Cicero’s lament over the desolate cities of Greece may everywhere be reëchoed by the traveler in ruin-covered Anatolia. This is particularly true of that part of the country once known as Ionia. In literature, art, history, philosophy, she long vied with Attica herself. For, among her distinguished sons are Homer Anacreon of Teos, Mimnermus, Apelles, Parrhasius and Herodotus, the Father of History. And in her once flourishing capital, Miletus, whose site is now occupied by the fever-stricken village of Palatia, lived that galaxy of philosophers--Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximenes. Here the geographers, Hecatæus and Aristagoras planned the earliest known charts. Here, too, was the birthplace of the rarely gifted Aspasia whose home in Athens, after she became the wife of Pericles, is celebrated in history as the first and most famous salon the world has ever known.[91] In Ionia originated that brilliant and highly intellectual society which a French writer has happily named _le printemps de la Grèce_. For even in the face of recent discoveries in Sparta [writes a distinguished Orientalist], it may be said without hesitation that the Greeks of western Asia Minor produced the first full-bloom of what we call pure Hellenism, that is a Greek civilization come to full consciousness of itself and destined to attain the highest possibilities of the Hellenic genius. Whatever its claim to absolute priority in culture, however, the Ionian section of the Hellenic race from the accident of geographical position served more than any other for a vital link between East and West, and imposed its individual name on Oriental terminology as the designation of the whole Greek people. All who follow the development of free social institutions must regard with peculiar interest the land where the city-State of Hellenic type first grew to adolescence. Students not only of literature, but of all the means of communication between man and man, know that it was in Ionia that the alphabet took the final shape in which the Greeks were to carry it about the civilized world. And who that belongs to, or cares for, the republic of art would ignore that “_bel elan de génie duquel est né la statuaire attique_”?[92] Nor were the islands which fringed Ionia less prolific in famous men and women than was the mainland. Suffice it to mention Cos, where Hippocrates, the oracle of physicians and “The Father of Medicine,” first saw the light of day and Lesbos, the birthplace of Alcæus and Sappho, the first of whom stands in the forefront of Greek lyric poets, while the second enjoyed the unique distinction of being called “The Poetess” as Homer was called “The Poet.”