarcely even dreams were remembered. The Ionians used to say that they remembered coming from Greece, long ago, about a thousand years before Christ.as we reckon it.driven from their ancient home on the Peloponnesian coast of the Corinthian Gulf by "Dorians" out of the North. They fled to Athens, which carried them in her ships across the Aegean to that middle portion of the eastern shore which came to be known as Ionia. For this reason they were in historical times accounted (by the Athenians at least) "colonists of the Athenians." Nobody in antiquity appears seriously to have disputed this account of the Ionians. There may be considerable truth in it; and if not, the Ionians were pretty good at disputing.

The Athenians belonged to that race. But if you questioned the Ionians further and asked them about their origins in prehistoric Greece, you had to be content with the Topsy-like answer that the first Ionians grew out of the ground. They were Autochthones, Earth-Children. The critical Thucydides puts it this way: he says the same stock has always inhabited Attica. People in his time could remember when old Athenian gentlemen used to wear their hair done up in a top-knot fastened by a golden pin in the form of a cicala, because the cicala also is an Earth-Child.

© 2018 Aeterna Classics (Ebook): 9783963762628

Release date

Ebook: 5 April 2018