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At a still later period, bands of the Dorians, not content with their conquest of the Peloponnesus, thronged to Asia Minor, where they peopled several cities south of Ionia; so that the AEgean Sea was finally circled by Grecian settlements, and its islands covered with them. The Dorians did not become undisputed masters of the Peloponnesus until they had conquered Corinth in the next generation.
In this concentration-area it gathered momentum during the earlier part of the seventh century A.D., and then burst out with irresistible force in all directions, eastward across the Maritsa basin till it reached the Black Sea, and southward down the Vardar to the shores of the Aegean. Beneath this Slavonic flood the Greek race in Europe was engulfed.
It is the elevation, not of a select class of the citizens, but of the whole society, which gives to Athens its unique distinction. Public spirit and enterprise, which made her navy dominant in the Aegean and over the sea-coast of Asia Minor, went hand in hand with delight in eloquence and in the creations of genius.
The Greeks solved it by reducing the width of the end intercolumniation, but later critics disliked this, and solved it by removing the end triglyph from the angle and placing it axial over the end column. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Aegean, the Ionic order was reaching its perfect form through a similar process of systematic thought on a type definitely adopted.
These jealous chieftains, however, had reason to be startled in the spring of 1823, when they heard that eighty thousand Mussulmans were to be sent to attack the Isthmus of Corinth; that forty thousand more were to undertake the siege of Missolonghi; that fifty thousand in addition were to co-operate in Thessaly and Attica; while a grand fleet of one hundred and twenty sail was to sweep the Aegean and reduce the revolted islands.
"There you are right; but if Polykrates were to declare against us, we should not be able to hold our own at sea; you say yourself that he is all-powerful in the AEgean." "Still I decidedly disapprove of entering into treaty with such a robber." "We want powerful allies, and Polykrates is very powerful at sea. It will be time to humble him, when we have used him to help us in conquering Egypt.
If Aeolia, Lydia and Ionia made no resistance worth mentioning, the two chief cities of Caria, Miletus and Halicarnassus, which had been enjoying in virtual freedom a lion's share of Aegean trade for the past century, were not disposed to become appanages of a military empire.
It was a critical moment not only for the little kingdom of King George, but for that great cause of Hellenism which for thousands of years had animated, and which still animated, the souls of the Greek population in all Aegean lands. King George himself was a ruler of large experience, of great practical wisdom, and of fine diplomatic skill.
It had been a long time since war had appealed with the same favor to so large a part of the Czar's people. Slavs there were in plenty to menace the allied German Powers, even if there were not allied French arms, on Germany's other flank, and Britain's naval supremacy to cope with. Slavs in past times had spread over all of eastern Europe, from the Arctic to the Adriatic and the Aegean Seas.
As, towards the north-east, though their trade embraced the regions of Colchis and Thrace, of the Tauric Chersonese, and Southern Scythia, their settlements were limited to the AEgean and perhaps the Propontis, so westward they seem to have contented themselves with occupying a few points of vantage on the Spanish and West African coasts, at no great distance from the Straits, and from these stations to have sent out their commercial navies to sweep the seas and gather in the products of the lands which lay at a greater distance.
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