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Updated: June 15, 2025
The Ionian cities, especially, were distinguished for luxury and refinement. Corinth took the lead in the early patronage of art, as the most wealthy and luxurious of the Grecian cities. The Pelasgi had erected Cyclopean structures fifteen hundred years before Christ. The Dorians built temples on the severest principles of beauty, and the Doric column arose, massive and elegant.
Delphi was probably the original place of meeting, and was, therefore, in one important sense, the capital of Greece. Originally, this council or congress was composed of deputies from twelve States, or tribes—Thessalians, Bœotians, Dorians, Ionians, Perrhæbians, Magnetes, Locrians, Octæans, Phthiots, Achæans, Melians, and Phocians.
The Greek colonies in Asia Minor were of very early origin. Legend attributed their foundation to the earlier inhabitants of Greece, driven out by the Dorians.
Among the Dorians only the communities with a mixed population, such as Corinth and Megara, took a special part, whereas the purely Doric provinces had but a subordinate share in the movement.
II. Melanthus was succeeded by his son Codrus, a man whose fame finds more competitors in Roman than Grecian history. During his reign the Dorians invaded Attica. They were assured of success by the Delphian oracle, on condition that they did not slay the Athenian king.
The descendants of the primitive races were attached to their ancient ways. The Dorians were not less, but more tenacious of their traditional customs. And they were conscious of their vantage and knew they were able to insist on their preferences. As the props of the royal houses they could hope to make terms with them, or withdraw and let them fall, or turn to cast them down.
The Greeks, when they first become known to us in historical times, consist of two great branches, the Dorians and Ionians, together with a less distinct branch, the Aeolians, which differs less, perhaps, from the parent Hellenes than do the two divisions just named.
All about the coast of Asia Minor they lived, while that Hittite power was ruling the interior; and, intermixed with Phoenician trading-posts, they held the great islands of Crete and Cyprus and the shores of Sicily and Italy. What shall we call them? Were they Dorians, or Heraclidae, Achaeans or Pelasgi?
The sentiment of veneration which pervaded their national character taught the Dorians not only, on the one hand, the firmest allegiance to the rites of religion and a patriarchal respect for age but, on the other hand, a blind and superstitious attachment to institutions merely on account of their antiquity and an almost servile regard for birth, producing rather the feelings of clanship than the sympathy of citizens.
In the southern part of Thessaly was Pharsalia, the battle-ground between Cæsar and Pompey, and near it was Pyrrha, formerly called Hellas, where was the tomb of Hellen, son of Deucalion, whose descendants, Æolus, Dorus and Ion, are said to have given name to the three nations, Æolians, Dorians, and Ionians, Still further south, between the inaccessible cliffs of Mount Œta and the marshes which skirt the Maliaeus Bay, were the defiles of Thermopylæ, where Leonidas and three hundred heroes died defending the pass, against the army of Xerxes, and which in one place was only twenty-five feet wide, so that, in so narrow a defile, the Spartans were able to withstand for three days the whole power of Persia.
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