READING HALL

THE DOORS OF WISDOM

THE ASSYRIAN EMPIRE. TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER XXIII

THE COLONIAL EXPANSION OF GREECE

I.

SURVEY OF DISTRIBUTION OF GREEK COLONIES

IF we compare the distribution of the Late Minoan civilization, or even that assigned in the Homeric Catalogue to the allies of Agamemnon, with that of the Greek city-states at the close of the sixth century, we find striking resemblances, and also striking contrasts. To elucidate these is the purpose of this chapter, in the light thrown upon literary tradition by geographical circumstances and archaeological discovery. Some of the most important contrasts, however, may here be taken for granted, and have indeed been already discussed: namely, the establishment of the three great groups of Aeolian, Ionian and Dorian city-states on the west coast of Asia Minor, in the course of the Minoan debacle. The establishment of a fourth such group, the so-called ‘Achaean’ cities of Magna Graecia—the significance of which seems only to have been appreciated gradually and rather late by the Greeks themselves, if we may judge from that revision of the Hellenic pedigree which appears first in Hellanicus—is so imperfectly attested by tradition, and so intimately involved in the story of colonization westward, that it must be considered in rather greater detail in that connection.

Similarly, a few later extensions of the area of colonization, due to Persian pressure on the cities of Ionia in the latter part of the sixth century, and to the political ambitions of Athens and Corinth in the fifth, belong rather to the general history of these later periods than to the Age of Colonization itself; and will only be treated here in outline. At most they were attempts to fill gaps in a distribution of which the main outlines were already clear by the middle of the sixth century, and of which only the first rudiments are traceable before that of the eighth.

The regions assured to Hellenic enterprises during this period of about two hundred years (750—550) may be briefly summarized as follows:

(a) Within the Aegean, the whole north coast, from Thessaly to the Hellespont, was occupied by more or less coherent groups of settlements, of which the most extensive and important, around the three promontories of Pallene, Sithonia and Athos, was due to Chalcidian enterprise; others originated from Eretria, Andros and Paros; from Chios, Clazomenae and Miletus in Ionia; and in a small region east of the Hebrus river, from Aeolic cities.

(b) Adjacent to the Aegean, and only accessible through it, are the shores of the Propontis and Pontus. Here the settlements were mainly from Ionian cities, Phocaea, Erythrae, Samos and (above all) Miletus; but an important group around the Bosporus came from Megara; and eventually Athens acquired important strategical and economic footing at Sigeum, on the Chersonese, and in the islands which command the Aegean approaches to the Hellespont.

(c) In the Levant, natural obstacles, and the rival sea-power of the Phoenicians, prevented any such wholesale exploitation, so that the remnants of Late Minoan enterprise, in Cyprus, and on the coasts of Cilicia and Palestine, either faded away, or found independent and peculiar expression. In the Nile Delta, too, colonization of the normal kind is replaced by trading-factories of abnormal constitution and precarious tenure.

(d) Farther west, on the north African coast, Cyrene and its offshoots entered into unusually close friendship with the Libyan natives, and had intercourse with the far interior. Beyond the Cyrenaica, however, the Tripolitan region around the river Cinyps, between the two ‘quicksands,’ was foreclosed by Phoenicians from the west, before 515, so that the Greek world ends here abruptly.

(e) North-westward it was otherwise. The ‘Achaean’ region of refugee-settlements, however much interpenetrated by later emigrants from the Aegean, retains a special character throughout, between the colonies, mainly Corinthian, which extend up the west coast of the Greek peninsula itself from Oeniadae to Epidamnus and Black Corcyra (Curzola), and the western Chalcidians, astride of the Strait of Messana, and along the northern and eastern shores of Sicily, as far as Himera westward, and Leontini just beyond the Simaethus. Another and perhaps even earlier Chalcidian region is the coast of Campania, limited southwards by the forested highlands of Calabria, and northwards by the home waters of Etruria, foreclosed like Punic Africa by deep-seated hostility. Late in date, but unusually successful within their remote field of enterprise, the Phocaean colonies east and west of Massilia, from the Riviera to the Ebro, kept precarious touch with their Chalcidian friends at the Strait, through short­lived occupation of Alalia in Corsica, and afterwards through Elea (Velia), in the Calabrian no-man’s-land.

(f) South of the Chalcidian area of Sicily, Corinth’s sphere of influence, around Syracuse and Camarina, was interrupted for a while by the Megarian settlements at Thapsus and among the Sicels of Hybla; and restricted westward by the colonies from Asiatic Doris, Gela and Acragas. Beyond these, the Megarian forlorn hope at Selinus, the precarious foothold of Heraclea-Minoa, and the failure of belated Dorians to gain foothold at Lilybaeum, mark the debatable ground between Greek and Punic territory, since the whole north-west of Sicily remained in enemy hands till the Roman conquest in the third century.

II.

PRECURSORS OF GREEK COLONIZATION; THE FATE OF THE SEA-RAIDERS

Obviously such a piecemeal distribution as this represents the outcome of long and various attempts to establish Greek settlements in face of natural and political obstacles. Of these the most notable, on the physical side, are the abruptness and infertility of such sea-coasts as those of Thrace, Lycia and western Cilicia; the severe climate and especially the copious rainfall of Caucasus and the north side of Asia Minor, and of the Adriatic from Epirus northward; the harbourless lee-shore and dangerous shoals of long stretches of north Africa. Among human adversaries the most important are the native populations of the Thracian, Paphlagonian and Pamphylian highlands, the Illyrians and Epirotes of north-western Greece, the Phoenician occupants of parts of Cyprus, Punic Africa and western Sicily, and the Tyrrhenian overlords of the coastlands north of Campania. Generally favourable circumstances, on the other hand, were the exceptional uniformity of structure, climate, and natural products which characterizes most parts of the Mediterranean region, so that, proceeding coastwise, it was possible to propagate settlements similarly constituted and sustained on the economic plane, with a minimum of adjustment to local circumstances; while the principal exceptions to this uniformity, in the featureless deep-soiled prairie north of the Black Sea, and on the plateau-steppe of Cyrenaica, happened to permit such exploitation of corn-crops and sheep-farming respectively, as most completely supplemented the natural produce of the homeland, and induced profound economic changes in its indigenous mode of life.

No less favourable, though less easily explained, was the reception generally accorded to the Greek colonies by the native populations among which they were founded, and to whose tolerance, if not positive goodwill, they necessarily owed their permanent security. Scythia and Cyrenaic Libya are conspicuous examples; Sicily and southern Italy less uniformly so, as will be seen later in detail. Most important of all, as the archaeological evidence is now beginning to reveal, was the previous extension, on somewhat similar lines, and with the same natural facilities or obstructions, of the Late Minoan civilization along the Mediterranean seaways, in the centuries between the Fall of Cnossus and those irruptions of alien peoples out of east-central Europe in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries, which cut short that civilization prematurely.

Of their Minoan precursors—as of the sea-raiders who wrecked so much of their work, while elsewhere they merged themselves in it—the Greeks of the sixth and fifth centuries seem to have preserved surprisingly fragmentary memories. Principal types of such traditions are those which attribute certain early settlements to the Argonauts and other ‘leaders from Thessaly,’ to the companions of Heracles in his raids on the Amazons and the cattle of Geryon, to Achaeans ‘returning from the Trojan War,’ to Trojans, Phrygians and other survivors of that struggle, to Thracians, Pelasgians and Carians; and (following quite another clue) to ‘those who came with Cadmus’ whose original Cretan ancestry had been displaced by the belief in a Phoenician origin.

To understand, therefore, the course actually taken by the principal currents of Greek colonization, both within the Aegean and beyond it, account must be taken of the general course of events around the margin of the cradle-land of the composite Greek people; more especially as such considerations as these will be found to offer important clues to the distribution and activities of the chief rival sea-farers, with whom Greek colonists came into conflict as they began to range farther afield. It has been often observed that, in the west especially, Greek, Phoenician, and Tyrrhenian enterprises were running a neck-and-neck race for principal points of vantage; and the question is unavoidable, how it comes about that the Mediterranean basin became the scene of this keen maritime competition, during the period under review. The answer to this question is all the more important, because it will be evident in the long run, that at the moment when the Persians were reorganizing the continental resources of the Near East in a single efficient and aggressive empire, something of a deadlock had been reached in this struggle for mastery of the seaways; and that the rivals themselves realized that the new land-power might well come to have the decision in a conflict which was in itself naval. Such a belief, on the Greek side, seems to have influenced the judgment of Herodotus on matters of the first importance, and certainly inspires the retrospect of earlier sea-powers with which Thucydides opens his history of the ‘greatest of wars till now.’

Aegean Hellenism, indeed, was by no means the only national culture which the long ‘dark age’ engendered. While the dis­membered remnants of the Late Minoan regime were reconstructing their shattered societies within the outerguard of a stabilized Macedon and Thrace in south-eastern Europe, and a stabilized Phrygia and Lydia in western Asia Minor, the survivors of the communities on the shores of the Levant, which had been wrecked by the combined Sea-raids and Land-raids in the early years of Ramses III, were recovering themselves similarly, and reconstituting partly a modified counterpart of what had existed before, partly fresh states with mixed ingredients, new outlook and interests, and consequently new relations with their neighbours.

Until the Fall of Cnossus, intercourse between the Aegean and the Levant seems to have been rather strictly limited to the direct line of intercourse between Crete itself and Egypt. Imported Egyptian objects seem only to occur on sites of the Helladic mainland during the period of Cretan predominance; and on the other hand, even so attractive a region as Cyprus seems to have been hardly touched by Minoan enterprise down to the end of the ‘Palace Period’. The resemblances between Minoan crafts­manship and that of the splendid objects brought as tribute by the Levantine (and probably north Syrian) ‘Keftiu-folk’ to Thuthmose III have been exaggerated; and the two cultures are now generally recognized to be essentially distinct.

But with the substitution of Mycenaean for Minoan hegemony in the Third Late Minoan period, after 1400 BC, the range of oversea contact widened rapidly, and its character changed. Cyprus was colonized extensively, and the foundations were laid of settlements such as Curium, Citium and Salamis, which per­sisted into historic times. On the mainland, evidence is still scanty, but there was intercourse with Palestine from the late fourteenth century onward.

The Levantine world into which the new comers penetrated was in agitated suspense between the waning protectorate of Egypt, the persistent aggressions of the Hatti-folk from beyond Taurus, and the depredations of Amorites, Habiru and other ‘men of blood,’ nomad raiders from the desert. To these a fourth distraction was added by western adventurers, whom Egyptian records describe generally as Lukki, very probably from an element which had made itself at home in the creeks and coast­fastnesses of Lycia—if indeed it did not actually originate there. Among these disturbances, old-established cultures in Cilicia, in north Syria, and on the Phoenician coast, maintained themselves as best as they could, siding with the more civilized Egyptian overlord as long as that was practicable, but transferring their allegiance sooner or later to the most aggressive competitor.

A century later, fresh danger loomed up from the north-west, from the founders of the Pelopid and Trojan hegemonies. An early symptom is the mutual-insurance treaty between Ramses II and the king of the Hatti, about 1272, not far removed in time from that Phrygian inroad on the plateau, which was an early memory of King Priam. Then comes the joint attack of Aegean and Libyan peoples on the west edge of the Delta, about 1225, almost contemporary, that is, with the Greek dates for the Pontic sea-raid of the Argonauts, Heracles’ attack on the Amazons, and the Hittite references to ‘Attarissyas (?Atreus) of Achaea.’ And then, in the fifth and eighth years of Ramses III, came the combined and evidently concerted Land-raids and Sea-raids which devastated all coasts, and much of the Syrian interior, and were only stopped by the double victory of Ramses somewhere on the south Syrian coast (c. 1194). The survivors were settled where they surrendered, in that lowland of ‘Philistine’ or ‘Palestine’ Syria, which still bears the name of their most notable contingent.

