Within this circle of nations little Greece expanded until its progeny peopled nearly every Mediterranean shore. For the gaunt hand that stretched its skeletal fingers southward into the sea was but a small part of the Greece whose history concerns us. In the course of their development the irrepressible Hellenes spread into every isle of the Aegean, into Crete, Rhodes, and Cyprus, into Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Asia Minor, into the Sea of Marmora and the Slack Sea, into the shores and peninsulas of the north Aegean, into Italy, Gaul, Spain, Sicily, and northern Africa. In all these regions they built city-states, independent and diverse, and yet Greek; they spoke the Greek tongue, worshiped Greek gods, read and wrote Greek literature, contributed to Greek science and philosophy, and practiced democracy in the Greek aristocratic way. They did not leave Greece behind them when they migrated from their motherland, they carried it with them, even the very soil of it, wherever they went. For nearly a thousand years they made the Mediterranean a Greek lake, and the center of the world.

The most discouraging task faced by the historian of classic civilization is that of weaving into one pattern and story these scattered members of the body of Greece. ["To write the history of Greece at almost any period without dissipating the interest is a task of immense difficulty . . . because there is no constant unity or fixed center to which the actions and aims of the numerous states can be subordinated or related." – Bury, Ancient Greek Historians, p. 22.] We shall attempt it by the pleasant method of a tour: with a map at our elbow and no expenditure but of the imagination, we shall pass from city to city of the Greek world, and observe in each center the life of the people before the Persian war-the modes of economy and government, the activities of scientists and philosophers, the achievements of poetry, and the creations of art. The plan has many faults: the geographical sequence will not quite agree with the historical; we shall be leaping from century to century as well as from isle to isle; and we shall find ourselves talking with Thales and Anaximander before listening to Homer and Hesiod. But it will do us no harm to see the irreverent Iliad against its actual background of Ionian skepticism, or to hear Hesiod's dour plaints after visiting the Aeolian colonies from which his harassed father came. When at last we reach Athens we shall know in some measure the rich variety of the civilization that it inherited, and which it preserved so bravely at Marathon.

If we begin at Argos, where the victorious Dorians established their government, we find ourselves in a scene characteristically Greek: a not too fertile plain, a small and huddled city of little brick-and-plaster houses, a temple on the acropolis, an open-air theater on the slope of the hill, a modest palace here and there, narrow alleys and unpaved streets, and in the distance the inviting and merciless sea. For Hellos is composed of mountains and ocean; majestic scenery is so usual there that the Greeks, though moved and inspired by it, seldom mention it in their books. The winter is wet and cold, the summer hot and dry; sowing is in our autumn, reaping is in our spring; rain is a heavenly blessing, and Zeus the Rain Maker is god of gods. The rivers are short and shallow, torrents for a winter spell, dry smooth pebbles in the summer heat. There were a hundred cities like Argos in the gamut of Greece, a thousand like it but smaller; each of them jealously sovereign, separated from the rest by Greek pugnacity, or dangerous waters, or roadless hills.

The Argives ascribed the foundation of their city to Pelasgic Argus, the hero with a hundred eyes; and its first flourishing to an Egyptian, Danaus, who came at the head of a band of "Dame" and taught the natives to irrigate their fields with wells. Such eponyms are not to be scorned; the Greeks preferred to end with myth that infinite regress which we must end with mystery. Under Temenus, one of the returning Heracleidae, Argos grew into the most powerful city of Greece, bringing Tiryns, Mycenae, and all Argolis under its sway. Towards 680 the government was seized by one of those tyrannoi, or dictators, who for the next two centuries became the fashion in the larger cities of Greece. Presumably Pheidon, like his fellow dictators, led the rising merchant class – allied in a passing marriage of convenience with the commoners – against a landowning aristocracy. When Aegina was threatened by Epidaurus and Athens Pheidon went to its rescue and took it for himself. He adopted – probably from the Phoenicians – the Babylonian system of weights and measures, and the Lydian plan of a currency guaranteed by the state; he established his mint on Aegina, and the Aeginetan "tortoises" (coins marked with the island's symbol) became the first official coinage in continental Greece.