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Excerpt from Delphi, Considered Locally, Morally, and Politically Of the vicissitudes of their southern progress historians have recorded little and have known less. Bare indications of some Doric settlement or of some Doric migration (for they were a wandering people) are all that remain to us. But it cannot have been without many a fierce contest that they won their way across that rich champaign to the lofty hills which part it from central Greece. Since time immemorial the plains had been inhabited by a primitive and agricultural nation, accustomed to a savage religion and a barbarous though peaceful life. From the black stream of Titaresius to Pherae, and the heights around Iolcus, all was theirs. Year by year they collected about the oaks of Larissa, if antiquarians speak true, to sacrifice to their Pelasgic god with dark and dreadful rites. Beyond, to the south-west, were nations of like habits, soil of equal or scarcely less fertility. As far as the eye could reach it swept over leagues of level land, well fitted by its extraordinary fruitfulness to be the battle-field of races. But of the con ict between the invaders and the invaded nothing is certain. So much only we may conjecture, that like their descendants in the Peloponnese, the Dorians probably followed the wind ings of the many rivers which irrigate Thessaly. Yet though authentic evidence is wanting, and the traces of their march have died away, the clang of arms'comes down to us preserved in many a random mythe: Hercules and the Centaurs, Bacchus and the Lapithae, the deities of Olympus and the Titans, Apollo and the Phlegyans, all are tales that perhaps embody some fierce struggle between the old and new life, between the powers of barbarism and the powers of civiliza tion, and that commemorate the throes of agony in the midst of which Hellas was born. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This