Had the classical writings of Greece been more extensively read throughout Europe in the Middle Ages it is probable that the Roman name Greece would have been discarded in modern usage, and the name Hellas restored to its proper position. An effort to effect this change has indeed been made more recently by many classical scholars, and it is by no means unusual to meet the terms “Hellas” and “Hellenes” in modern books of almost every European language; but to make the substitution in the popular mind after the word Greece has been so closely linked with so wide a chain of associate ideas for so many generations would be utterly impossible, at least in our generation. THE ORIGIN OF THE GREEKS But whether known as Hellas or as Greece, the tiny peninsula designated by these names was inhabited by a people which by common consent was by far the most interesting of antiquity. It has been said that they constituted a race rather than a nation, for the most patent fact about them, to any one who gives even casual attention to their history, was that they lacked the political unity which lies at the foundation of true national existence. Yet the pride of race to a certain extent made up for this deficiency, and if the Greeks recognised no single ruler and were never bound together into a single state, they felt more keenly perhaps than any other nation that has lived at any other period of the world’s history--unless perhaps an exception be made of the modern Frenchman--the binding force of racial affinities and the full meaning of the old adage that blood is thicker than water. All this of course implies that the Greeks were one race in the narrow sense of the term, sprung in relatively recent time from a single stock. Such was undoubtedly the fact, and the division into Ionians, Dorians, and various lesser branches, on which the historian naturally lays much stress, must be understood always as implying only a minor and later differentiation. One will hear much of the various dialects of the different Greek states, but one must not forget that these dialects represent only minor variations of speech which as compared with the fundamental unity of the language as a whole might almost be disregarded. To be a Greek was to be born of Greek parents, to the use of the Greek language as a mother tongue; for the most part, following the national custom, it was to eschew every other language and to look out upon all peoples who spoke another tongue as “barbarians”--people of an alien birth and an alien genius.