How general and severe were their devastations may be judged from three instances. In Cyprus the large Minoan settlements all end abruptly, and the most important, Salamis and Citium, even change their sites, just at the stage in their declining culture which supplies the sudden and rather copious evidence for oversea settlements at Askalon and apparently also at other Philistine sites; there to persist, in more rapid degeneration, and to be gradually superseded by later phases of the local culture into which they intruded. In Phoenicia, where archaeological evidence has only begun to be available since the French occupation of the country, the tradition of a refoundation of Tyre ‘in the year before Troy fell,’ or perhaps a little earlier, indicates just such a breach of continuity as appears on the Cyprian sites). In Cyprus itself, too, the culture of the Early Iron Age which follows abruptly, in most parts of the island, on the extinction or displacement of the Minoan colonies, is characterized by many points of resemblance with what is known of the civilization of Cilicia and north Syria in the period of ‘reoccupation,’ even so far inland as the district around Carchemish; from which it may be inferred that Cyprus was now both a refuge for broken folk from mainland districts, and a source whence those districts were repeopled and reconstituted when the worst was over. As Phoenician sites share in this hybrid island-culture, modifying it only slightly into conformity with that already mentioned as habitual in Palestine before the Sea-raiders were settled there, it seems to follow that the new ‘Tyrian’ phase of history, which opens now, owes something to similar give-and-take with the Minoanized areas of eastern Cyprus.

Thus, with the hereditary connections between the Phoenician cities and the centres of trade and craftsmanship in the Syrian interior, and in Palestine and Egypt southwards, were interwoven now those of easterly outliers of the Late-Minoan West, which extended not only far into the north Aegean, as we are now beginning to discover, but farther still along the shores of southern Italy and Sicily, and up the whole length of the Adriatic. Nor is it without significance that the Sea-raid in Merneptah’s reign co-operated with a large Libyan force, and that it was for a Libyan trading-voyage that Odysseus pretended that he and his Phoenician partner had fitted out the ship which was caught, like that of Paul, ‘in mid-sea outside Crete.’

At this point the contrast must be noted between the composition of the Philistine, the Phoenician, the Cypriote, and the Cilician communities, in this period of reconstruction, and also between their respective fortunes.

(1) Palestine. On the coast-plain of Palestine alien elements predominated derived from the Sea-raiding captives of Ramses III. Within a century they had thrown off any allegiance they owed to his successors, and could insult an Egyptian envoy with impunity. While they still harried their neighbours by sea—and were liable to be harried themselves by kindred ‘Teucrians’, such as those in Cypriote Salamis—they had a large, open, and fairly fertile country behind and around them, and some trouble to defend it against occupants of the Judaean highland, who, according to the Old Testament, were apparently as recently installed as they were themselves. Amid the general appropriation of the ‘Promised Land’ by the Israelite invaders from beyond Jordan, the failure of Joshua and his successors to conquer Philistia stands out conspicuous; and we may be sure that if we had both sides of the story, the repeated expeditions of the Philistines into the high­lands would appear no less punitive than predatory; interspersed as they were with the wild doings of a ne’er-do-weel like Samson, and culminating in strict disarmament of the Israelites of the hill-country in the early years of King Saul. It is an epitome of border warfare between a mainly pastoral upland and the corn-lands of a coast plain; and the difference of origin, language and manners between Hebrew and Philistine only served to exacerbate a feud that was physically inevitable.

The Philistine domination lasted about two centuries. Then, the political reunion of the Israelite tribes under Saul, and the military prowess of David, turned the scale. Henceforth we hear little of the Philistines in the Old Testament, though the Assyrian records show how important was the part they could play in the history of Palestine. That there was still some spirit in the lowlanders is seen from the utterances of Ezekiel; and Jeremiah threatens that ‘Yahweh will spoil the Philistines, the remnant of the country of Caphtor’, a literary phrase which covers Cyprus. How far the ‘Cherethim’ of the sixth century had maintained their original connection with Crete or even Hellenic Cyprus, or were in league with the ‘ Ionian and Carian ’ adventurers who were now serving the Saite kings of Egypt, or with Jeremiah’s ‘Lydians that handle and bend the bow’ in the same cause, cannot be proved directly; but the frequent allusions to ‘the Isles’ in the manifestos of that period prove community of interests between the descendants of the old Sea­raiders and their actual counterparts. In view of this later history, and—still more—of their original circumstances, the ‘fenced cities’ of Philistia, with their courtyard houses, their porticoes whose columns could be wrenched from their bases (as in the story of Samson), their gigantic leaders in helmet, greaves, vast shield, and long iron spear, and their close aristocracy of ‘lords of the Philistines,’ present striking analogies with the communities of the Homeric Age, and with all that we know of the first Greek settlements in Ionia, and of the Hellenic cities of Cyprus, which are to be described later. We seem to catch glimpses of what might have been another Ionia, had Jerusalem been able and willing to play the part of Sardes.

(2) The Phoenicians. On the Phoenician section of the coast, farther north, the course of events after the Sea-raids was quite different. The Lebanon is far more rugged and inhospitable than the Judaean hill-country, and the coastland is of negligible extent, barely large enough to yield mere garden-crops to settlements of fishers and coast-traders clinging on the sea front. Here, therefore, there was no such partition between highland and lowland interests. The civilized Canaanite population, if it had to leave its ancient cities, had sure refuges at hand—the foot-hills, the defensible promontories and, above all, the islands inshore. Of the last named, the most important was the ‘Rock,’ the ‘strong city’ of Tyre; and it is no accident that whereas in Homeric tradition, as under the Egyptian protectorate, the place of wealth and craftsmanship had been Sidon, in the reconstruction period Tyre was predominant.

It was from Tyre, whose king Hiram I is also ‘king of the Sidonians’ about 970, that Solomon obtained timber and craftsmanship for his temple at Jerusalem, supplying Hiram in return, ‘because he inhabited on an island’, with agricultural produce, corn, wine and oil. It was Tyre, too, which under Hiram and his successor Abibaal was rebuilding itself on a large plan to meet its growing needs; which, a little before 800 BC, made the great venture into the west and established a dependent ‘ New-town ’ at Carthage; and whose earlier occupation of the district of Citium in Cyprus is attested by another ‘New-town’ which was governed by a ‘servant of Hiram king of the Sidonians’ at least as early as the middle of the eighth century, and seems, from its scanty remains, to have been fortified during the early part of the last Assyrian hegemony.

As yet another king of Tyre, Ethbaal, is described as ‘king of the Sidonians’ in the middle of the ninth century, and as ‘Sidonians’ appears to have been a general term for the ‘fisher­folk’ of the whole coastline, it seems that this primacy of Tyre over the rest of Phoenicia was continuous, at all events until the great schism at the end of the eighth century.

Phoenician colonization, and Phoenician influence on the early civilization of Greece, were given a larger extension by Greek historians and by many modern writers than is supported by the material evidence. The reasons for such exaggeration cannot be discussed in detail here. Principal arguments in support of Greek traditions and theories were philological comparisons of place-names with Semitic words; similarities between some of the Greek cults least closely associated with the Olympian deities, and the obscure and unfavourable descriptions of Phoenician myths and rituals; and premature generalizations as to the routes, methods, and objects of early Mediterranean trade. Like the traditional Pelasgians, many Phoenician settlements would seem to have been ‘put there only to be driven out,’ and planted not by Phoenicians but by the Greeks who wrote about them. With the discovery of the Minoan civilization—and especially since its geographical range has been approximately determined—and with fuller information, mainly from archaeological sources, as to the stages by which archaic Greek arts and industries came to their historical maturity, Greek legends of ‘Phoenician colonization’ fall into a fresh perspective. Some of them seem designed to explain ancient discoveries of non-Hellenic and pre-Hellenic (that is to say, Minoan) monuments and works of art; others, to account for survivals of old practices not specially Syrian or Semitic, but once widespread around the Mediterranean, such as the worship of upright stones, of trees and other symbols of the natural forces concerned in growth and reproduction, of beast­killing and giant-killing heroes; or of local and special industries, such as mining or purple-fishing, which have no necessary connection with either the craftsmen of Sidon or the fisher-folk of the Lebanon foreshore.

Arguments based on similarities between the Phoenician and the Greek systems of writing are undercut by the circumstance that in Cyprus, nearest to Phoenicia of all areas of Greek settlement, the Phoenician script was limited to a few specifically Phoenician communities, while their Greek-speaking neighbours used no alphabet at all, but a syllabary mainly derived from the Minoan pictographs, and connected with them by transitional forms from the Late Minoan sites in Cyprus itself. Cypriote weights and measures, too, seem more closely related to the Aeginetan system than to that which was in use in Phoenicia; and the material culture of Phoenician cities, from the period of the Sea-raids onwards, borrowed from the island, in the Early Iron Age, quite as much as it contributed. When we take account, further, of the fact that though about a score of loan-words from Phoenician speech have been detected in the Greek language, most of them denote articles of luxury or sedentary craftsmanship, and not one of them has any reference to building, agricultural processes, writing, nor, above all, to ship-building or navigation, the Greek terminology of which is wholly indigenous, it would seem that it is only from direct evidence of a material kind that it would be safe to infer the existence of any Phoenician settlement which is not attested by contemporary allusions. Even so, the discovery of objects of conjecturally ‘Phoenician style’ on a site does not demonstrate a permanent abode of Phoenicians, still less an organized town or state of Phoenician origin, culture and administration; any more than the presence of Greek vases in early tombs at Carthage disproves the Phoenician origin of that settlement.

A few communities such as Gades, which were Phoenician in historic times, were believed to be considerably older than the Tyrian colonies already discussed; perhaps because they were believed to have been founded from Sidon or Byblus. In such cases it is as difficult to prove a negative conclusion as to accept the arguments offered. All that can be noted at present is that on no such site, except in Cyprus—and single stray vases from Thera and Athens—have any material remains been found as yet which resemble any class of objects found in Phoenicia and referable to an earlier period than the Sea-raids. But it must be remembered that the Phoenician sites themselves, with the recent exception of Byblus, are very ill-explored; and that, hitherto, the material from Byblus itself is in entire accord with what is stated above.

Positive conclusions, then, are justified only in regard to the following districts. In Cyprus, copious intercourse with several centres of culture on the Syrian coast is demonstrable a little further back in time than the Late Minoan exploitation; but the earlier interchanges are rather with Palestine than with Phoenicia, and the exact source of most of these foreign imports is still unknown. In the Late Minoan period no site has been found which yields mainland material to the exclusion of Minoan; even Citium, which later was the headquarters of Phoenician enterprise and administration, lies in a thoroughly Minoanized area. Paphos, which had what was afterwards the most famous sanctuary of the ‘Cyprian Goddess,’ can hardly be traced back even to the Sea-raid period; and Idalium, the only great sanctuary which was in Phoenician hands in historic times, had a Greek ‘king’ in the seventh, and in spite of its inland situation had been as fully Minoanized as Citium itself. In the sixth and fifth centuries, a well-marked district round Citium and Idalium in the south­eastern lowland, and a smaller one round Amathus on the south coast, were the only territories actually in Phoenician hands, and seem to have maintained themselves so, mainly by playing off against each other their stronger Greek neighbours, Salamis on the east coast, Curium and Paphos on the south-west, and Soli on the north.

Punic Africa tells a different story. Though the earliest remains hitherto found at Carthage cannot be dated earlier than the seventh or eighth century, ancient tradition as to its foundation by expelled or seceding Tyrians is exceptionally precise and detailed, and the occasion falls within a historical context, namely the reconstruction-period following the collapse of the hegemony of Ashur-Nasir-Pal and Shalmaneser, who had repeatedly harried Tyre and other Phoenician cities between 876 and 846.

It remained a dependency of Tyre until after the surrender of the motherland to Cyrus, when the connecting link was cut by Amasis’ conquest of Cyprus; a masterly counter-stroke to Tyre’s defection from the cause of Mediterranean freedom, and an important supplement to the Herodotean version of Cambyses’ negotiations for the use of Phoenician sea-power.

Of the other Punic cities, some were colonies of Carthage; others seem to have claimed ‘Sidonian’ or other early origin; the most important—Utica, Lixus in Mauretania, and Gades in south­western Spain—were attributed to Tyre, and to the period immediately following the Sea-raids; and in the same way Virgil’s account of the first settlement of Carthage itself transfers the historical Elissa to the morrow of the Trojan War.

