The Athenians, throughout their history, never tired of this kind of talk. No folktales of migration, of the melting pot, for them. Instead, with a smugness that other Greeks found wearisome in the extreme, they pointed to the sacrosanct quality of their borders, of how no Heraclid or Dorian had ever succeeded in forcing them, and of how, like “the wheat and the barley” that grew in the Attic fields, “the vines, the olives and the figs,”2 they were earth-born, soil-sprung—“autochthonous.”
