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Updated: May 14, 2025
+1099+. It was different with the Dionysiac cult, whose wildness made it popular; of foreign origin, it was in time partly Hellenized and in Athens took its place in the regular national worship; some of its foreign features were taken up in the mysteries. These latter, with their enthusiasm and their half-barbaric ceremonies, excited the contempt of most of the educated class.
But the Greek can never lose the flavour of the Greek genius, and could he penetrate the universe, the universe would be Hellenized. But if, O Athenian chiefs, ye judge that we have now done all that is needful to protect Athens, and awe the Barbarian, ye must be longing to retire from the armament and return to your homes."
Those settled in Sicily, Magna Graecia, and Campania came into contact with the Greeks at a period when they were unable to offer resistance to their civilization, and were either completely Hellenized, as in the case of Sicily, or at any rate so weakened that they succumbed without marked resistance to the fresh energy of the Sabine tribes.
There was no West Asia now; only Europe: all was European and Hellenized to the borders of India, with periodical overflowings beyond; just as, long afterwards, Spain was a province of West Asia; and just as Egypt now is submerged under a European power.
The supposition of an especially close affinity between the Iapygian nation and the Hellenes finds further support in the frequent occurrence of the names of Greek divinities in the inscriptions, and in the surprising facility with which that people became Hellenized, presenting a striking contrast to the shyness in this respect of the other Italian nations.
Lastly, the claim of Rome to extend her protecting arm over all the Hellenes was by no means an empty phrase: the citizens of Neapolis, Rhegium, Massilia, and Emporiae could testify that that protection was meant in earnest, and there is no question at all that at this time the Romans stood in a closer relation to the Greeks than any other nation one little more remote than that of the Hellenized Macedonians.
Prom the first historic glimpse which we get of Korkyra, it is not merely a land fringed by Hellenic colonies; it is a Hellenic island, the dominion of a single Hellenic city, a territory the whole of whose inhabitants were, at the beginning of recorded history, either actually Hellenic or so thoroughly hellenized that no one thought of calling their Hellenic position in question.
If we thus dismiss, as fruitless for our investigation, the most famous representative of the Hellenic Mysteries proper, how does the question stand with regard to those faiths to which Cumont is referring, the hellenized cults of Asia Minor?
Certain it is that Albania was already an ancient nation when Greek history began. Unlike the other primitive populations of the Balkan peninsula, which became in time either Hellenized, Latinized or Slavonicized, the Albanians have remained almost unaffected by foreign influences.
The Jew, attracted by the brilliant art, literature, science, and philosophy of the Hellene, speedily Hellenized, and as early as the third century B.C.E. Clearchus, the pupil of Aristotle, tells of a Jew whom his master met, who was "Greek not only in language but also in mind."
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