The stories of ‘Sidonian’ exploitation of a great dependency (‘Tarshish’) beyond the Strait of Gibraltar have become inextricably confused with those of the Samian and Phocaean intercourse with the country round Tartessus, somewhere in this region, but apparently unvisited until Colaeus touched there by accident about the time of the foundation of Cyrene (630). Historical data do not go back here beyond the Carthaginian occupation of Gades in 501; and Phoenician prospectors were probably as skilful in advertising their speculations as in concealing trade­secrets. But there is no reason to doubt Herodotus’ story of systematic explorations along the Atlantic coast of Africa as early as the reign of Necho; and the ancient consensus as to Phoenician tin-trade in the far west makes it probable that they had at all events reached the Galician promontory. No site in the Spanish peninsula however has as yet yielded any Punic object of earlier date than the sixth or late seventh century.

Within the western Mediterranean the material evidence is ampler. The native civilization of some parts of the Sicilian interior during the Early Iron Age certainly absorbed elements of the same culture as is common to the tomb-contents of Carthage and to the contemporary industries of Cyprus and Phoenicia itself. Precise dates are not available, but this influence may mount back rather earlier than the first Greek settlements, that is, at least to the eighth century; and if so, Thucydides’ description of coastlands beset with Phoenician factories at the time of the Greek colonization receives qualified support. The only permanent hold, however, which Punic enterprises retained in Sicily was in the rugged and metalliferous but comparatively uncivilized west, where Eryx was believed to have a long history, and Thucydides, like Virgil, thought there were ‘Trojan and Phocian ’ settlements of Sea-raid quality and date. But the historic centres, Soloeis, Motya and Panormus, though early enough to forestall Chalcidian expansion, did not prevent Megarian Selinus from establishing itself far beyond its Dorian cousins; and about 580 it was still a neck-and-neck race for the natural harbour of Lilybaeum. Of all this the sparse archaeological evidence offers cautious confirmation.

In the Lipari Islands, no Phoenician settlement seems to have preceded the Hellenic colony in the early sixth century; but in the Maltese group, which had had a magnificent culture, of west-Mediterranean affinities, in the late Stone Age, but had been long desolate afterwards, Phoenician settlements begin abruptly about the seventh century, and there is no trace of any Greek attempt to dislodge them. Sardinia, to judge from rich archaeological material at Tharros, in the fertile lowland promontory at the south end, was occupied abruptly and vigorously early in the sixth century, or perhaps at the end of the seventh; but the rest of the island does not seem to have been affected by this. In Corsica, so far as we know, the Phocaeans in the sixth century found no rivals in possession, though they were themselves expelled by a combination of Phoenician with Tyrrhenian rivals. The Balearic Islands, on the other hand, were allowed to fall under Punic control uncontested, like Malta, but not early enough to bar the Greek route to Tartessus, or facilitate Punic intercourse with that region.

(3) Cyprus. It remains to deal with the non-Phoenician elements in Cyprus, and with the obscurer question of the coast-settlements of Cilicia.

That the Greek cities of Cyprus directly inherit from the Late Minoan settlements may be inferred first from their peculiar dialect, akin to that of Arcadia, and consequently introduced before the Arcadian-speaking population of Peloponnese was hemmed in by the Dorian-speaking peoples which occupy the coast districts in historic times; secondly, from their peculiar script, derived (as has been already noted) from Minoan syllabary; from cults common to Cyprus and Arcadia, such as those of Apollo Opaon, Alasiotes and Amyklaios, the latter also represented in the pre-Dorian culture of Laconia; and further, from the survival of a variety of Minoan dress, and archaic types of weapons, ornaments, furniture, burial customs, and religious ritual; and from their political constitution, with hereditary king­ships like the Achaean dynasties in Greece. Of these last, the most famous and best-attested was the Teucrid dynasty at Salamis, represented in the sixth century by Evelthon, and in the fifth and fourth by Evagoras and Nicocles, whose pedigree dated the foundation of Salamis to the generation of the Trojan War and the Sea-raids. Other such dynasties are illustrated by the kings who did homage to Sargon in 709, and to Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal later—Eteander of Paphos, Pylagoras of Chytri, Onasagoras of Ledri, Damasus of Curium, Aegisthus of Idalium. Obviously connected with the courts of such kings are the ‘Cyprian’ epics which came back into vogue in the Aegean, not later than the time of Stesichorus (632-552), alongside the Homeric which were traditional there: though commonly accepted in antiquity as authentic survivals of the same literature as the Iliad and the Odyssey, they preserved alternative versions of episodes in the Trojan cycle, as well as much other material; but as the text of them is lost, nothing is known about their language or style.

Hellenic folk-memory of the origin of the Cypriote cities was full and precise, and in general accord with the other evidence. The foundation legend of Salamis linked this city with its name­sake off the coast of Attica. Paphos had two legends, of an earlier foundation by a Syrian named Cinyras, a friend of Agamemnon, and therefore contemporary with the Sea-raids; and a later, attributed to Agapenor, an ‘Arcadian returning from Troy.’ Amathus too had a Cinyrad element. Curium was a ‘colony of Argives’; Lapethus on the north coast was ‘Laconian.’ Soli claimed Athenian origin, from another contemporary of the Sea­raids, Demophon son of Theseus; it also had a cult of Athena; but the specially close relations established in Solon’s time between the two cities may have been occasion for refurbishing the story.

On the other hand, there is no legend of colonization from Aeolis, Ionia or Doris; and the material intercourse between Cyprus and the Aegean was at no period so rare as in the centuries from the eleventh to the seventh. Even Rhodes only shows few and unimportant analogies in craftsmanship, after the Minoan debacle, and Crete almost nothing. In the later age of colonization it is the same; it may therefore be inferred that when ‘Ionian and Carian’ adventurers made their way to the Levant, they found their Cypriote kinsmen isolated, but secure and prosperous, and were able to make use of their resources without any such wholesale reinforcement of the old Arcadian-speaking communities as we shall see reason to suppose in the ‘Achaean’ settlements of Magna Graecia.

The arts and industries of these Cypriote cities differ widely from those of the Aegean, and in many respects resemble those of the Phoenician mainland. But, as has been noted already, outstanding elements in their culture—which is common to Greek­speaking and to predominantly Phoenician sites—seem to have come to the island not from the Syrian coast but from the Cilician frontage of Asia Minor. The ‘geometric’ decoration, characteristic of the Early Iron Age in Cyprus as elsewhere, owes much to older styles in north Syria, and almost nothing to the Aegean, in spite of demonstrable importation of a few Aegean objects. From the eighth century onwards, and especially after the foundation of Tyre’s ‘New-town’ at Citium, the ‘mixed-oriental’ style, of which Phoenician cities are chief traditional exponents, rapidly dominates the higher artistic achievements, sarcophagi, monumental stelae, gold and silver vessels, bronze-work and jewellery. The older votive figurines of clay are supplemented, though never wholly replaced, by sculpture in local limestone, under the influence mainly of Assyria in the eighth and seventh centuries, then of Egypt in the seventh and sixth, then of successive Hellenic styles. Architecture, till Hellenistic times, was almost universally of wood and sun-dried brick; the temples were mere enclosures with open porticoes, crowded with commemorative stelae, and effigies of priests and votaries from the eighth century onwards.

Side by side with the western cults of Apollo already mentioned, and variously combined with them, was the worship of an ‘oriental Heracles’ partly akin to the lion-taming Sandon of Asia Minor, partly to the Egyptian Bes: he wields bow and club simultaneously, so that one of his epithets is amphidexios, and his symbol is a lion, whose skin he wears, as in the Aegean. At Curium, Apollo is also ‘lord of woodland’, hylates, elsewhere he is patron of flocks and herds; or has attributes of deities so incongruous as Pan and Adonis.

In the same way, the nameless ‘Paphian Goddess’ on the west coast, where alone the striking spectacle of her ‘rising from the foam’ is to be seen today, was transfigured both as Aphrodite, and as Artemis, at Idalium and elsewhere, combining the nursing­function of the ‘Great Mother’ from Asia Minor and Syria, with other attributes, the crescent moon, an oracular sphinx, and a snake-symbol reminiscent of Minoan Crete. At Paphos itself her doves drink from a fishpond, like that of Derceto in Askalon of the Philistines. The frequent ‘temple-boy’ figures, if not votaries, may be her Adonis. Later, Hecate sometimes replaces Artemis.

In the more Hellenized centres Olympian cults appear in time; Zeus seldom and late, as Ammon, Labranios (in a Carian dedication) and at last—in the Christian era—as ‘Serapis the One Saviour’; Athena at Soli and Idalium; and a late pair of goddesses recall Demeter and Persephone. Citium, on the other hand, had shrines of Eshmun, of the Lord of Tyre, Resheph-Melkart, and of the Baal of Lebanon.

(4) Cilicia and southern Asia Minor. Along the south coast of Asia Minor, the circumstances were different again, more complicated in themselves, and less easy, with our imperfect knowledge, to interpret. Only a few leading points are fairly certain. North of Phoenicia, the regions which the Eighteenth Dynasty Egyptians knew as Alasa, Asi and Kode had a rich and distinguished culture, as their tribute-objects show. They seem to have been a chief haunt of the Keftiu group of peoples; whose name, subsequently transferred, as in later Hebrew writers, to Cyprus (Caphtor) seems to have been continental originally. Of this early importance we have a faint memory in the remark of Solinus that ‘before the Assyrians came, Cilicia was one of the four powers of Asia.’ Farther to the west, most probably in Lycia, lay the haunts of the piratical Lukki; but whether these early Lycians were indigenous to the mainland, or as Herodotus seems to have believed, ‘colonists from Crete,’ of Minoan antecedents, remains uncertain. In the Levant their raids begin under the XVIIIth Dynasty, and in Homeric folk-memory a Lycian hero in disgrace is found ‘avoiding the path of men’ on the Aleian plain in Cilicia. But they had ceased to give serious trouble, before the Ramessid Sea-raids changed the whole situation along the coast, and the great Land-raid of 1190 BC broke in upon what the Assyrians and Herodotus call Cilicia, as it can hardly have avoided doing, on its way south into Syria. Here, in all probability, we have the cause of the total disappearance of the old culture of Kode, Asi and Alasa; of the transference of the ‘remnant of the land of Caphtor’ to Cyprus; and of the frequent occurrence of ‘Trojan War settlements’ along this seaboard.

Three legendary names of ‘wise men’ are conspicuous in this connection—Amphilochus son of Amphiaraus of Argos, Calchas son of Thestor of Mycenae, and Mopsus son of Teiresias of Thebes. Amphilochus was foundation-hero of the Pamphylian settlements, of Mallus, and of Posidium on the frontier between Cilicia and Syria; he had also shrines at Oropus in Attica, and at Amphilochian Argos in the far north-west of Greece. Calchas had his cults in Pamphylia and at Selge in Pisidia; Mopsus, too, in Pamphylia, and in Cilicia at Mallus, Mopsuestia and Mopsucrene. As the two last named are in the interior, it is significant that in an early legend of Mopsus’ encounter with Calchas, he is described as ‘leading his forces over Mt Taurus’; perhaps a reminiscence of the Land-raiders. The ‘Kilikes’ of Homer, we must remember, inhabited not Cilicia but the Troad, and the name ‘Cilicia’ (Khilakku) first appears in Assyrian records of the eighth century. Argive origin was assigned also to Aspendus in Pisidia, and to Tarsus; and Soli was colonized from Lindus, a Rhodian city which faces eastward, has a secure port, was an ‘ally of Agamemnon,’ and has archaeological record older than that of Camirus, though it has not yielded the Minoan material which is so copious at Ialysus.

It is a further question, in what relation these traces of eastward expansion in the twelfth century stand to that westward dispersal for which the chief literary evidence is the biblical account of the ‘children of Javan (Yawan).’ Of these the firstborn is Ellshah, followed by Tarshish, Kittim and Rodanim; and then ‘of these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations.’ As all the collaterals of Yawan who can be identified are in Asia Minor, it seems safe to see in his ‘children’ a group including Alasa, Tarsus, Citium and Rhodes, and to compare with their insular kindred the Greek legend of the Heliadae, who reached Rhodes from the east and had settlements up the west coast of Asia Minor as far as Lesbos. The bearing of this on the ‘Carian’ occupations of the islands, both before and after the Achaean hegemony, is obvious; and the recognition of this counter­current of westward migration along the south coast of Asia Minor is of fundamental importance in reconstructing the early history of the Asiatic Greeks.

