Indo-European
Family of peoples, which spread in the course of many centuries from an original home somewhere near the Caucasus into India, Iran, and Europe. They began to enter Greece from the north about 1900 B.C. From the great steppes they entered a world in which the sea was of primary importance for communications; the land of Greece is mountainous, broken up into a multitude of separate small plains, river valleys, and islands. The fierce particularity of classical Greece, in which every city as a matter of course had its own coinage and even its own calendar, with jealous hostility and intermittent war the rule between neighbouring cities, is clearly connected with the terrain. Italy, too, is not a country of great navigable rivers: the Romans were astonished by the broad and equable rivers of Gaul. The climate of Greece is temperate, although the Aegean Sea is notorious for sudden storms, and a man needed little-by the standards of the wet and chilly North-for reasonable comfort. Open-air gatherings and a life largely lived out of doors came naturally in such surroundings. However spectacular the public buildings on the Acropolis, the life-style of a classical Athenian was very modest. The Greeks themselves said that poverty was their great instructor in hardihood and self-reliance. (Boardman, 1986)