5. The connection existing between the colonies and the mother cities was generally determined by the same causes that led to their foundation. In those cases where a city had been founded by malcontent or banished emigrants, all dependence on the mother country was naturally out of the question; and even in the colonies established for the purposes of trade, that dependence was but feeble and brief; the mother cities failing in power, if not in will, to enforce it. The very independence of so many colonies, made (almost without exception) in countries preeminently favoured by nature in productions and climate, and so situated as to oblige the inhabitants to navigation and commerce, must have given a great impulse to the civilization of the Hellenic race, and may be regarded as the main cause of its rapid progress and wide extension; wider indeed than that of any other nation of the ancient world. What a variety of political ideas must have been formed among a people whose settlements, more than a hundred in number, had each its own peculiar form of government. 6. Of the Greek colonies, the most ancient, and in many respects the most important, were those along the western coast of Asia Minor, extending from the Hellespont to the boundary of Cilicia. Here, ever since the Trojan war, which first made these countries generally known, Hellenes of the three great families, Aeolians, Ionians, and Dorians had planted settlements. These were the most important for trade; and here likewise in the native country of Homer, the father of Grecian civilization, of Alcaeus, and of Sappho, poesy, both epic and lyric, expanded her first and fairest blossoms; and hence too, the mother country herself received the first impulse of moral and cultivated taste.