The people of Hellas were very happy according to all accounts; their clothing was inconspicuous, their wants few, and they enjoyed a peculiarly pleasant entente with the gods and goddesses whom they evoked out of their own imagination, as well as from different phenomena which Nature produces to foster our taste for the supernatural. They must have been a thoroughly lovable, imaginative, unpractical collection of philosophers, richly endowed with all the necessaries of life, such as wives, children, servants, etc.; in fact, everything to make life worth living and philosophizing easy. How the times have changed since then! They changed suddenly, it appears, for ancient Hellas, for their cousins, as they considered themselves, the Macedonians, felt the need for expansion, “Tatendrang” if they had only known it, and therefore broke in upon the daydreams of the dwellers in Arcadia.
Philip of Macedonia led his army against the Hellenes, the allied Thebans and Athenians, defeated them at Cheironeia in 338 B.C., and forced them to acknowledge his dominion over them. His son, Alexander the Great, vanquished the Thracians, defeated the Thebans, who had revolted against his rule, and prepared for his victorious march through Asia Minor.
The Hellenes made many an effort to throw off the Macedonian yoke, but failed, and exchanged it for that of Rome, after the last Macedonian King had been defeated by the Romans at Pydna in 168 B.C. Macedonia was divided up into four provinces, and was incorporated with the Roman Empire in 146 B.C. Greece became the province of Achaia. The northern Balkan countries retained their independence until near the end of the first century B.C., when, by degrees, Rome conquered all the people south of the Danube, the Moesii, Raetii, and Vindelicei, their lands forming the Roman provinces of Raetia and Noricum.
It is usual to include Roumania among the Balkan States, though that kingdom does not consider itself one of them. Trajan crossed the Danube and entered what is now Roumania, adding it to the Roman Empire as Dacia Trajana in A.D. 106.
Some hundred and fifty years later another people came wandering down from the north, penetrating as far as the Danube, to the great discomfiture of Dacia, the Goths, and they forced Emperor Aurelian to remove his army and colonies to southward and westward, founding a new colony, Dacia Aureliana. The Goths in their turn, hard pressed by the wild hordes of nomad Mongolians, the Huns, abandoned the province of Dacia Trajana, where they had been settled for a century, and crossed the Danube, invaded Thrace, defeated the Emperor Valens at Adrianople, and made themselves peculiarly obnoxious to the peaceful people of the Eastern Empire, while the Huns continued their raid westward. The Goths in the meanwhile plundered right and left in Thrace unchecked, because they had filled the hearts of the Roman legionaries with fear, so that none would meet them in battle again. That wise Emperor, Theodosius I, knew how to manage them, even made them useful as allies, and contrived to make the Balkan countries too uncomfortable for them. So the Goths went elsewhere, and as Gepidi occupied parts of Transylvania, vacated by the Huns on the death of Attila, their King.
About this time the first Slavs made their appearance. It seems that they had settled for a while in Wallachia, whither they had wandered from Southern Russia. Their language proclaimed them akin to the Indo-German race, but there is reason to suppose that they had a strong admixture of the Mongolian in them; they proved to be brachy-instead of dolichocephalic. As the Huns had shown to the Eastern races the gateway into Europe, other Mongolians streamed in after them, so we find the Avari settling in Transylvania, and the Bulgars following them. Of these latter more anon.
About four centuries after the first appearance of the Bulgarians, some distant relatives of theirs forced their way into Europe, the Hungarians. It appears that they confined themselves to the left bank of the Danube, moving westward till they finally settled in Hungary; other Ugric races followed them, the Petshenegs, and the Cumanians, but these too kept to the northern bank of the great river. Their descendants may still be found in parts of Hungary. An entirely different people made its appearance shortly before the arrival of the Petshenegs, the Vlachs, a race of nomads of whom no one knows whence they came; they wander about the Balkan peninsula still, for during all these centuries no one has managed to induce them all to settle down permanently.
From the tenth century till the fourteenth the Balkan peoples, varied as they were, and are still, settled down to a more or less ordered existence, developing into nations, waging war against others, and behaving in much the same manner as they do to-day. I have treated them separately elsewhere. A great change came with the fourteenth century, when yet another race came out of Asia, a people related to the Magyars and the Bulgars, but already mixed with various other elements, occupying a different intellectual plane, and moved by aspirations at variance with the ambitions of the people they visited, the Turks.
I have told how the Turks overran Eastern Europe in another part of this book, how they brought down the Empire of Byzant, crushed the smaller nations, and kept them in submission until they grew, like the seed, out of obscurity into light, insisted on their separate nationalities, and finally went to war with their oppressors, moving like the spirit of revenge, striking swiftly and surely till their guns thundered insistently on the outer defences of Constantinople, at the lines of Chatalja.
Another people which plays an important part in that complex body, the Ottoman Empire, is the Armenian race. Their history is somewhat obscure, as they have never shown any talent for self-government, and, consequently, hold few records which throw any light on their past. They are most respectably connected, claiming descent from Japheth. Mt. Ararat, where the ark eventually landed, is in the northern part of the territory which they consider their country, and Armenians are still to be found among the valleys at the foot of that historic eminence. The Armenian name for their great ancestor is Haik; they call themselves after him, and their land Haiasdan.