Confirmatory of these folk-memories of early Aegean settlements in the Levant is the close likeness of the Greek dialects of Pamphylia to that of Cyprus, and the later belief of the people of Side, who were still of different speech from their neighbours in the fourth century, that they were originally from Cyme in Aeolis, and were speaking Greek when they settled in Pamphylia. That the Pamphylian cities used a Greek alphabet, not a syllabary like that of Cyprus or the semata lugra of Homeric Lycia, indicates that eventually, if not throughout, intercourse with the Aegean was easy, and the same conclusion follows from the use of quasi-Aeginetan standard for archaic silver coins of Mallus and Celenderis and from the Greek inscriptions on these and other issues of western Cilicia. Later reinforcement of the Greek population is indicated by the foundation-legend of Phaselis, an ‘Argive’ colony contemporary with Gela in Sicily (690) and therefore perhaps propagated from Rhodes or other Triopian towns; and by the repeated references of Assyrian invaders of Cilicia in the next generation to ‘Ionian’ aggressors along their sea­flank. The cow-and-calf coin-types of Tarsus may have the same significance as those of Corcyra; but they are of Phoenician standard, and there is no tradition of any refoundation of the original ‘Argive’ settlement. Samos however certainly sent colonies to Celenderis and Nagidus. The ‘Solonian’ connections of Soli with Athens stand or fall with those of its Cypriote namesake, already noted.

But the results of these enterprises were not large. The native population of the rich coast-plain had recovered much of its older prosperity before the Assyrian conquest of Cilicia in the eighth century; and its native dynasts, who bore the title of Syennesis, played a considerable part in the days of Alyattes and Nebuchadrezzar, and retained their kingdom as a vassal-state under Persia. That the later relations of the overlord with the coast-cities were friendly is suggested by the satrap-coins of Mallus, Soli and Tarsus.

This then is the background of those ‘Ionian and Carian’ enterprises and ambitions in the Levant which become traceable early in the seventh century, and culminate in the participation of Cyprus in the Ionic Revolt. Of all the Minoan heritage, which we have seen to have been considerable, and of the precarious acquisitions of the Sea-raiders, the Palestinian section had faded, in face of Israelite conquest, and the superior natural equipment of Phoenicia; the Cilician and Pamphylian coast had been re-barbarized or absorbed into a continental principality, without sufficient inducement to states such as Samos or Rhodes to press their tentative reinforcements very far. Phoenicia, under the leadership of the new-model city of Tyre, had supplemented old local and coastwise traffic by opening a new world of Punic exploitation in the west, from Leptis to Gades, Tharros and Panormus. In Etruria, too, the Tyrrhenian Sea-raiders were good leaven gone sour. Only Cyprus remained continuously though not completely Greek; and here the very magnitude, the local wealth, and the self-sufficiency of the island, its remoteness and isolation, and the misfortunes of those coastlands, of which, with less divided interests of its own, it might have become the metropolis, prevented it from playing the part which was to be sustained by Sicily, until opportunity passed, and its neighbours fell one after another into vassalage to Persia.

III.

NORTH AEGEAN COAST

From this large south-easterly field of enterprise we turn to regions more directly and easily reached from the cradle-lands within the Aegean; dealing first with those which were exploited from the older centres in the Greek Peninsula or in its island fringe, and then those which fell to the Greek cities of western Asia Minor.

Of the five principal avenues followed by the first oversea settlements, the more southerly take little or no part in this second movement. The shores of the Laconian and Argive gulfs fell so completely under Dorian domination, that further enterprises oversea could hardly be expected when the initial exodus was over. Almost all Dorian colonization from the Aegean outwards originates in Thera or in the Triopian colonies, not in Peloponnese; the only exceptions, due to belated resurgence of old internal feuds, being the Laconian enterprises in western Crete after the conquest of Amyclae about 800 BC, and the colony sent to Tarentum about 705. But this last, though formally Laconian, falls rather into the separate category of western enter­prises resulting from the ravages of the First Messenian War.

In the Saronic Gulf, Epidaurus and Attica, after exploiting the region which fell to them geographically, in the Cyclades and Ionia, took no further part in colonization until the Peisistratid venture in the sixth century. Aegina, which had been itself occupied by Epidaurians, made ample use of its central position, for trade with its neighbours and their hinterlands, as the geographical distribution of its weights and measures shows.

It had a precinct at Naucratis in the Egyptian Delta, and may have had similar factories elsewhere; but it did not colonize, except late and inconspicuously at Cydonia in north­western Crete, during the tyranny of Polycrates of Samos.

In the twin gulfs however, which separate Euboea from the mainland of northern and central Greece, the course of events was very different. Orchomenus had belonged, like Athens, Epidaurus and Aegina, to the Calaurian Amphictyony, which is shown by the list of its members to be a survival from pre-Dorian, probably even from pre-Achaean times; and the ruin which befel Orchomenus at the hands of the Boeotian group of states, under Theban leadership, in the ninth or eighth century —a northern counterpart to the destruction of Amyclae by Sparta—may be regarded as a principal factor in the fresh out­ward movements from among its Ionian neighbours in Euboea. This Euboic expansion followed both of its natural avenues, from Eretria southwards, and through Chalcis towards the north. Eretrian colonization is less easy to trace than Chalcidian, partly because subsequent quarrels between the two mother-cities resulted unfavourably to Eretria, and allowed Chalcidian enterprises to flourish at the expense of Eretrian; partly because the most important settlements of this south Euboic group were not founded directly from Euboea itself, but from other islands, such as Andros, which had either been colonized from Eretria at an earlier stage, or were more favourably situated for communication with the regions which remained unexploited.

For such Euboic expansion, only one area within the Aegean had remained untouched by the primary colonization. Though Late Minoan influence affected even Thessaly very late and had no firm hold there when it was cut off at the source, there is new evidence that it reached the lower valley of the Axius, and a Minoan sword has been found even farther up country. The natural attractions of the region round the Thermaic Gulf and the triple promontory between the lowlands of the Axius and Strymon—the possibility of more direct access to the nearest tin supplies, in Serbia, and to the amber-countries; perhaps also the gold-field of the Pangaean hills—are sufficient reasons for the establishment of this northward connection in the first instance, and for attempts to maintain it during the Migration-period, and to reorganize it afterwards. Even more significant is the fact that Eretria and Paros, which took important part in the coloniza­tion of the north Aegean, now to be described, had also interests on the coast of Epirus and beyond; at the westward approaches, that is, to the same continental interior as was accessible by way of the Haliacmon and Axius. For the Parian connection the evidence is late, but the Euboean link with Corcyra goes back to the Achaean regime. Here, as usual in Greek colonization, we can trace regions of enterprise, geographically distinct, or only partially overlapping. Farthest to the west lay enterprises of Eretria, round the Thermaic Gulf and Pallene, the westernmost of the three promontories; next, the Chalcidic area, in the strict sense, occupied the greater part of the foreland to which it gives its name; then came the Andrian group, from Sane on the isthmus of Mt Athos to the Strymon; then Parian Thasos and its offshoots on the mainland; then Chian Maronea, and eastward thence to the Hellespont, a less orderly series of rather later towns, from Aeolis and Ionia.

Differences of origin, and clash of local interests, kept these groups distinct and unfriendly to each other: conspicuous instances of this are the feuds between Chalcidian and Eretrian, Chalcidian and Andrian, Andrian and Parian colonies. Andrian and Eretrian cities on the other hand seem to have been usually friendly.

The principal Eretrian settlement was at Mende, in the Pallenian promontory. Its neighbours, Scione, and indeed the Pallenians generally, traced descent from ‘Achaeans returning from Troy,’ which suggests Late Minoan antecedents; and the loose settlements in this region are not quite what is usual in a Hellenic colony. Within the Thermaic Gulf lay Dicaea or Dicaeopolis, a smaller town, with Eretrian coin-types; and near it Methone, the last refuge of the former Eretrian population whom Corinth expelled from Corcyra, presumably about 734. In this district too they had predecessors, for Edessa, in the interior, had once had a settlement of ‘Eretrians returning from Troy,’ who had founded later a town Euboea of their own. Since another Eretrian foundation, Oricus, on the Illyrian coast not far from Corcyra, was similarly attributed to the ‘dispersion’ after the Trojan War, it looks as though Eretrian Corcyra also had been established as a western terminal of a cross-country route, or a westward bifurcation of a main road south from the Danube (see below). Euboic, though not specifically Eretrian, intercourse with the far north-west is apparent already in the Homeric account of Phaeacia. If Scabala, ‘a place of the Eretrians,’ may be identified with the later Kavalla, east of the Pangaean country, the range of Eretrian settlements would be greatly extended, and there would be reason to accept the vague statements about similar towns in the promontory of Athos, where only Andrian colonies are recorded by name.

The relations between Eretrian Mende and Corinthian Potidaea, which was founded with characteristic vigour during the Cypselid tyranny, are easily explained. Under that tyranny Corinth seems to have deserted its habitual friendship with Chalcis, Samos and their associates; and its sea-king, Periander, is found intimately co-operating with Thrasybulus of Miletus, about 600 BC. Such estrangement presumably excluded Corinth from Chalcidian ports, and enforced an understanding with Eretria, and the foundation of a fresh Corinthian base on the threshold of Pallene. Subsequent reconciliation between Corinth and Chalcidian states turned the tables on Eretrian projects in Pallene, and left a deep feud between Potidaea and Scione, for example, which comes to light in Herodotus’ story of Timoxenus. It increased, however, the eventual importance of Mende and Scione to Athens, as a friendly enclave within the Chalcidic region, and helps to explain both their prosperity in the fifth century and the annoyance of the Athenians when Mende, in particular, fell into the hands of Brasidas.

It looks as though the Andrian colonies, Sane, Acanthus, Stagirus and Argilus, filled by some early agreement the gap in the Eretrian distribution between Scione and Scabala. They were never of great importance; they formed another dissident enclave in the Chalcidic area; and it was the separatist opposition of Acanthus in the fourth century which wrecked that remarkable experiment in federal administration, the Olynthian League.

Chalcis was credited, by historians from the fourth century onwards, with more than thirty settlements in the ‘Chalcidic’ peninsula; but very few names are preserved, and even in the fifth century few were of separate importance. The reason for this, over and above the wholesale destruction of these towns by Philip of Macedon, was the synoecism of them (by Critobulus of Torone) in Olynthus, the headquarters of the partly Hellenized Bottiaeans, after its capture by the Persians under Artabazus in 479. Torone alone, aloof on the Sithonian promontory, retained some individuality later. It was indeed this earlier synoecism which prepared the way for a greater constitutional novelty, that civil union (sympoliteid) of all Chalcidic towns in the early fourth century, which provoked first the suspicions of Sparta, then the resentment of Philip of Macedon, and involved all Chalcidic Greeks in dispersal, servitude, or beneficent internment in their conqueror’s own experiment, Philippopolis, that inland colony, far away in the upper valley of the Hebrus, which was the prototype of Alexander’s foundations and of the continental city-states of the Hellenistic Age.

Remote from the main currents of migration and avenues of trade, secure on the land-side behind the natural fosse of Lake Bolbeis, founded ‘in the time of the Hippobotae, the horse­ ranching squirearchy of Chalcis, and conserving in all probability a more uniformly agricultural habit than most of the Greek colonies; mixing quite as freely with their native neighbours as the early settlers in Ionia mixed with Lydians and Carians, yet never exposed to the beneficent interference, though repeatedly to the hostility, of the native dynasties in the mainland, the Chalcidian towns matured slowly enough to be still capable of synoecism in the fifth and fourth centuries. They were Greek enough to be the sources of Macedonian Hellenism; but provincial enough (perhaps even Bottiaean enough) to be indifferent allies and recalcitrant subjects of an imperial city. As in their origin they were neither refugee-settlements of Ionian type, nor yet city-state colonies, fully organized, like their eastward neighbours in Thasos, Maronea and Abdera, so in their uneasy history and untimely ruin they stand a little apart from the rest of the Greek world; most nearly perhaps akin, in their aloofness from Aegean Greece and their exceptionally intimate dealings with their barbarous landward neighbours, to their Chalcidian cousins in Campania who were to suffer similar misfortunes at the hands of the Tyrrhenian and the Samnite.

