DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.748#0082
INVESTIGATIONS AT ASSOS, 1881. 67
This easy communication by water tended to connect Assos
more intimately with ^Eolic Lesbos than with the neighbor-
ing lands of the Scamander, to which the roads are rugged
and difficult. In primitive and lawless ages the sea is always
safer than the land ; no ambush or unforeseen difficulty
need be feared upon the narrow strait, which was overlooked
from the citadel of either town. The low houses at the south
of the castle of Molivo are visible from the port of Behram
and from the Acropolis; and on clear days it was possible to
note the departure from the island of the little boat which
weekly brought across the eagerly awaited mail of the Expe-
dition.
The /Eolians gradually Hellenized the tracts of the conti-
nent chosen for their settlements, apparently without any long
warfare with the previous inhabitants, to whom they were in
some degree ethnographically related. Some force was doubt-
less at first required, but the final results must have been
mainly due to the superior activity and intelligence of the
Greeks, who stood in much the same position to the Mysians
of the tenth and ninth century b. c, as do their descendants to
the Ottomans of the present day.
The ^Eolians appear to have acquired by degrees many
traits of the original inhabitants of the continent,—even as
the modern Greeks are in many ways affected by certain
Turkish peculiarities of manner and speech.
Having become wholly Greek, Assos advanced in power and
prosperity until it possessed an extended tract of the surround-
ing country, and was itself able to found the colony of Gargara
upon a spur of the Ida range, twenty kilometres at the west.
Though Assos may never have rivalled the greatness of the
cities of the mother island, it was intimately connected with
Methymna and Mytilene, at a time when they represented the
highest contemporary advance of Hellenic civilization. When,
This easy communication by water tended to connect Assos
more intimately with ^Eolic Lesbos than with the neighbor-
ing lands of the Scamander, to which the roads are rugged
and difficult. In primitive and lawless ages the sea is always
safer than the land ; no ambush or unforeseen difficulty
need be feared upon the narrow strait, which was overlooked
from the citadel of either town. The low houses at the south
of the castle of Molivo are visible from the port of Behram
and from the Acropolis; and on clear days it was possible to
note the departure from the island of the little boat which
weekly brought across the eagerly awaited mail of the Expe-
dition.
The /Eolians gradually Hellenized the tracts of the conti-
nent chosen for their settlements, apparently without any long
warfare with the previous inhabitants, to whom they were in
some degree ethnographically related. Some force was doubt-
less at first required, but the final results must have been
mainly due to the superior activity and intelligence of the
Greeks, who stood in much the same position to the Mysians
of the tenth and ninth century b. c, as do their descendants to
the Ottomans of the present day.
The ^Eolians appear to have acquired by degrees many
traits of the original inhabitants of the continent,—even as
the modern Greeks are in many ways affected by certain
Turkish peculiarities of manner and speech.
Having become wholly Greek, Assos advanced in power and
prosperity until it possessed an extended tract of the surround-
ing country, and was itself able to found the colony of Gargara
upon a spur of the Ida range, twenty kilometres at the west.
Though Assos may never have rivalled the greatness of the
cities of the mother island, it was intimately connected with
Methymna and Mytilene, at a time when they represented the
highest contemporary advance of Hellenic civilization. When,