Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/88

 The People. 67 the village and the demos. According to their version, when the Pelasgi still tilled the Athenian plain, and Thracians and Mysians were invading the flat of Eleusis, the lonians immigrated to the eastern coast or Paralia, the alluvial level of Marathon, where they planted four villages one close to the other, which they called the Ionian Tetrapolis. The situation occupied by these villages permits us to guess that the strangers had come by sea, either from Asia Minor or the Archipelago ; had they been lonians driven from Peloponnesus, they would scarcely have approached Attica on that side. On the other hand, there can be no question here of lonians, who, one or two hundred years after they had left Attica under the leadership of the Codridae or Nelidae, would have returned to their former seats. When this last immigration took place, Attica had already reached that unity whose being was supposed to have been brought about by Theseus himself. The data relating to the Tetrapolis and the worship of Apollo which these immigrants carried with them and ere long diffused over the rest of the country, belong to a much older cycle of traditions, to a time when Athens had not yet come into existence, when the several districts which in the course of time became Attica lived each its own separate life and had its own special gods, when the bond of common institutions had as yet not gathered together these populations of different origin scattered in small groups on the slopes of Parnes, Pentelicus, and Hymettus, or the narrow valleys let in between them. Thought thus travels back to a very remote period indeed, when the lonians loom in the distance as a sea-faring people, who, after having served their first apprenticeship in Asia, overran the ^gean, settled on several islands, and landed on more than one isolated point of the European continent, intro- ducing everywhere the worship of the pre-eminently civilizing god, the god of light and progress. Another group which must have constituted itself in the same region and followed pretty nearly on the same tracts, was that of the Achaeans. Legend connected Ion and Achaeus as brothers- german. In one of the genealogies which set forth the origin of the Greeks, they are called the offspring of Xuthus by Creusa, the daughter of Erechtheus. To Xuthus was attributed the planting of the Tetrapolis of Marathon.' Through the tribe of the Teucridae,
 * Strabo.