III. THE DORIAN OVERFLOW

The Dorians, too, colonized the Cyclades, and tamed their warlike spirits to terrace the mountain slopes patiently, that the parsimonious rain might be held and coaxed to nourish their crops and vines. In Melos they took over from their Bronze Age predecessors the quarrying of obsidian, and made the island so prosperous that the Athenians, as we shall see, spared no pains to Melos to win its support in the struggle with Sparta. Here, in 1820, was found that Aphrodite of Melos* which is now the most famous statue in the Western world.

Moving east and then south, the Dorians conquered Thera and Crete, and from Thera sent a further colony to Cyrene. A few of them settled in Cyprus, where, from the eleventh century, a small colony of Arcadian Greeks had struggled for mastery against the old Phoenician dynasties. It was one of these Phoenician kinglets, Pygmalion, of whom legend told how he so admired an ivory Aphrodite carved by his hands that he fell in love with it, begged the goddess to give it life, and married his creation when the goddess complied.¹⁸ The coming of iron probably lessened the demand for Cyprian copper, and left the island off the main line of Greek economic advance. The cutting of the timber by the natives to burn the copper ore, by the Phoenicians for ships and by the Greeks for agricultural clearings, slowly transformed Cyprus into the hot and half-barren derelict that it is today. The art of the island, like its population, was in the Greek period a medley of Egyptian, Phoenician, and Hellenic influences, and never attained a homogeneous character of its own.†

The Dorians were but a minority of the Greek population in Cyprus; but in Rhodes and the southern Sporades and on the adjoining mainland they became the ruling class. Rhodes prospered in the centuries between Homer and Marathon, though its zenith would not come till the Hellenistic age. On a promontory jutting out from Asia, Dorian settlers developed the city of Cnidus, well situated to be a port of the coastal trade. Here the astronomer Eudoxus would be born, and the historian (or fabulist) Ctesias, and that Sostratus who was to build the Pharos at Alexandria. Here, among the ruins of ancient temples, would be found the sad and matronly Demeter of the British Museum.

Opposite Cnidus lay the island of Cos, home of Hippocrates and rival of Cnidus as a center of Greek medical science. Apelles the painter would be born here, and Theocritus the poet. A little to the north, on the coast, was Halicarnassus, birthplace of Herodotus and royal seat, in Hellenistic days, of the Carian King Mausolus and his fond Artemisia. This city, with Cos and Cnidus and the chief towns of Rhodes (Lindus, Camirus, and Ialysus) formed the Dorian Hexapolis, or Six Cities, of Asia Minor—weak rivals, for a time, of the Twelve Cities of Ionia.