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But of all that I shall tell about that land, the most was told to me by the priests whom I myself visited at Memphis and Thebes and Heliopolis. They account themselves the most ancient of peoples. If the Ionians are right, who reckon that Egypt is only the Nile Delta, this could not be. But I reckon that the whole Egyptian territory is.
There they cast away their small anchorstone by the advice of Tiphys and left it beneath a fountain, the fountain of Artacie; and they took another meet for their purpose, a heavy one; but the first, according to the oracle of the Far-Darter, the Ionians, sons of Neleus, in after days laid to be a sacred stone, as was right, in the temple of Jasonian Athena.
He remained some time in Crete, studying the institutions of the Dorian people of that island. He travelled extensively in Asia and was especially careful to observe the manners and customs of the Ionians. He found the poems of Homer, transcribed and arranged them, and caused them to be more generally known.
Upon this errand, there were twenty men, of such as were above fifty years of age, sent by commission; five to summon the Ionians and Dorians in Asia, and the islanders as far as Lesbos and Rhodes; five to visit all the places in the Hellespont and Thrace, up to Byzantium; and other five besides these to go to Boeotia and Phocis and Peloponnesus, and from hence to pass through the Locrians over to the neighboring continent, as far as Acarnania and Ambracia; and the rest to take their course through Euboea to the Oetaeans and the Malian Gulf, and to the Achaeans of Phthiotis and the Thessalians; all of them to treat with the people as they passed, and to persuade them to come and take their part in the debates for settling the peace and jointly regulating the affairs of Greece.
The Ionians, seeking religious freedom from the persecutions of the phallic worshippers in India persisted in their adherence to yoni worship, and from them dates the Eleusirian mysteries, which were celebrated in Athens down to a comparatively late date.
When any Doric state abandoned its hereditary customs and institutions, it soon lost the Doric character became lax, effeminate, luxurious a corruption of the character of the Ionians; but no change could assimilate the Ionian to the Doric; for they belonged to different eras of civilization the Doric to the elder, the Ionian to the more advanced.
VI. But the Ionians were not fated to return in safety: from the borders of the river Halys a troop of Persians followed their retreat, and overtaking them when the Ephesian territory was already gained, defeated the Ionians with a great slaughter, amid which fell the leader of the Eretrians. The Athenians were naturally disappointed with the result of this expedition.
The same spirit which teaches Christians that those who have no earthly friend have specially a friend above to care for and to avenge them, taught the Ionians a proverb which appears again and again in Homer, that the stranger and the poor man are the patrimony of God; and it taught them, also, that sometimes men entertained the Immortals unawares.
"And since all are grateful to Athens for that final stand against the Mede, to which all Greece owes her liberties, and since the chief of her armaments here is a man of so modest a virtue, and so clement a justice, as we all acknowledge in Aristides, fitting is it for us Ionians to constitute Athens the maritime sovereign of our race."
There is a further credible tradition, that a considerable interval elapsed between the settlement at Cumae and the main Hellenic immigration into Lower Italy and Sicily, and that in this immigration Ionians from Chalcis and from Naxos took the lead.
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