Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/671

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 655

more complex environments. From isolated momentary factors they became factors favorable to progress. The movement and displacement of populations subsided after the Dorian invasion. In the first period Achaia with Argos and Mycenae dominated. In the second no new race was introduced. All the groups were Indo-European but strongly mixed, especially along the coasts and in the islands. However, there were still internal displace- ments, but they gave place to more and more regular relations in which the fixity of the social group was harmonized with the mobility of the individuals who composed the groups. A relative fusion was accomplished at the time when the primitive popula- tions were different races.

The physical character of the country, the mountains, little basins, rivers, peninsulas, and islands, were certainly elements of the development of Greek civilization and its variable forms. It was in the countries of the plains, in Bceotia and Thessaly that were founded the first confederations. These were the maritime regions of the East, with their natural doors, which inaugurated the movement of colonization toward Asia in the eleventh century B. C. The colonization toward the west by reason of circumstances less advantageous to commerce, was begun only about the eighth century. And we see how in spite of all the physical barriers, wrongly called natural frontiers, the Greek expansion became wider and wider. In the fifth century the Greeks had colonized almost all the coasts southeast and west of Italy, and all those of Sicily where they were in competition with the possessions of the Phoenicians. They had colonies in Egypt, along the eastern coast of Spain, and in Liguria. They were established all around the Black Sea and the Propontis. In the middle of the seventh century, Egypt was open to Greek com- merce. The colonization of Cyrenaica in the sixth century made at least half of the Mediterranean a Greek sea. The Phoenicians now had outside of Phoenicia and northwest Africa only some settlements in Sicily, Sardinia, and Italy.

Orographic obstacles did not prevent the extension of the Greek world. The seas, far from being natural limits, became means of communication. And here again colonization, from