If in importance and wealth the Aeolian were inferior to the Ionian colonies, so were the Dorian colonies to the Aeolian.

Six cities (Ialyssus, Camirus, and Lindus, in Rhodes; in Cos, a city called from the island; Cnidus and Halicarnassus, on the mainland) were united, like the Ionians, by a common sanctuary--the Temple of Apollo Triopius.
Besides these colonies--the Black Sea, the Palus Maeotis, the Propontis, the coasts of Lower Italy, the eastern and southern shores of Sicily [102], Syracuse, the mightiest of Grecian offspring, and the daughter of Corinth,--the African Cyrene,--not enumerating settlements more probably referable to a later date, attested the active spirit and extended navigation of early Greece.
The effect of so vast and flourishing a colonization was necessarily prodigious upon the moral and intellectual spirit of the mother land.
The seeds scattered over the earth bore their harvests to her garner.
III.

Among the Grecian isles, the glory of Minos had long passed from Crete (about 800 B.C.).

The monarchical form of government had yielded to the republican, but in its worst shape--the oligarchic.
But the old Cretan institutions still lingered in the habits of private life;--while the jealousies and commotions of its several cities, each independent, exhausted within itself those powers which, properly concentrated and wisely directed, might have placed Crete at the head of Greece.
Cyprus, equally favoured by situation with Crete, and civilized by the constant influence of the Phoenicians, once its masters, was attached to its independence, but not addicted to warlike enterprise.

It was, like Crete, an instance of a state which seemed unconscious of the facilities for command and power which it had received from nature.
The Island of Corcyra (a Corinthian colony) had not yet arrived at its day of power.