Standish O'Grady; selected essays and passages

MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS 297
clear in the midst of the darkly-marked surrounding
mountains. There a bowl-shaped hollow in the hills
supplies the husbandman with a field for his labour. It
is an alluvial valley and plain, good for corn and kine,
for the apple and vine, the olive and the fig, a green land
fit for the sustenance of man and beast, and traversed by
many streams and rivulets descending from the hills which
gird it round upon all sides. That little valley was the
cradle and nursery of one of the world's great races, the
mountain eyrie of an eagle brood.
At some time far beyond the reach of history, a little
Greek Clan who called themselves Children of Dorus
and so the Dorians—^in one way or another got possession
of the valley and called it after their own name, Doris.
Like all the Greeks, they seem to have come down out of
the north-west, from lUyria. They established friendly
relations with the neighbouring Hellenes, with the Pho-
cians, the Aetolians, the Ozolian and Opuntian Locrians,
especially with the sacred families who held and ad-
ministered holy Delphi where Apollo dwelt and gave
oracles, chief counsellor and adviser of all the Hellenes
in his time. He was especially dear to the Dorians. Their
ancestor, Donis, was his son.
In that little plain in the hills the Dorians lived, throve,
and multiplied, utterly ignored by the great Hellenic
World outside, known only, but creditably known, to their
own neighbours. The civilized Greek world knew
nothing about them. Homer, who has celebrated those
more ancient neighbouring nations, was quite ignorant
of the strong, quiet little nations that dwelt here, hidden
—