East of the Andrian colonies, the Strymon outfall, and the Pangaean hills, Greek aggression took yet another course. Here the determining factor, replacing the triple promontory, was the single commodious and metalliferous island of Thasos; near enough to the mainland to control a wide range of shore-stations, without need to colonize them independently; yet far enough, like Rhodes, to be secure against surprise attack from a continental enemy. Persistent tradition made Thasos a Phoenician settlement originally; not a Tyrian or Sidonian colony, like those of the Punic west, but founded long before ‘by those who came with Cadmus,’ who was described as a contemporary of Hellen, as an uncle of the earlier Minos, and as the founder (perhaps even the re-organizer) of what we now know to have been a Minoan establishment in Boeotian Thebes early in the fourteenth century; though the Herodotean reckoning ‘five generations before Heracles ’ had grown to ten by the time of the Byzantine geographer Stephanus. Greek speculation, however, assigned to the culture-hero Thasos no less than three ancestries; he was a son, not only of Agenor of Tyre, but of Cilix (another Levantine allusion the significance of which we are now in a position to appreciate), and thirdly of Poseidon, the patron (among much else) of the Calaurian League. Archaeological commentary on all this is not available yet; nor are the pre-Hellenic metal-workings described by Herodotus distinguishable now, “a whole mountain ransacked in the quest”.

Nor is it clear why it should have been Paros which made this its special and almost its sole enterprise. Like Eretria, Paros had factories at Anchiale and Paros away up the Illyrian coast; and it persisted long, like almost all the Cyclades, in the use of Aeginetan measures. Its Thasian adventure involved a feud with Andros, whether as cause or effect we cannot tell. The date of the colony, however, is certain, in the generation before Archilochus, who was himself concerned in an early reinforcement of it about 680. It was therefore almost a contemporary of that Chalcidian adventure in the west which borrowed its name from Naxos, the nearest neighbour of Paros in the Cyclades. As its dialect and alphabet remained Parian till writing was in fairly common use, it may be supposed to have maintained close, perhaps even rather exclusive, relations with its mother-city.

Besides its own wealth of forest, vineland, and precious metal, Thasos drew large revenues from trading stations and colonies of its own on the Thracian mainland. Most of these were small— the most easterly, on Stryme Island, led to complications with Maronea—and were directly controlled from Thasos. The most important are Datum the precursor of Philippi, and Neapolis close to the modern Kavalla. Galepsus, however, far to the west, in the Gulf of Torone, must have had to look after itself. How far the Pangaean mining-district was under direct Thasian control, how far exploited by natives, is uncertain. Skapte Hyle itself— the name ‘quarry-chace’ recalls many a hillside in Montana and our own ‘Forest of Dean’—was Thasian at the end of the sixth century, but Thasian occupation of Myrcinus is ill-attested and hardly accords with Darius’ grant of this place to Histiaeus only a few years earlier.

Outside their own district, neither Paros nor Thasos colonized much. Paros, besides its Illyrian settlements already mentioned, joined Erythrae and Miletus in founding Parium (‘little Paros’) in the Hellespont; and Thasos held at one time a similar port-of-call, Archium, on the Bosporus; but there were troubles here with Megarian Chalcedon, and the Thasians retired to Aenus, only to meet with similar ill-luck and Aeolian supplanters. The reasons for these sporadic enterprises are not known; but a prosperous and not over-fertile mining-district needs to be assured of its corn, and besides its silver, Thasos, like its mother-city, had famous wines to barter for foodstuffs. Friendship of the one city with Miletus, and friction between a Megarian colony and emigrants from the other, are a warning not to press too closely those indications of hereditary feud between Greek states which are often a valuable clue to their major interests.

Before turning to Ionian and Aeolian adventures east of the Thasian domain, the general structure and ethnology of the continental background require brief mention.

Three principal drainage-systems, converging on cultivable lowlands, correspond in general with three main groups of peoples, and avenues of access for Greeks and their culture. In the centre, Strymon and Nestus, draining the south-west flank of the wild highlands of Rhodope, had been the home of the Paeonians from at least Homeric times. In those days Paeonia had extended westward as far as the Axius, but by the fifth century the frontier was in Mt Orbelus, immediately east of the Strymon, thanks to the same Macedonian pressure which had driven the Bottiaeans from their home on the lower Haliacmon across the head of the Gulf of Therma into the background of the Chalcidic promontory. Of the Macedonian kingdom the political centres were at Aegae and Pella, commanding, therefore, both the road to the west up the Haliacmon and that to the north up the Axius to the Morawa and the middle Danube. Macedon too was threatened in its turn by Lyncestae, Eordaei and other peoples of the enclosed basins between the two main streams, and in the upper valleys of them. The Paeonians, withdrawing eastwards, left in the no-man’s land towards advancing Macedon fragments of earlier populations still, Tyrrhenians, Pelasgians, Phrygian ‘Briges’ and ‘Brygi’ north of Chalcidice and within its hill­country. East of the Nestus, on the other hand, the Paeonians had apparently quite overmastered the Cicones of Priam’s league, around Ismarus, and could make raids as far east as Perinthus on the north shore of the Propontis. But through the defiles of the upper Strymon they were being harried by Thracian tribes from the upper Hebrus and the secluded plain of Sofia; and the principal of these, the Edones, replaced them altogether in the Pangaean hill-country at the end of the sixth century; an aftermath of that campaign of Megabazus which closed the ‘Scythian’ (or more truly, Thracian) expedition of Darius.

Very different from this patchwork of nationalities in the centre and west is the homogeneous Thracedom of the Hebrus valley and the plain of Adrianople. Here the horse-ranches of Rhesus and Priam persisted, under similar chiefs and overlords, civilized sufficiently, through land-borne intercourse with Scythia beyond Danube, to be able either to take or to refuse what Greek newcomers had to offer along their south frontage; a recurrent nightmare ‘if only they were to unite’ and flood over into Propontis or Macedon; rich enough to be good customers, if only they could be brought to a bargain: owners of actual forest, potential cornland, and problematical minerals like those of the Thasian domain.

Here consequently Greek colonization lagged. Immediately east of the last Thasian claims, Maronea, founded at an uncertain date by Chios, supplemented the wine out put of the mother­country with the local vintage of Ismarus, the wine with which Odysseus snared the Cyclops. But Maronea lay in a no-man’s-land between Paeonia and Thrace, among the last of the Cicones. A similar venture from Clazomenae at Abdera, a little before 650, and consequently one of that group of refugee-colonies which relieved districts devastated by the Cimmerians, was planted too far into the open and was ‘destroyed by the Thracians’; and it was not till the next great peril in Ionia, after the Revolt of Pactyas, that a second and greater Abdera received all that was left of the people of Teos. On the very neck of the peninsula, Cardia, another colony of Clazomenae in conjunction with Miletus, held stronger ground, and prospered, in spite of troubles with the Apsinthian tribe to the north, and the Dolonci within the peninsula. Aenus, with a clean port then, though so close to the Hebrus mouth, had been Thasian once, as we have seen, but was recolonized by Aeolians of Mytilene and Cyme from their earlier settlement at the ‘fox­island’ Alopeconnesos, just north of Suvla, a backdoor of Aeolian Madytus and Sestos on the peninsular side of the Narrows. Limnae, named from the Suvla lagoon itself, was Milesian wholly, an obvious shelter-cove on the way up the Black Gulf to Cardia; and a ‘black gulf’ it can be, in a bad wind.

Thus the Thracian foreshore remained in essentials a no-man’s-land of mixed and inconspicuous factories; only Cardia, Aenus, and Abdera enjoying the autonomy which even Alope­connesos claimed.

IV.

HELLESPONT AND PROPONTIS

A no less obvious field of enterprise than the sea-board of the Black Gulf and lower valley of the Hebrus was offered by the shores of the Hellespont and the sea of Marmora to which it led; and in the Hellespont itself we find the same mixture of Aeolian and Ionian settlements. Madytus and Sestos, on the European side of the Narrows, were Aeolian: and evidently also Aeolium, though it eventually became in some sense ‘Chalcidic.’ Aeolic, too, on the Asiatic side, were Arisbe, till Miletus refounded and annexed it; Cebren, far up the Scamander among the western spurs of Mt Ida; and Scepsis, in a secluded plain still farther east, communicating by road both with Adramyttium and with Cyzicus in Propontis. But Lampsacus and its small neighbour Abarnus were Phocaean; Abydos, with smaller ports at Paesus and Priapus, and Colonae inland overlooking the Granicus valley were Milesian; and Parium was a joint settlement from Paros (or Thasos) and Erythrae, with a Milesian element which may have been supplementary. Evidently we have here a region of general attractiveness, and as some of these towns appear in the ‘Trojan Catalogue’ in the Iliad, it may be inferred that Hellenization was here early and gradual. But with the Milesian occupation of Abydos, in the reign of Gyges and with his positive sanction, a fresh movement began, and the traditional dates for Lampsacus—in 654, shortly after the year of the sack of Sardes by the Cimmerians—and for other cities farther out into Propontis suggest that this movement was general. The remarkable sequel shows clearly enough what was afoot.

Between the Greek Archipelago and the Black Sea, and at the same time between Asia Minor and the Minor Europe which adjoins it, intervenes a region, of a build as peculiar as its fate. In its long history the Marmora region1 has played many parts; as land-avenue from Asia into Europe, and conversely, as seaway between Aegean and Pontus; as middle-kingdom, with favourable prospect of greater things, during the brief accord of Lysimachus with his queen Amastris of Heraclea, and under the ‘Latin Empire’ of the thirteenth century; as no-man’s-land, between Macedon and Persia, Bithynia and Thrace; as metropolitan area of the New Rome of Constantine, and of an Ottoman empire. For the Greeks it was essentially Propontis, the forecourt of Pontus, the ‘big-sea-water’ or lacus superior in that Old World lake-region, of which the Marmora shores were the Ontario. In climate and vegetation, as in position and structure, the region is transitional. Its lake-land centre mitigates the severity of Pontic winds over the low open downs on its north margin, and gives Constantinople a climate almost as equable as that of Athens, milder than Salonica, considerably less rain-swept than Trebizond, but far moister than Adrianople. Trees and plants of the Aegean, of northern Asia Minor, and of Balkan and Carpathian lands intermingle here. The Thracian ‘Peninsula’ has the tough ever­green scrub of a Greek island; Therapia, the remains of deciduous forest. The plain of Adrianople has ample cornland, fading to prairie and steppe; but vine, mulberry, and even olive and fig, flourish locally where there is shelter, almost to the Bosporus.

Geographically, then, Propontis was a little Aegean, temporarily disorganized by the overflow from Europe, first of Phrygians, then, in post-Homeric times, of the Thracians of Bithynia. At Placia and Scylace, near Cyzicus, there were ‘Pelasgian’ remnants, as there were in the rougher parts of Chalcidice. Argonauts, and ‘those who went with Heracles’ to the Amazon War, had passed through the region in the days of the Sea-raids, but had left little trace. A belated Thracian raid of uncertain date, the Cimmerian invasion in the seventh century, and an incursion of Scythians as far as the Peninsula, at the end of the sixth, were small incidents in a long period of recuperation, between the Phrygian and Thracian movements and the coming of the Gauls into Galatia early in the third century.

Up the long corridor of the ‘Hellespont stream’—for Greek sailors insisted that this water was in some sense a river—navigation was facilitated by strong back-eddies, and diurnal change of wind; while the return journey followed the southward current. Once within Propontis, Proconnesus—whose marble quarries have given the region its modern name—and a string of smaller islands lead rather to ‘Bear-island,’ Arctonnesus, and the more promising southern shore, than to the steep and almost harbourless coast of Thrace: as far as Chalcedon, you might almost be still in Aeolis or Ionia; and the Mysian Olympus is worthy of its name.

