Asia Minor was in prehistoric times a field for Greek colonization. Long after its littoral had, in early Hellenic times (dating back, in fact, to the 10th century B.C.), been bordered with a fringe of Greek settlements, which were the basis of the old Ionic and Æolic civilizations, this coast colonization had, in later Greek times, been extended and developed through the victorious eastern expeditions of Alexander the Great into a real colonization of the interior. Just as had been the case in the whole of the western regions of Asia Minor, there arose in the 4th to 2nd centuries B.C., in the interior of the country as well, a whole series of new Greek cities, which from that time on have constituted firmly fixed centers for the Hellenizing and civilizing of the land. This began with Byzantine and Turkish times and has extended up to the present, forming a sure testimony to the stubborn endurance of this late Greek civilization. One needs only to think of towns like Nicæa, Nicomedia, Prusa, Pergamon, Philadelphia, Thyatira, Laodicea, etc., which were all founded in the 3rd and 2nd centuries B.C. and were named after the Diadochi[12] or their wives. After the fall of the states founded by the Diadochi, the Romans came in and conquered Asia Minor. Without having succeeded in permanently Romanizing it, they gave it a solidity which enabled the Byzantine emperors, after the later Hellenizing of the Eastern Roman Empire, to advance farther and farther into the interior and toward the east, accompanying the victorious advance of Christianity: in Cappadocia, the home of Greek monastic life in the East, there was firmly established in Cæsarea, in the 6th century, a new outpost of Greek civilization.