The Coming of the GreeksAt this point it may be helpful to see how historians pictured
the event we have been discussing. A particularly vivid picture
can be seen in James Breasted's Ancient Times. "The great white
race" began its historic breakup in the middle of the third mil-
lenium: "Divided into numerous tribes, they wandered at will,
seeking pasture for their flocks.... They were the most gifted
and the most highly imaginative people of the ancient
world. ... In the West these wanderers from the northern
grasslands had already crossed the Danube and were far down
in the Balkan peninsula by 2000 B.C. Some of them had doubt-
less already entered Italy by this time." 11 What Breasted imag-
ined was a vast Volkerwanderung, analogous to the Germanic
peoples' invasion of the Roman Empire. "Driving their herds
before them, with their families in rough carts drawn by
horses, the rude Greek tribesmen must have looked out upon
the fair pastures of Thessaly, the snowy summit of Mount
Olympus, and the blue waters of the Aegean not long after
2000 B.C." 12
Beloch, too, explained the "Ausbreitung der Indogerma-
nen" as the westward and southward expansion of a pastoral
population: the Aryans, a prolific but decent and responsible
people, pushed on from one river frontier to the next, searching
out new pastures for their herds as the Aryan population con-
tinued to expand.' 3 Similarly, in the mind of Eduard Meyer
the dispersal of the Indo-European language family was visu-
alized as "grossen Volkerbewegungen." 14 This picture of the
- J. Breasted, Ancient Times: A History of the Early World (Boston:
GinnandCo., 1916), 174-75. - Ibid., 253.
- Beloch, Griechische Geschichte, i: 68—69: "Natiirlich kann die
Einwanderung nicht in einem Zuge erfolgt sein." Since the expansion of the
Indo-Europeans continued until the end of classical antiquity, and stretched
from India to the Atlantic Ocean, it was an entirely gradual affair, occa-
sioned by the need to find "neue Weidegriinde" for the growing number of
Aryan herds and flocks. - Meyer, Geschichte ties Altertums, 1:805.
IO