Earliest of Greek settlements in Propontis is the first founda­tion of Cyzicus from Miletus in 757, if a tradition may be trusted which links it with Pontic Trapezus and the still earlier Sinope, and there was a legend of a ‘Carian’ settlement at Cios, which may be early too. Even its second foundation in 676 leaves Cyzicus prior to all but the first Megarian colonies, Astacus and Chalcedon (Calchadon); in any case it goes further back than the Cimmerian Raid; and, behind all, it had vivid memories of Argonaut doings. Its exceptionally favourable site, at the point where Arctonnesus was eventually connected with the mainland, gave it twin harbours, and ample and defensible home-territory in early days; later it spread southwards too. On the island lay another smaller town, Artace; Proconnesus had another early Milesian colony; westward lay Priapus, as old as Abydos, exploiting the Granicus valley; and eastward Dascylium, evidently an old Phrygian site reoccupied; with Apollonia-on-Rhyndacus inland on the north shore of its lake, and another town, Miletopolis, of which the site and period are alike uncertain. Rather farther east and rather later (628) was Cius, also essentially Milesian, at the head of its gulf, where the main eastward road passed inland by the Ascanian Lake to the later Nicaea. Myrlea, at the entrance to that gulf, was founded from Colophon, but had no great importance till it was refounded by the Bithynian kings as Apamea and became in turn the port of Brusa and the modern Mudania.

Only beyond this well-defined Milesian region, and separated from it by a rugged headland, do we come upon the nearest and probably the earliest Megarian colony, Astacus, founded about 710, at the head of its own deep gulf and within a few miles of the lower course of the Sangarius. Chalcedon, the next, lay on the Asiatic side of the Bosporus mouth, and dates from 685. That the founders of this ‘City of the Blind’ missed Byzantium (founded seventeen years later) was a good jest but bad history. That interval was none too long to make good on the Asiatic shore before venturing into what looked like mere Thrace, and on to a site over-large for a seventh-century enterprise. That its occupants were actually not Thracian, but belated Bithynians, could hardly be conjectured in advance, but may have made things easier eventually. Moreover, the northward backwash of the Bosporus carried adventurers rather up than across the strait, and the downward stream is strong enough to keep you off shore, even if you did not steer clear of Seraglio Point intentionally. Nor was Chalcedon alone in its blindness, for Selymbria, some forty miles beyond the strait, was also reputed older than Byzantium. As Heraclea Pontica and Mesambria, the remaining Megarian colonies in this direction, lie far beyond the Bosporus and were not founded till about the middle of the sixth century—and Mesambria not till near its close—we seem to have in this Megarian group another example of a well-defined region selected, for reasons no longer apparent, by a particular metropolis, and developed until obstacles were met.

In this case the western obstacle is known, for Selymbria was in frequent trouble with its neighbour Perinthus, which with Bisanthe a few miles westward again, and another neighbouring outpost, ‘Fort-Hera’ were an enterprise of Samos, and could count upon their mother-city to hinder Megarian reinforcements to Selymbria. We have just a hint that Samians once had holdings also in Proconnesus, an obvious stepping-stone from the Hellespont to Perinthus. But here Miletus prevailed; and the roughness, physical and political, of Apsinthian Thrace between Bisanthe and Cardia at the Isthmus accounts fully for the Samian neglect of this section. Both Perinthus and Selymbria introduce another element of Propontid life, for they command openings in the northern bluffs to the wide down-land and steppe of eastern Thrace, and beyond it to principal avenues into south-eastern Europe, up the Hebrus valley to the Margus and middle Ister: it is behind Selymbria that the Orient Railway turns finally west, towards Adrianople and Belgrade. This way came amber, for example, and perhaps other commodities from afar. Nearer at hand, too, in the neighbourhood of Hadrian’s city-to-be, were usually the home-ranch and cavalry-force of the paramount chief of Thrace. But there were risks in such a situation, for the friendship of Thrace did not bind Paeonians, from whom Perinthus suffered severely in the sixth century.

Thus all coasts of Propontis, except the rugged Apsinthian country between Bisanthe and Cardia, were distributed into well-defined fields of enterprise, Milesian, Megarian, Samian, with a footing for Colophon at Myrlea, and a more important enclave around Lampsacus for Phocaea.

V.

THE EUXINE

Mention has been made already of Milesian and Megarian colonies beyond the Bosporus, and it is obvious that the prosperity of the Propontid cities was very much increased, if in addition to their own local interests they became involved, as ports of call, in the through-traffic with this farther region.

The Pontic cities are sometimes discussed as if they formed a single homogeneous and wholly Milesian system, with Megarian colonies merely guarding the passage from the south. There was, however, a clear difference of function between the cities on the Scythian coast, and those on the north coast of Asia Minor, whether of Milesian or of Megarian origin. This difference of function accords with a marked diversity of physique between the regions which they occupied. The north coast of Asia Minor is at first sight even more inhospitable than the south; it has no Pamphylia, no Cilician plain, for the folded mountain ranges which separate the plateau from the sea run parallel with the coast. There are few promontories or harbours, and the greater part of the drainage system flows east and west between them, like the original drainage of the plateau itself. But since the subsidence of the present main basin of the Black Sea, small mountain-torrents have cut back through the coast ranges and captured a large part of these older streams. We see from the map how the Sangarius has deprived the Sea of Marmora of all its eastern tributaries, and discharges their waters northward to a mouth over eighty miles east of the Bosporus. The Halys has done the same for the whole drainage of the eastern half of the plateau, and probably once did more, before the western half was annexed to the Sangarius. The Iris shows the same process in an earlier stage, and the Billaeus in Paphlagonia is still more immature. But there were compensations, in time. Larger rivers naturally brought down more considerable silt. Sangarius has wide alluvial lowlands, and both Halys and Iris have prominent deltas. But as highlands overlook the sea at all other points, there was no question of large agricultural settlements, and the mountains are for the most part so rugged and lofty that it is only at a few points that a road of any value traverses them. The climate, however, mitigates the austerity of this configuration. With so large a water-area to the north, the sea winds are moist and mild, especially farther east, and vegetation, mainly deciduous, is abundant. Most important of all, in spite of summer showers the olive flourishes here, and was a source of great wealth in antiquity, lying nearer to the oilless Scythian cities than any Aegean supply; and their corn too lay nearer to these oil-farms than to any other customers.

This Pontic coast of Asia Minor had been subject to Aegean incursions in the thirteenth century, if we may judge from the Argonaut story and that of the Amazon War in the same generation. The reason given for the voyage of the Argo was ‘to find the golden fleece,’ and it was a good reason: for the practice of separating the gold dust of the coast-torrents by mooring fleeces in them—a primitive anticipation of the ‘grease-process’ in modern gold-winning—prevailed here to within living memory; and as this region was repeatedly the objective of Assyrian attack, for its mineral wealth, it is probable that the custom is ancient. The Amazon-story adds verisimilitude, by its glimpses of beardless—or were they clean-shaven?—votaries of a mother-goddess; Themiscyra, the Amazon-city, dominates the Lycus-Thermodon delta already mentioned, one of the few points along the whole coast where a considerable native settlement could lie within reach of a Sea-raid. The Homeric ‘birth-place of silver’ at Alybe also lay somewhere east of Paphlagonia; and in later times the native Chalybes and Tibareni, east of the lower Lycus, were famous iron-workers, of the same culture probably as those whose handicraft can be studied in tombs of early date both south and north of the Caucasus.

Here then was manifold inducement to renew adventures which the Minoan collapse had interrupted; and it is not surprising to find that the first Greek settlement at Sinope was dated as early as 812. A second, coupled in date with Istrus, Abydos and Lampsacus, falls just before the sack of Sardes by the Cimmerians; but a Cimmerian raid northward occupied the site, and maintained, perhaps for some while, oversea communications with Cimmerian survivors in the Crimea. Finally, about 630, Milesian reinforcements established or confirmed the settlement, which remained essentially Greek till the Turkish massacres of 1920 A.D., and founded in its turn a number of secondary colonies, from Tieum westward at the mouth of the Billaeus river, to Trapezus, which has a foundation-date as early as 756, and achieved exceptional prosperity, thanks to the strength of its ‘table-mountain’ site, and its good access to the Armenian interior. It was inevitably to Trapezus that the Ten-thousand turned their faces, as the nearest Greek city to the field of Cunaxa. Cromna also had a tradition about ‘Carian’ settlers, which suggests an early adventure, and recalls the ‘man from Cos’ who was one of the refounders of Sinope in 630.

Farther west still, Heraclea-Pontica is described as a Milesian enterprise, reconstituted later by Megarians and Boeotians perhaps about 560; it had a secure port, fairly open country around it, and exceptionally favourable relations with the native Mariandyni, an easterly section of the Bithynians, who accepted its protectorate, and are described later as its serfs. Farther west, Dioscurias, at the mouth of the Phasis, and consequently in enjoyment of a wide and rich alluvial country, and of an important route eastward as far as the Caspian shore, seems to have been a separate Milesian foundation, and had Argonautic memories as well. The ‘deep harbour’ which gives its name to Batum, lies a little farther south, in the delta of the wild Boas river, an easterly replica of the Lycus.

Finally, in a central position, isolated by the lower courses and sheltered by the prominent deltas of Halys and Lycus, and well served landwards by far easier routes to Cappadocia than any other Pontic city, the Phocaean rivals of Miletus established a colony of their own at Amisus. Its foundation legend is mutilated, and it may have been a joint colony like Anthea and Heraclea; and it certainly became predominantly Milesian later, like its neighbours, and probably through influx of their folk. There was an obscure break in its history when it fell temporarily to a ‘Cappadocian ruler’—whether an early dynast or a Persian satrap is unknown—and this may have been the excuse for its refoundation by Athens, under the home-name Piraeus. But the Milesian connection was cherished still, by treaties of alliance in the Hellenistic age.

Beyond Dioscurias’ river the abrupt coast-line of the Caucasus and the unfriendliness of its peoples prevented even exploration, as the lacuna in geographical knowledge shows: and it was not by this route that the Milesians made their most significant discovery. The alternative was west-about, and Istrus is said to have been founded, like the second settlement at Sinope, in the time of the Cimmerian raid. Apollonia-Pontica, which under its other name, Anthea, was reckoned a joint enterprise of Miletus with Phocaea (or with Rhodes, in another version), was assigned to 609, and is shown by its remains to be at least as early as this. As often happened, refoundation (epoikia) introduced discordant elements here. Odessus, also Milesian, began only in the reign of Astyages, and Mesambria in that of Darius. The latter, like Heraclea, was a joint colony from Chalcedon and Byzantium; it therefore ranked as Megarian, and it was credited with at least a share in the settlement at Bizone. Tomi and the close-set group of sites in the mouth of the Tyras river were Milesian again.

None of these east-Thracian and Danubian settlements were of any great importance, except as ports of call on the way to the coast of Scythia, which was reckoned to begin at the Ister: their landward interests were small, and their tenure precarious. Apollonia and Istrus, and perhaps other towns, had colonies of their own; there was a ‘Port of the Istrians,’ for example, near Olbia.

Far more important than the sites on the Tyras were the other two main enterprises of Miletus, Olbia at the mouth of the Borysthenes, and Panticapaeum on the Cimmerian Bosporus. Both, like Tyras, were at least double settlements, and it is probably with daughter-colonies from them that we should supply the balance of the seventy-five or hundred Milesian cities known respectively to Seneca and Pliny. Panticapaeum, for example, is described as ‘metropolis of all the Bosporan cities,’ and Herodotus writes as though a district of considerable extent was peopled by ‘other factories of Greeks’ like that at Borysthenes.

