Speakers of Greek entered the southern part of the Balkan peninsula in the first half of the second millennium b.c. From then until the present day they have formed the overwhelming majority of the population of the region. From this nucleus Greek spread to become the language of both isolated settlements and large areas all round the Mediterranean coast as well as of the greater part of the land mass of Asia Minor. In addition it served at various times as a language of culture, of administration, of trade in areas where it was not the native language of the mass of the population: it fulfilled this role as far east as the foothills of the Pamir and the Indus valley in Hellenistic times, throughout Egypt and beyond its frontiers to the south in Hellenistic and Roman times, in the Slavonic-speaking areas of the northern Balkan peninsula during the middle ages. Lastly there have existed at various periods, including the present, compact communities of Greek speakers settled in areas of non-Greek speech, and often maintaining their identity and their national consciousness for many generations, examples which spring to the mind are the Greek trading community of Southern Gaul of which St Irenaeus was a member, the ‘hungry Greeklings’ of Juvenal's Rome – one of whom was St Clement –, the Greek village of Cargèse in Corsica, the Greek communities of the present-day United States, the Greek communities of Odessa and Alexandria, the Hellenophone Cypriot community of London.