It was to the northern part of Asia Minor, the island of Lesbos and the opposite shores, that the Achaean and Aeolian adventurers steered their ships. Here they planted the first Hellenic settlements on Asiatic soil—the beginning of a movement which, before a thousand years had passed away, was to carry Greek conquerors to the Indian Ocean. The coast-lands of western Asia Minor are, like Greece itself, suitable for the habitations of a sea-faring people. A series of river-valleys are divided by mountain chains which run out into promontories so as to form deep bays; and the promontories are continued in islands. The valleys of the Hermus and the Caicus are bounded on the north by a chain of hills which run out into Lesbos; the valley of the Hermus is parted from that of the Cayster by mountains which are prolonged in Chios; and the valley of the Cayster is separated from the valley of the Maeander by a chain which terminates in Samos. South of the Maeander valley there are bays and islands, but the mountains of the mainland are broken by no rivers. The Greek occupation of the lower waters of the Hermus and Caicus is known to us only by its results. The invaders won the coast-lands from the Mysian natives and seized a number of strong places which they could defend—Pitane, Myrina, Cyme, Aegae, Old Smyrna. They pressed up the rivers, and on the Hermus they founded Magnesia under Mount Sipylus. All this, needless to say, was not done at once. It must have been a work of many years, and of successive expeditions from the mother-country. The only event which we can grasp, by a fragment of genuine tradition lurking in a legend, is the capture of the Lesbian town of Brēsa. The story of the fair-cheeked maid of Bresa, of whom Agamemnon robbed Achilles, is the memorial of the Greek conquest of Lesbos.
The Greeks made no settlement in the Troad. But in occupying the country south of the Troad, they came into collision with the great Phrygian town of Troy, or Ilios, as it was called from King Ilos, who perhaps was its founder. We can easily understand that the lords of Troy—though we know not how far their power may have extended—would not look with favour on the arrival of the new settlers. There were weary wars. Then the mighty fortress fell; and we need not doubt the truth of the legend which records that it fell through Grecian craft or valour. The Phrygian power and the lofty stronghold of “sacred Ilios” made a deep impression on the souls of the Greek invaders; and the strife, on whatever scale it really was, blended by their imagination with the old legends of their gods, inspired the Achaean minstrels with new songs. Through their minstrelsy the struggle between the Phrygians and the Greek settlers assumed the proportion of a common expedition of all the peoples of Greece against the town of Troy; and the Trojan war established itself in the belief of the Greeks as the first great episode in the everlasting debate between east and west.
It is to be observed that the Greeks and Phrygians in that age do not seem to have felt that they were severed by any great contrast of race or manners. They were conscious perhaps of an affinity in language; and they had the same kind of civilisation. This fact comes out in the Homeric poems, where, though some specially Phrygian features are recognised, the Trojans might be a Greek folk and their heroes have Greek names; and it bears witness to the constant intercourse between the Achaean colonists and their Phrygian neighbours.
The Achaean wave of emigration was succeeded by another wave, flowing mainly from the coasts of Attica and Argolis, and new settlements were planted, south of the elder Achaean settlements. The two-pronged peninsula between the Hermus and Cayster rivers, with the off-lying isle of Chios, the valleys of the Cayster and Maeander, with Samos and the peninsula south of Mount Latmos, were studded with communities which came to form a group distinct from the older group in the north. Each group of settlements came to be called by a collective name. As the Achaeans were the most illustrious of the settlers in the north, one might expect to find the northern group known as Achaean. But it is not thus that names are given in primitive times. A number of cities or settlements, which have no political union and are merely associated together by belonging to the same race and speaking the same tongue, do not generally choose themselves a common name. It rather happens that when they get a common name it is given to them by strangers, who, looking from the outside, regard them as a group and do not think of the differences of which they are themselves more vividly conscious. And it constantly happens that the name of one member of the group is, by some accident, picked out and applied to the whole. Thus it befell that the Aeolian and not the Achaean name was selected to designate the northern division of the Greek settlements in Asia; just as our own country came to be called not Saxony but England. The southern and larger group of colonies received the name of Iāvŏnes—or Iones, as they called themselves, when they lost the letter v. The Iāvŏnes were, as we saw, a people who had settled on the coasts of Argolis and Attica, but there the name fell out of use, and perhaps passed out of memory, until on Asiatic soil it attained celebrity and re-echoed with glory to their old homes.
But it would probably be a grave mistake to regard these two groups as well defined from the first. To begin with, it is possible that they overlapped chronologically. The latest of Aeolian settlements may have been founded subsequently to the earliest of the Ionian. In the second place, the original homes of the settlers overlapped. Though the Aeolian colonies mainly came from the lands north of Mount Oeta—apart from those who came from Aetolia—they included some settlers from the coasts of Boeotia and Euboea. Thus Cyme in Aeolis derived its name from Euboean Cyme. And on the other hand, though the Ionian colonies were chiefly derived from the coasts of Attica and Argolis—apart from some contingents from Crete and other places in the south—there were also some settlers from the north. Thirdly, the two groups ran into each other geographically. Phocaea, for example, which is geographically in Aeolis, standing on the promontory north of the Hermus river, was included in Ionia. Its name shows that some of the men who colonised it were Phocians. And some of the places in north Ionia—Teos, for instance—had received Achaean settlements first, and were then re-settled by Ionians. In Chios, which was afterwards fully in Ionia, a language of Aeolic complexion was once spoken.
Of the foundation of the famous colonies of Ionia, of the order in which they were founded, and of the relations of the settlers with the Lydian natives we know as little as of the settlements of the Achaeans. Clazomenae and Teos arose on the north and south sides of the neck of the peninsula which runs out to meet Chios; and Chios, on the east coast of her island, faces Erythrae on the mainland—Erythrae, “the crimson”, so called from its purple fisheries, the resort of Tyrian traders. Lebedus and Colophon lie on the coast as it retires eastward from Teos to reach the mouth of the Cayster; and there was founded Ephesus, the city of Artemis. By the streams of the Cayster was a plain called “the Asian meadow”, which destiny in some odd way selected to bestow a name upon one of the continents of the earth. South of Ephesus and on the northern slope of Mount Mycale was the religious gathering-place of the Ionians, the temple of the Heliconian Poseidon, which, when once the Ionians became conscious of themselves as a sort of nation and learned to glory in their common name, served to foster a sense of unity among all their cities from Phocaea in the north to Miletus in the south. Samos faces Mount Mycale, and the worship of Hera, which was the religious feature of Samos, is thought to point to men of the southern Argos as participators in its original foundation. South of Mycale, the cities of Myus and Priene were planted on the Maeander. Then the coast retires to skirt Mount Latmos and breaks forward again to form the promontory, at the northern point of which was Miletus with its once splendid harbour. There was one great inland city, Magnesia on the Maeander, which must not be confused with the inland