The athletic festival required for its growth fairly settled conditions of life, and during the troubled period which intervened between the time of Nestor and the first Olympiad no progress was possible. Long before the Homeric poems were composed, love of adventure, quickened perhaps by pressure from the North, had driven the Achaeans and other kindred tribes forth from the mainland of Greece to find fresh homes in the islands and on the eastern shores of the Aegean. Other tribes, Aeolians, Ionians, Dorians, followed, and for centuries the stream of colonization flowed eastwards, carrying Greek civilization to every part of the Aegean. This civilization gathered fresh life from contact with the East. There, while Greece itself was paralyzed by wars and migrations, great cities grew and flourished, cities great not only in material prosperity but in art and literature and science. Of the history of these cities unfortunately we know nothing; we can only judge of their greatness by the results which we find in the seventh and sixth centuries when the rise of the Lydian and Persian empires first brought them into conflict with these powers. But of one thing we may be sure—the Greek settlers brought with them their love of sport. This must be a truism to all who hold that the 23rd _Iliad_ was composed in the Eastern Aegean; it is confirmed by the many victories gained in later days at Olympia by athletes from the cities and islands of the East, and by the numerous athletic festivals existing in those parts in historical times.