=The Hellenes.=--Dorians and Ionians--these are the two opposing
races, the most remarkable of Greece, and the most powerful: Sparta is
Dorian, Athens is Ionian. But the majority of the Greeks are neither
Dorians nor Ionians: they are called AEolians, a vague name which
covers very different peoples.
All the Greeks from early times take the name "Hellenes" which they
have kept to this day. What is the origin of the term? They did not
know any more than we: they said only that Dorus and AEolus were sons
of Hellen, and Ion was his grandson.
=Cities.=--The Hellenes were still in little peoples as at the time of
Homer. The land of Greece, cut by mountains and sea, breaks naturally
into a large number of small cantons, each isolated from its neighbor
by an arm of the sea or by a wall of rocks, so that it is easy to
defend the land and difficult to communicate with other parts. Each
canton constituted a separate state which was called a city. There
were more than a hundred of these; counting the colonies, more than a
thousand. To us a Greek state seems a miniature. The whole of Attica
was but little larger than the state of Delaware, and Corinth or
Megara was much smaller.
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