Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/69

 Tomi and Kallatis, as well as in Olbia and Byzantium, no other Greek populations than these (the western borders of the Pontus were inhabited alike by Ionians and Dorians), so that, when their hour struck, the Roman colonists were able to gain the whole of the land from the Adriatic to the Black Sea. Before the arrival of the Slav hordes there was, in all these broad lands, a united Latin-speaking population, for the most part preserving naturally the same anthropological characteristics of the Thracians as of the Illyrians on the western coast of the peninsula. Rome was obeyed throughout all these valleys. Under the Byzantine emperors nothing was changed: the same local, financial and military life was pursued, subject to the oriental idol in Constantinople—the heir of the Roman emperors. The strong sense for the necessity of rule by the Caesars, considered the only legitimate sovereigns of the world, made, in later times, of the many-tongued inhabitants of the Carpathians, the Pindus and the Balkans, the obedient subjects of the new Byzantine princes, the Sultans of the Ottoman Turk. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the richer classes were enamoured of the same western currents, coming first of all from France, which was the creator of a new civilisation.

Having this community of ancient memory and aspiration, of tradition and fashion, South-Eastern Europe has necessarily, deeply rooted in the remote past of the region, the same problems today.

All existing states in the peninsula and north of its limits are essentially peasant-states. From the days of the Illyrian pirates and the Thracian shepherds and farmers, their inhabitants have been devoted to pastoral pursuits; in the most remote ages a free warrior-peasantry. The speech of Alexander the Great to his malcontent soldiery in the Persian valleys, reminding them of their humble 65