The Nations Spread Abroad

After this they were scattered because of their languages and went out in colonies everywhere. Each colony took possession of whatever land it came upon and to which God led it, so that the whole mainland was filled with them, both the inland and the coastal regions. Some also crossed the sea in ships and settled the islands. Some of those nations still keep the names their first founders gave them; some have lost them; and some have only allowed certain changes in them, so as to be more intelligible to the inhabitants. It was the Greeks who caused these changes. For when in later ages they grew powerful, they claimed the glory of antiquity for themselves, giving the nations names that sounded well in Greek, so that they would be better understood among themselves, and setting attractive forms of government over them, as though they were peoples descended from themselves.