The myths of Aphroditê and Apollo have been already commented upon as enfolding within them the history of their origin. Aphroditê is essentially an Asiatic divinity; she springs to life in a Phœnician colony. But Phœbus Apollo is before all things the god of the Ionian Greeks; and as _their_ first national life begins in the islands, _his_ birth too takes place in one of these, the central one of all, Delos. In Homer, Delos, or Ortygia, is feigned to be the central spot of the earth.
Thus the Greeks were from the beginning a commercial people. Before their history began, there is proof that they had established a colony in the Delta of the Nile; and the frequent use of the word _Javan_[140] in the Bible--which here stands for Ionians--shows how familiar was their name to the dwellers in Asia. Wherever these mariners came in contact with their brethren of the continent, they excited in them the love of adventure, and planted the germs of a new life, so that it was under their paramount influence that these primitive Greeks began to coalesce from mutually hostile tribes into nations. In Northern Greece it was that the gathering together of tribes and cities first began. These confederations were always based primarily upon religious union, the protection of a common deity, a union to protect and support a common shrine. They were called Amphictyonies, confederations of neighbours, a name which lived long in the history of Greece. These amphictyonies seem first to have arisen in the north. Here too the words _Hellenic_, _Hellenes_, first spring up as national epithets. Hellas never extended farther north than the north of Thessaly, and was naturally marked off from foreign countries by Olympia and Pierus. But the term spread southwards till it embraced all Greek-speaking lands to the extremity of the peninsula, and over the islands of the Ægean, and the coast of Asia Minor, on to the countless colonies which issued from Greek shores; for Hellas was not a geographical term, it included all the peoples of true Hellenic speech, and distinguished them from the _barbaroi_, the ‘babblers,’ of other lands.
The two great nations of the Græco-Italic family kept up some knowledge of each other after they had forgotten the days of their common life, and, strange to say, in days before either of the two races had come to regard itself as a distinct people, each was so regarded by the other. The Italians classed the Greeks in the common name of Græci or Graii, and the Greeks bestowed the name of Ὀπικός upon the nation of the Italians. It is curious to reflect upon the different destinies which lay ahead of these two races, who came under such similar conditions into their new homes. Whether it were through some peculiarity in their national character, or a too-rapid civilization, or the two great influences of a changeful character and adventurous life, the Greeks never cemented properly together the units of their race; the Italians, through a much slower process of integration, lived to weld their scattered fragments into the most powerful nation the world has ever seen.