Thus, throughout the centuries, by a process of colonization that was forwarded now by peaceful means and again by war, Hellenism forced its way steadily eastward, and on the basis of the older indigenous population a new sphere for Greek colonization was opened up which developed its own peculiar cultural strength only after the passing away of the ancient Greek civilization, in Christian, that is, and Byzantine times. Up to the end of the first millennium of the Christian Era, at a time when the Balkan Peninsula, including Ancient Greece, had long since lost its ancient city-life and culture beneath the inroads and devastations of Goths, Avars and Slavs, Asia Minor was still a populous and blooming land with countless large cities, whose inhabitants combined Hellenistic culture with Christian fervor. Intellectual traditions, associated with the names of Arrian, Dio Cassius, Strabo, Galen and Epictetus, were still living and were perpetuated in the writings of the Byzantine historians of the 10th-14th centuries, the most famous of whom came from Asia Minor.[13] At that time the strongly ascetic ideals of Greek monastic life were still in full vigor, as they had been first preached and practiced by the three great Church Fathers, Basil of Cæsarea, the Cappadocian, and the two Gregories of Nyssa and Nazianzus, and as they had assumed controversial form in the monastic castles of Asia Minor (the forerunners of the monasteries of Mount Athos), built on the Bithynian Olympus, which is still called by the Turks Keshish-Dagh, _i.e._, Monks’ Mount, on the Auxentios (also in Bithynia), on Mounts Sipylus, in Lydia, and Latmos, in Caria. In ecclesiastical architecture, too, Asia Minor was an originator: the so-called “Domed” Basilika, which reached its greatest perfection in St. Sophia in Constantinople and its most perfect reproduction in St. Mark’s in Venice, owes its development to Asia Minor.[14] Finally there arose in Asia Minor a new folk-poetry that dealt with the deeds of heroes. What the Nibelungen is to the Germans, the Chanson de Roland to the French, and Beowulf to the English, that, to the Greeks of the Middle Ages, was the romantic epic of Akritas (_i.e._, Count) Basilios. Discovered only a few decades ago, though scattered widely, wherever Greek is spoken, in countless fragments of folk-poetry, it is a sort of crystal precipitate in verse of those struggles which the Byzantine Counts were forced to wage against the Saracens on the eastern confines of their realm, in Cappadocia. The poem has for us a double value: first, as proving that the national center of gravity of Hellenism lay then in Asia Minor, and second, as enlightening us as to the ethnological relations of the country, for its hero is the son of a Greek woman by an Arab Emir (hence his surname Digenis, that is, born of two races).[15]