"Though the words 'Hellenism', 'Hellenic', 'Hellenes', 'Hellas' are less familiar than the words 'Greece' and 'Greek' to the English-speaking public, they have two advantages. They are not misleading; and they are the words which, in the Greek language, the Hellenes themselves used to designate their civilization, their world, and themselves. 'Hellas' seems originally to have been the name of the region round the head of the Maliac Gulf, on the border between Central and Northern Greece, which contained the shrine of Earth and Apollo at Delphi and the shrine of Artemis at Anthela near Thermopylae (the narrow passage between sea and mountain that has been the highway from Central Greece to Northern Greece and thence to the great Eurasian Continent into which Northern Greece merges). 'Hellenes', signifying 'inhabitants of Hellas', presumably acquired its broader meaning, signifying 'members of the Hellenic society', through being used as a corporate name for the association of local peoples, the Amphictyones ('neighbours'), which administered the shrines at Delphi and Thermopylae and organized the Pythian Festival that was connected with them." (Arnold J. Toynbee: Hellenism, The History of a Civilization; Oxford University Press, 1959).