If an area the size of West Virginia were divided into some twenty independent counties, which could arrange treaties, make alliances, and declare war, and which sometimes united into leagues for defense or offense, but which were never able to unite to form a single State, we should have a condition analogous to that of mainland Greece. [3] A sea- faring people, the Greeks became to the ancient Mediterranean world what the English have been to the modern world. Southern Italy became so thickly set with small Greek cities that it was known as Magna Graecia. On the island of Sicily the city of Syracuse was founded (734 B.C.), and became a center of power and a home of noted Greeks. The city of Marseilles, in southern France, dates from an Ionic settlement about 600 B.C. The presence of another seafaring people, the Phoenicians, along the northern coast of Africa and southern and eastern Spain, probably checked the further spread of Greek colonies to the westward. The city of Cyrene, in northern Africa, dates from about 630 B.C. Greek colonists also went north and east, through the Dardanelles and on into the Black Sea. (See map, Figure 2.) Salonica and Constantinople date back to Greek colonization. Many of the colonies reflected great honor and credit on the motherland, and served to spread Greek manners, language, and religion over a wide area.
[4] It is the great mixed races that have counted for most in history. The strength of England is in part due to its wonderful mixture of peoples— Britons, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, Northmen, to mention only the more important earlier peoples which have been welded together to form the English people.
[5] Athens, however, permitted the children of foreigners to attend its schools, particularly in the later period of Athenian education.
[6] "When I compare the customs of the Greeks with these (the Romans), I can find no reason to extol either those of the Spartans, or the Thebans, or even of the Athenians, who value themselves the most for their wisdom; all who, jealous of their nobility and communicating to none or to very few the privileges of their cities … were so far from receiving any advantage from this haughtiness that they became the greatest sufferers by it." (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, in his Roman Antiquities book II, chap. XVII.)
[7] In Sparta the number of citizens was still less. At the time of the formulation of the Spartan constitution by Lycurgus (about 850 B.C.) there were but 9000 Spartan families in the midst of 250,000 subject people. This disproportion increased rather than diminished in later centuries.
[8] The Austrian-Magyar combination, which held together and dominated the many tribes of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, is an analogous modern situation, though on a much larger scale.
[9] Two Greek poems illustrate the Spartan mother, who was said to admonish her sons to come back with their shields, or upon them. The first is:
"Eight sons Daementa at Sparta's call
Sent forth to fight: one tomb received them all.
No tears she shed, but shouted, 'Victory!
Sparta, I bore them but to die for thee.'"
The second:
"A Spartan, his companion slain,
Alone from battle fled:
His mother, kindling with disdain
That she had borne him, struck him dead;
For courage and not birth alone.
In Sparta testifies a son."