ABSTRACT
SCATTERED all round the Mediterranean basin, the Greeks recognized themselves everywhere as forming part of the same group, the same family. This feeling was strengthened by the very fact of their dispersion. If the Greeks had remained simple farmers, and had only formed rural communities, shut off from one another and sufficient to themselves, each group, having no contact with its neighbours, would have evolved separately, would have had its own language, institutions, and manners, and would have ended by forming a nation clearly different from the neighbouring nations. As it was, their dispersion in the midst of a world of foreigners, and the very weakness of each group, which could not live alone and had to maintain continuous commercial relations with the others, preserved the ties which originally united the Greeks. The mariner or merchant of Miletos or Phocæa was never more aware of his Hellenic nationality than when he felt himself lost among Scythians or Ligurians. The Greeks may not have been able to make extensive states, or to effect their political unity; at least they always preserved the notion of their common origin and the feeling of Hellenic unity.
