In their free youth the Asiatic Greeks carried into fullest practice the Hellenic conception of the city-state, self-governing, self-contained, exclusive. Their several societies had in consequence the intensely vivid and interested communal existence which develops civilization as a hot-house develops plants; but they were not democratic, and they had little sense of nationality--defects for which they were to pay dearly in the near future. In spite of their associations for the celebration of common festivals, such as the League of the twelve Ionian cities, and that of the Dorian Hexapolis in the south-west, which led to discussion of common political interests, a separatist instinct, reinforced by the strong geographical boundaries which divided most of the civic territories, continually reasserted itself. The same instinct was ruling the history of European Greece as well. But while the disaster, which in the end it would entail, was long avoided there through the insular situation of the main Greek area as a whole and the absence of any strong alien power on its continental frontier, disaster impended over Asiatic Greece from the moment that an imperial state should become domiciled on the western fringe of the inland plateau. Such a state had now appeared and established itself; and if the Greeks of Asia had had eyes to read, the writing was on their walls in 600 B.C. Meanwhile Asiatic traders thronged into eastern Hellas, and the Hellenes and their influence penetrated far up into Asia. The hands which carved some of the ivories found in the earliest Artemisium at Ephesus worked on artistic traditions derived ultimately from the Tigris. So, too, worked the smiths who made the Rhodian jewellery, and so, the artists who painted the Milesian ware and the Clazomenae sarcophagi. On the other side of the ledger (though three parts of its page is still hidden from us) we must put to Greek credit the script of Lydia, the rock pediments of Phrygia, and the forms and decorative schemes of many vessels and small articles in clay and bronze found in the Gordian tumuli and at other points on the western plateau from Mysia to Pamphylia. The men of "Javan," who had held the Syrian sea for a century past, were known to Ezekiel as great workers in metal; and in Cyprus they had long met and mingled their culture with that of men from the East.