The circumstances here were in fact without parallel in the Greek world; for Scythia, which included all the featureless flat-land from Ister to Tanais at the head of the Sea of Azov, seems to have retained, under the dominion of its Iranian conquerors, the ‘royal’ and ‘nomad’ Scythians of Herodotus, a considerable sedentary population—Alazones, Callipidae, and the like—wherever agriculture was practicable; as it was (and is) very widely, though not by any means continuously even in classical times. Especially east of the Borysthenes there were ‘farming’ and ‘ploughing’ Scythians, and of them the latter at all events grew crops ‘not for sustenance but for sale.’ Transport of such bulky commodities was down the great rivers, to the ‘ports’ (emporia) at their mouths, and there seem to have been other wharves in Greek hands, far into the interior, where the vessels were laden. As the foundation of Olbia was assigned to 644, it may be inferred that there had been quite a century-and-a-half of such exploitation before the destruction of Miletus by the Persians; and also that it began, like other colonial adventures of Miletus itself and its Ionian rivals, in close connection with the Cimmerian raid. Necessity at home was (as so often) the mother of discovery abroad. Confirmatory evidence for fairly early data is the retention of Aeginetan measures by Olbia, Tyras, Odessus, and some other cities, as though their intercourse with their neighbours was already established immutably in this respect before other standards were at all widely used. That such intercourse was habitual, and extended far, is shown by the frequency of objects of Greek craftsmanship in richly-furnished tombs of Scythian chiefs throughout the region east of the Borysthenes, and also beyond the Cimmerian Strait; by the description of the Geloni far to the north-east, sedentary, agricultural, speaking a hybrid dialect, and believed to be runaway Greeks from the coast factories; and by allusions to half-breeds and half-Hellenized Scythians, like Scyles in Herodotus, leading a double life ‘in town’ and up-country. Regular cities, indeed, of the normal Greek type, were hardly practicable in a country without natural barriers or restricted opportunities for agriculture: and the early settlements on the ‘great lakes’ of the New World, in French Canada and Manitoba, afford instructive analogies, especially in their relations with cultured and organized aborigines such as the Hurons and Iroquois. The more intimate fusion of Greek and Scythian society, especially in the district round Panticapaeum, belongs however rather to the fifth and fourth centuries.

Exploitation by Greeks, under such exceptionally favourable conditions, of a region strongly contrasted with their motherland in physique and resources, could not fail to have profound effects on the city-states of the Aegean. Within the mountain-zone, cereal agriculture was strictly limited in extent, and must be supplemented, if population outgrew the corn-lands. Here on the inexhaustible ‘black-lands’ there was corn ‘for sale’ in excess of local needs, and a population willing to cultivate it; for they were farmers by habit, and by habit also tributary to Scythian overlords. Aegean cities, on the other hand, were perforce becoming industrialized, over-population enforcing industry even more than resulting from industrial prosperity; they had metal work, furniture, textiles, ‘for sale’ as the Scythians had corn; Scythia had neither wood, nor metals, nor flax, so far as we know, of its own; and Scythian chiefs, to judge from their purchases, were good customers for good work. Thirdly, Greek settlers, attracted by cornland and prosperity of trade, had experiences common to most men who exchange their habitual supply of fats for another: to pass from vegetable oil to butter is quite as trying to the men of the south as the converse is to many northerners, or as it is to a European to pass from butter to blubber or ghee. With drinks it is the same; the taste for either beer or koomiss is acquired with difficulty by the wine-drinker.

Now Scythia, with the exception of a few small districts, is loess-land; intolerant therefore of tree-crops. Only in the Crimea, which was never Scythian, do vine and olive flourish in exceptional shelter. In the Aegean, however, it was an easy discovery, made already in Minoan times and verified abundantly since, that oil and wine, currants and figs, pay better than cereals; and the fact of intensive tree-crops like olive and vine cultivation, from the later seventh century onwards, is demonstrated by incidents such as Thales’ ‘corner’ in Milesian oil-presses, the tactics of Alyattes in his Milesian war, Solon’s economic reorganization of Attica, and ubiquitous traces of actual oil-farms throughout Milesian territory and adjacent Caria. A fourth main factor in the trading prosperity of these Pontic cities was the through-trade with the fur-trappers of the forest-zone north and east of the steppe, and with the gold-fields of the Urals and western Siberia, permitted and patronized by the ‘nomad’ Scythians, to their own great profit, no less than that of the Greek prospectors. That ‘the ends of the world have the best of good things’ became proverbial, and the Pontic trade was a standing instance of this.

Of the social and political consequences of the revolution in Greek agriculture and handicrafts which resulted mainly from these Pontic ventures, it is only necessary to note here how redistribution of wealth and influence in city-states accentuated internal quarrels and pretexts for secession, and thus provided cumulatively the man-power for developing colonial resources. Examples of such epoikia have been already given, of reinforcement (that is) of a colony already founded, by a fresh contingent of settlers.

VI.

CYRENAICA

What Miletus achieved in the Pontic area, which was so nearly its monopoly, was attempted also southward, in the Theraean colonization of north Africa. Thera, like Thasos, had ‘Cadmeian’ traditions and a Minoan heritage; like Melos and the southern Sporades, it had been Hellenized from the gulfs of Argolis and Laconia, but included a ‘ Minyan ’ element of north Aegean origin, temporarily received into the Spartan state but uncongenial there. These Minyans seem to have taken the lead, for which Argonautic tradition may well have designated them, in this African venture. Though it belongs to the latter part of the seventh century, when ‘Ionians and Carians’ had already been at home in the Levant for more than two generations, it was only under strong pressure from Delphi—by this time recognized as a well-informed agency for such ventures—and with the special guidance of men from Itanos—once a Minoan settlement, now Hellenized and Dorian, at the east end of Crete—that the ‘promised land’ was reached at all; and the first choice of a site was unlucky. The eventual Cyrene, however, prospered from the first, and founded several colonies in its turn, of which Barca, farther west, with a Phoenician-looking name, was the most important.

The Cyrenaean prominence lies between the harbourless and exhausted foreshore of Libya, west of the Delta, which had more than once been a danger to Egypt before its rainfall failed, and a similar but more obstructed lowland south of the Greater Syrtis, a vast bay of dangerous shoals, lee-shore and breakers. The Cyrenaica itself, a featureless slab of tabular limestone, sloping gently southwards, and abruptly scarped along the sea­front, stands high and steep enough to catch a fair allowance of sea-borne rain and dew; it has therefore good pasture everywhere, and soil for corn-land in parts. The sea-front is abrupt enough to give shelter from the hot winds of the south, and there is even sun-shade, morning and evening, in its deep gullies. A curious feature is the collapse of the tabular surface in some places, forming quarry-like ‘gardens of the Hesperides’ full of moisture and rank vegetation. Best of all, at the foot of the seaward escarpment are perennial springs, of which the most copious determined the site and name of Cyrene. Since Greek times, this section of the African foreshore has subsided a little and submerged an older coast-shelf; but curtailed though it is now, the site of Cyrene and its palatial rock-hewn cemeteries is one of the most impressive in the Greek world.

From the first, the native Libyans, as closely akin by race to Greek colonists as the Scythians were distinct, maintained unusually cordial relations with them. They had culture and traditions of their own; their ancestors had joined with the Sea-raiders in a whirlwind attack on the Delta about 1221 BC; and Minyan families from Thera would bring traditions of the Argonaut visit, dated to the same generation. As there was ‘corn for sale’ in Scythia, so here there was wool from inexhaustible sheep-walks, of which there was Homeric memory. Around the springs in the coast-fringe were date-palms worthy of ‘Lotus-land,’ though less extensive than west of the Quicksands; and the wild silphium-plant, ubiquitous then on the plateau, though ravaged out of existence later, had only to be brought to market, to become a ‘household remedy’ like camomile or quinine. Beyond all, where the plateau-pastures fade gently into low-lying steppe and a line of oases, ran the great east-and-west route from Lower Egypt to Punic Africa, and at the more important oases—and chiefly at that of Ammon, with its trading priesthood playing the part of the modern Senoussi hierarchy—other old lines of traffic diverged south-westward into Fezzan, and thence away to a land of great marshes, pygmy-haunted forest, a Nile-like stream infest'ed with crocodiles, and a juju-ridden folk, ‘all sorcerers.’ Intermittently along these routes came ivory, ostrich-feathers, and other products of inner Africa, as they came to Leptis and Carthage farther west.

It was perhaps not wholly accident that the first Theraean expedition was revictualled by a Samian vessel bound for Egypt. The subsequent adventures of Colaeus and his shipmates will concern us later, but his intervention here throws a little light on the procedure of such merchant-men, as of the Sea­raiders long before; and also helps to explain the ‘great friend­ships,’ which later events attest, between Theraean enterprises and those of Samos. And there is much in the characteristic art-style of sixth century Cyrene that is not merely Ionian in quality but specifically Samian.

No less important is the close intimacy of craftsmanship between Cyrene and Laconia. The precise nature of the traffic between them is not yet known, interchange of painted pottery being only a symptom of voluminous trade in commodities such as wool and silphium which perish in the using. But it is significant, in view of this double connection with a great Dorian and a great Ionian and insular state, that, when the constitution of Cyrene was revolutionized by Demonax of Mantinea under Delphic patronage late in the sixth century, the two new ‘tribes’ which were established alongside of that which comprehended the old burghers of Theraean descent and those ‘ Libyan neighbours ’ who had been so closely associated with them from the first, were designed to admit to full citizenship, on the one hand, ‘Peloponnesians and Cretans,’ whose ancestry and manners would be Dorian, and, on the other, ‘all the islanders,’ of whom a large proportion must have been Ionian and no doubt many hailed from Samos itself.

Further proofs of Samian interest in this Libyan region are the use made of Samos as a place of refuge by dissident Cyrenaeans, about the time of Polycrates; and the surprising occurrence of a settlement of Samians ‘of the tribe Aeschrione’ in an oasis called the ‘isle of the blest,’ seven days’ journey from Egypt along the western desert-route already mentioned, though not so far west as that of Ammon. It is in this context, too, that we see the significance, first, of the Samian colonization of the island of Amorgos, a half-way-house to Thera, which is dated by the participation of Simonides to the early part of the seventh century; and much later, of the temporary occupation of Cydonia near the west end of Crete by Samians exiled by Polycrates. Evidently Samos was developing an extensive southward connection, during the period which saw the Pontic enterprises of Miletus, its perennial rival.

VII.

THE WEST

Greek enterprises in the west followed rather different courses from those in the north and south, and the story of them has come down in more coherent though not necessarily more authentic shape, mainly owing to the thorough revision of traditional accounts by two western historians—Philistus for Sicily, and Antiochus of Syracuse, a contemporary of Herodotus, for Italy—who frankly ‘selected from ancient accounts what seemed most credible and obvious’; and again later, in the days of Agathocles and Pyrrhus, by Timaeus of Tauromenium. Thucydides’ brief retrospect of Sicilian colonization seems to be summarized from Antiochus.

The physical prospect westwards was fair enough. The west coast of northern Greece, indeed, becomes rapidly more austere from the Gulf of Patras to that of Ambracia, and is harbourless from the latter to the Strait of Corcyra. Only in this region— nameless ‘mainland’ (epirus) as it seemed to its insular visitors— was Hellenization so belated that here alone we find city-states planted colonially among tribal societies which spoke some sort of Greek. Beyond Corcyra, again, the steep Acroceraunian wall screens the ‘channel’ (aulon) of Valona and the Albanian coast­lands from view, and points shipmen westward to the low-lying heel of Apulia, which is just visible from its high cliffs.

Here too was country of an aspect quite unfamiliar to voyagers from the Aegean, moors almost featureless and of wide extent, pasturable in great ranches everywhere and arable in parts, rising to parkland and the virgin forests of a vast interior, whose summits—the far ‘Vulture’s Beak’ (Monte Voltore) among them —caught the winter snow, and sent broad perennial streams sprawling across the maritime plain, white bouldery avenues which lost themselves in tangled everglade and fern among the dunes and rosemary-scrub that line the beach. West of the happy valley of the Crathis, which nearly cuts this interior in two at its narrowest point, a more massive highland, densely forested, presses hard on the coast, like a gigantic Naxos: then comes less rugged and rapidly changing scenery, not unlike Cos or Rhodes, rising again austerely in the neighbourhood of the Sicilian Strait as if to enhance the marvel of that breach in a world’s rim. After this, Sicily, smaller featured for the most part—except the Titans’ forge of Etna—and more abruptly crushed and sculptured, might seem almost homelike, but for its milder climate and relatively abundant moisture: though the Simaethus landscape repeats some features of the great valleys of Magna Graecia.

Here was Paradise, if you could enter and possess it; just such a ‘Magna Graecia’ to Aegean eyes as the Americas were a ‘New Spain’ and ‘New England’ to explorers from Genoa or Bristol, accustomed to ventures on a merely mediterranean scale, or to the ‘narrow seas.’

