One thing, then, is certain, the Athenians and Ionians admitted that they were Hellenic in race and speech merely through slight contact with Achaeans. Attica was never "Achaeanised" in religion, burial rites, and other ritual. Attica was never conquered by Achaeans, she stood apart. Now this claim to be a region apart, conquered neither by Achaeans nor Dorians, is certainly supported by the fact that the traditions and legends of Attica stand widely remote in all respects from the ancient Achaean legends in Homer, and in Theban and Minyan and Aetolian "saga," or bardic traditions.[2] The traditions of the Ionians in Asia, again, are connected with those of Attica rather than with the Achaean saga, although the Ionians of Asia were not, and were known not to be, by any means of solely Attic descent. This is confessed. Returning to the Ionians of Asia, and their account of themselves given in the time of Herodotus, we find that it agrees with the fabulous genealogies already studied. The Ionians claimed to have in-habited twelve cities of what, in the time of Herodotus, was called "Achaia," the _Aigialos_ in the northern Peloponnese;--that they were driven thence to Attica by Achaeans, fugitives from the Dorians in other parts of Peloponnese, is asserted by Herodotus. Ionians were also, of old, _in Boeotia_, neighbours of the "Cadmeians," and some of the Cadmeians were admitted, on conditions, to Athenian citizenship.[3] It thus appears that the people later called, in Asia, "Ionians," had been dwellers on the coasts of Boeotia and Attica, as well as on the northern Peloponnese. That they were then and there known as "Ionians" it would be difficult to prove. Homer has nothing to say of the Ionians as a peculiar people in the Peloponnesus or Boeotia. Of their twelve Peloponnesian cities, the Catalogue gives Orneai, Pellênê, Aigeira, and Helikê to Agamemnon.[4] If Homer really knew any people called Ionians at all, they were Athenian. Meanwhile the people of the Ionian name in Asia were, according to Herodotus, "a mixed multitude," including members of the communities known to Homer as Abantes of Euboea, with forty ships, Phocians, even Arcadians, Cretans, and many others. All these could only be lumped together as "Ionians" after their settlement in Asia, and their alliance with the Ionian colonists from Attica.