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The People. 105 mayhap even a retrocession in the march of progress. When, for instance, the Arnaeans, seeing themselves disturbed out of their abodes, fell upon Boeotia, when Dorian bands struck terror throughout Peloponnesus, laying waste the land, surprising for- tresses, or reducing their defenders by famine ; all these com- motions must of necessity have suspended, for a season, direct and indirect relations between Phrygia, Caria, and Lycia, between Phoenicia and Egypt, between towns like Cadmic Thebes, Tiryns, Argos, and Mycenae, boasting one and all to have been founded by heroes that had come from Oriental regions. Maritime trade was either brought to a complete standstill, or at any rate greatly reduced in its activity ; many raw products and models no longer found their way to feed an industry which already possessed con- siderable technical skill, in fact was very near rising to eminence, and in some of its works might be said to have attained thereto. Yet now it must not only have been checked in its advance, and languished everywhere, but on many a point have fallen to a very low ebb indeed. In the old days, Achaean princes had supplied it with the precious metals which they kept in the treasuries of their citadels, so as to have them transformed into richly- decorated armour, artistic furniture, vases, and ornaments for per- sonal use. But when these princes saw themselves menaced by northern tribes, they were obliged to turn all the resources at their disposal in beating back an enemy whose power for mischief waxed from year to year ; and then when all their means had failed, they too had wandered forth into exile. With them were scattered to the four winds of heaven the master-artificers whose training had been obtained in their service. These long troublous times brought with them a period of wretchedness, of economic and industrial decadence. The decadence, however, was of short duration. The rude, warlike mountaineers, whose intrusion had wrought devastation and troubles of every kind, were closely related to the men whom they had overthrown. The dialect they spoke belonged to the common mother-tongue ; they had the same natural apti- tudes, the same secret instincts, and they worshipped the same gods. As soon as they got a firm foothold in the land which they had wrested from the earlier inhabitants, they drew around them Achaeans, lonians, and ^EoHans, all those masses of populations which had abandoned their native seats, whilst the /