And that is really the most important part that the Greeks took in the making of the story--a part quite different from that of the great empire-makers, and yet, {122} as I think you will agree, a bigger part than any of theirs. For it made, or did a great deal to make, the thought of the world what it is to-day. It did a great deal to make the thought of the world what it was all down the pages of the story, say from 1200 B.C. onwards. I mean that it made men think about things--about art and philosophy and music, and about life in general--as they do think. Had it not been for the Greeks we should be thinking differently, and probably not nearly so wisely, about all these things. That is the greatest work that the Greeks have done in the world. You may remember that we said the disasters which befell the Jews, and their scattering throughout the other nations, made them able to take their religious ideas with them, and to sow those ideas, as it were seeds from which plants should spring, amongst those nations into which they were driven. Something like the same kind of scattering happened to the Greeks, and so enabled them to carry their ideas over a great part of the world. Of their own accord they would, no doubt, have carried them far. If you look at the map of Greece, you will see that not only has the country the sea on three sides of it, but that it is cut up, and cut into, by a wonderful number of bays and gulfs of the sea, so that it would have a very great length of seashore if all were added together. Naturally that meant that the Greeks were great sea-goers. They were a great "maritime" people, as we should say--from _mare_, which is Latin for sea. A good deal of their excellence in art we may suspect that they derived from those ancient Minoans whom we saw masters of Crete very long ago. The Minoans, as the Minotaur legend showed us, were masters of Athens also. They were the great sea-power in very ancient {123} times. They left evidences of their art at Mycenæ in Greece. The Greeks, following the Minoans in art, perhaps followed them also in the skilful management of ships. We know, at all events, that they went far and wide on the Mediterranean in ships, certainly as great traders, probably often as pirates, and, whether the one or the other, taking their thoughts, their arts, their culture with them. [Sidenote: The expansion of the Greeks] But besides this--beside these expeditions which they went of their own will, and beside the further spread of their culture, which their soldiers, going out to fight for hire, would carry with them--some or other of the Greeks were from time to time in the course of the story obliged to fly over-sea, obliged to save themselves from the pressure of enemies coming down on them from the north.