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The growth and influence of classical Greek poetry (1893)
The growth and influence of classical Greek poetry - 1893 Author:Richard Claverhouse Jebb Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: The period at which the Hellenes began gradually to oust the Phoenicians from their trading- stations in the southern Aegean is placed by some as early as the tw... more »elfth century B.C., and can hardly have been later than the eleventh. Homer knows Phoenicians in the Aegean only as occasional visitors, the cunning vendors of Oriental wares. The Phoenician left the Aegean to the Hellene, and passed on to found more permanent seats of industry and trade in the western Mediterranean. But who are these new comers, the Hellenes, and with what qualities do they stand forth against the background of that ancient world at which we have been glancing ? The history of the Hellenes begins, for us, with a series of great migrations. When The first ap- these movements took place, the country pearance of J the Hellenes. afterwards known as Greece was occupied by a number of Indo-European tribes, akin to each other, but, for the most part, unconscious of the kinship. Such were the Selloi at Dodona and the Graioi on the Oropus. To these tribes the only collective appellation which we can give is that of Hellenes, a modified form of the name borne by the Selloi. These Hellenes, offshoots of the Indo-European stem, had forgotten theirown origin, and believed themselves children of the soil on which they lived. For us, indeed, they are such. Collectively, these prehistoric Hellenes represent a civilization which later immigrants found existing in Greece, and partly destroyed, partly assimilated. These later immigrants consisted, in the main, of tribes akin to the Hellenes themselves, though neither they nor the Hellenes knew it. The two earlier streams of immigration entered the Balkan peninsula from east and west respectively. From the east came those who passed through Thrace into the ...« less