But this was not wholly a ‘new world’ for the contemporaries of Archias and Theocles. Whatever memories of a Trinacrian ‘vine-land’ and its ‘skraelings’ may have inspired the tales about Laestrygonians and ‘round-eyed’ ogres which have been preserved in the Odyssey, direct Homeric references to Sicily, at all events, and to mutual traffic therewith, point rather to early than to later circumstances, even in our present knowledge of Minoan intercourse with the west. The blocks of liparite and objects fashioned therefrom in the Cnossian palace have no other source, demonstrable or even probable, than the island which gives this rare mineral its name; Syracuse, Thapsus, Megara, and other sites of eastern Sicily have early tombs of Minoan form, with Minoan pottery and rapier-blades; and farther afield still, in Sardinia and on the site of Marseilles, there are burials and imitated objects which prove occasional contact. And though lower Italy and even Sicily (as Thucydides knew) were not immune from the folk-movements characteristic of the close of the Minoan Age—so that the native civilization was altered profoundly, and the Minoanized sites were deserted for others— occasional Aegean imports, of ‘geometric’ style, in Sicilian and also in Campanian tombs, show that communications were never broken for long. At Tarentum, indeed, there is debris of a settlement which appears to have been continuous from Late-Minoan times to its Dorian refoundation at the close of the eighth century. However sudden and rapid, then, the Hellenic colonization of the west may have been, there is no longer any reason for disregarding the traditions of ‘Trojan War’ settlements at Siris, Metapontum, Brundusium and Hyria, more especially as some of these are not described as ‘Achaean’ but as ‘Trojan’ or ‘Phrygian,’ and consequently must be referred to the larger movements of which the Achaean domination was a part. Of these memories the most famous is that which not only brings Aeneas to Eryx on his way to Latium, but makes him find kins­men settled there already. In the west, too, Heracles had had adventures, as in Pontus, and the Thespiad descendants of his settlers in Sardinia found refuge eventually at Cumae. Earlier still went the retrospect of that ‘Aeolian’ settlement at Lipara which was extant in the sixth century.

Into the problems of Etruscan history this is not the place to go. Active and ubiquitous elements among the Sea-raiders in the Levant were known to their Egyptian victims as the Tursha. They were wolves of the same pack as the Shardina, Shakalsha, and those Philistines and Teucrians whose fortunes we have followed in Palestine and Cyprus. When the first Greek navigators cruised beyond the Sicilian Strait, they found themselves in waters where ‘Tyrrhenian pirates’ rivalled Phoenician ‘swindlers’ in sea-wolf hostility. Tracked home to their lairs on the low coast between Tiber and Arno, and also between Ancona and the mouth of the Po, these western Tyrrhenians were found to hold a dozen or more of fenced cities, like those of Philistia, and to be a close ring of war-lords, ruling with more than Philistine austerity a rich, populous region, which only escaped being ‘civilized’ in the Greek sense, because this armed injustice turned with utter frightfulness on everything Greek that carried oars and a sail. Wealth wrung from their Italic subjects they would squander on Greek works of art, and have their own people imitate more or less ill, borrowing Chalcidian writing for their barbarous and uncouth speech, and making unholy alliance at times with opportunist upstarts like Aristodemus of Cumae. Whatever their avenue or avenues of access to Italy had been, their headquarters in the eighth century were south and west of the Apennines; they had a commercial port at Populonia and were working the iron and copper of Elba, and they had made all the sea ‘Tyrrhenian’ as far as the coasts of Sardinia, Liguria, and Sicily. Until the early part of the sixth century the Latin-speaking people south of the Tiber had managed to hold the river frontier against them; but the very successes of the Greek settlements and traders as far as that line were probably one of the chief inducements to the wars of aggression which established an Etruscan dynasty in Rome and a similar overlordship in Campania to the very gates of Cumae.

But between the Tyrrhenian domination northwards, and the first Punic settlements in western Sicily, there was still room enough for adventurers from east of the Strait, and it was only gradually that the jealousies between claimants of rival origin became so acute as they were at the close of the sixth century.

It might have been expected that colonization in so extensive an area, and at such distances from the mother-country, would be progressive from nearer to farther regions. This however is not so. Cumae far away in Campania claimed to be the oldest settlement of all; but apart from Cumae and (more doubtfully) its own offshoot Zancle, in the Narrows, no Italian city—not even Tarentum—seriously contested the priority of the Sicilian Naxos; though Archias, on his own outward way to Syracuse, was said to have ‘assisted’ the founders of Sybaris in some fashion, as though these two ventures were simultaneous.

Corcyra, comparatively near home, was believed to be as ancient a Corinthian settlement as Syracuse (734), and to have had an Eretrian phase before that1; but the other Corinthian colonies in Acarnania and Epirus belong to the Cypselid tyranny (after 657). The standard chronology, summarized by Thucydides, and attributed to Antiochus, shows a manifold outburst of colonial activity between 735 and 680; then a long pause, with only secondary foundations of local origin, such as Acrae (664), Selinus (c. 630), Himera (649), and the Cypselid colonies; and then, after a shorter interval, Camarina from Syracuse (599) Acragas from Gela (580), Lipari from Cnidus and Rhodes (also in 580) and the great series of Phocaean settlements in Liguria and Iberia (all between 600 and 550). After this, the forlorn hope of the Phocaeans at Alalia and Velia, about 540, the expedition of Dorieus in 510, and the inrush of Samian and other Ionian exiles when the Ionic Revolt failed (494), betray a new motive, intolerable Persian interference with Ionian cities in the Aegean. They also show how nearly full of Greeks, by this time, were the regions which were open to them at all.

Reasons for this piecemeal exploitation of the new countries are not hard to find; they recur in all colonizing ages. In proportion as the movement is conceived as a recovery of lands formerly visited but perforce neglected during the period of folk-movement and its immediate sequel, the impulse becomes intelligible, on the part of the reoccupation leaders, to push their outposts in the first instance as far afield as a season’s voyage permitted, in face of Punic or Etruscan counter-claims, and leave nearer, easier, or less promising localities to be occupied later. The recoil of the Naxians onto Catana, after founding Leontini, and the Sybarite miscalculation of seizing Metapontum before Siris, which left the latter open to settlement by Colophon, are instances of this. But allowance must also be made for the multiple origin and course of the colonization; and for the probability of early understandings as to ‘spheres of influence,’ such as kept Dorians of all kinds in Sicily south of the Simaethus river, and Chalcidians almost wholly north of it; Delphi playing probably much the same part here as the Vatican in the partition of the ‘Indies.’ Above all, the possibility cannot be excluded that other places besides Tarentum had come through the bad years, and been accepted as survivals of what had been in the days of Minos or Diomedes, until need or opportunity flooded these too with newcomers, and reconstituted a ‘Trojan War’ derelict as a Hellenic city-state. In his account of the founding of Metapontum, Strabo even uses the word synoikismos, as though earlier settlements in a whole district were to be combined into one state.

In their subsequent history, the diverse origins and early antipathies of the principal cities count for so much, that the eventual structure and balance of parts within this western world will be best exposed, not by adopting a chronological or even a strictly regional order, but by tracing separately the growth of each main factor and noting its connections with its place of origin, as a first clue to reasons for its emergence in the West.

(1) Achaean Colonies. Most closely connected probably with the Minoan exploitation of the West were those whose homes lay best placed for Western enterprises, and on whom the stress of the Dorian and Thessalo-Boeotian movements pressed most directly outwards in that direction; namely, the inhabitants of both shores of the Corinthian Gulf. Suggestive hints are early tales of Cretan navigators within that gulf and of derelict ‘Phocians’ and ‘Achaeans’ in the West; the solidarity of the Locrians-in-the-west with the Opuntian Locrians who find place in the Homeric Catalogue, rather than with their Ozolian kinsmen who do not, and whose position in the gulf-area seems best explained as a result of known shifting of the peoples of central Greece in post-Achaean time; the emergence of the terms Hellas and Hellenes, old by-names probably of the dynastic Achaeans, as a common designation of all Greeks who came ‘homing’ to Olympia, and made the later fortunes of its festival; finally, the association, by Hellanicus if not earlier, of Achaeus with Ion in the Hellenic pedigree as coheirs of Xuthus, as though wider experience was showing that the ‘ Ionian’ exodus down the Saronic and Euboic gulfs towards Asia Minor had its western counterpart in an ‘Achaean’ emigration by way of the gulf of Corinth. Such Achaean emigration was not limited to Magna Graecia; Zacynthus for example was ‘colonized’ in this way, and probably others of the western islands which had composed the barony of Odysseus.

On the other hand, large elements in the cities of Magna Graecia were not strictly Achaean. Besides the Locrian contingent already mentioned, there were Phocians and Aetolians at Metapontum, and men of Troezen at Sybaris who were afterwards forced on, to found Posidonia. Above all, there were eventually Messenians, Arcadians, and other men of the older population whom the Dorian Conquest had disorganized, and whose prospects became darker than ever when the Dorian Sparta began the ‘First Messenian War’ (c. 730)

For it is probably no accident that the main westward movement overlaps and a little outlasts that war. The connection is of course clearest at Tarentum (Taras), where Sparta is described as organizing the colony with the object of ridding Laconia of war-babies or unwanted half-breeds. Who these ‘Partheniae’ were, and who their leader Phalanthus was, or whom he represented, was apparently discussed in antiquity: and such episodes as his abortive settlement between Troezen and Corinth, and his ship­wreck in the Crisaean Gulf, suggest that the foundation of Tarentum was only part of a larger movement, as the later expeditions of Dorieus are only part of the resettlement of homeless men, after the fall of Polycrates and the Spartan crusade against ‘tyrannies’ in the last half of the sixth century.

This consideration explains also how so restricted an area as the ‘Achaean’ shore of Peloponnese suddenly provided so large a surplus of population, not of industrials or traders, but of country-bred men looking for cultivable land and a quiet life. For the fisheries, the horse-ranching, the wide inland commerce, which eventually supplemented this, at Sybaris and Tarentum, were later accidents: nothing is more striking in the later history of these ‘Achaean’ cities, and in Locri, Siris and Tarentum, which resembled them in origin and shared their local resources, than the persistence of agriculture as their economic basis. This made their sudden and great prosperity, in early days; when they lost control of their wide lands, and the native serfs who worked them, through the Sabellian invasions of the fourth century, they faded away, except only Tarentum, and Thurii, the second self of Sybaris, which could subsist on one or more of those special facilities.

Within this general similarity of origin and circumstance, so strikingly symbolized by the peculiar fabric of their coins, the South Italian towns varied conspicuously in detail. Sybaris—with its self-contained paradise, its native peasantry, its unique coast-to-coast route with ports on the Tyrrhenian sea at Laus and Scidrus, and a bosom-friendship with Miletus to exploit this, in competition with the Chalcidian all-sea-route through the straits, to the common goal of an Etruscan market insatiate for Greek and Oriental wares of every kind—became a by-word for the fate of the nouveau riche, and tolerated an extreme democracy whose whims brought it to disaster like that of Tarentum later. Croton, with a harder task in early days, a brisker climate, a famous sanctuary of Lacinian Hera, an important position on the great western sea-route, and local resources in wine, oil, timber, and fisheries, exactly complementary to those of Sybaris, fostered schools of athletics, medicine, and exact science, and owed as much to Chalcidian and Samian friends, as Sybaris to Milesian; not least, its role in the most inveterate of interstate feuds. Like Sybaris, it had daughter-cities, but not in such close control: Pandosia, high in the interior, on the head waters of its rival’s river; Terina on the far side; and Caulonia on its own sea towards Locri. Metapontum, founded by Sybaris to forestall Tarentum in control of the Bradanus valley, seems to have remained mainly a corn-grower. Siris, interjected by Colophon between Metapontum and its mother-city, on the site of an older town which had Rhodian (perhaps Late Minoan) associations, had a rich rolling lowland, and behind it a watershed-portage like that of Sybaris, and good friends at Pyxus to operate it. After withstanding a threefold attack from Croton, Sybaris and Metapontum, it sank later to be little more than a landing-stage for its Tarentine neighbour, Heraclea.

Locri, after a false start, made good on a site farther from Croton, and more central to its natural region; and had colonies of its own, like Sybaris, on its northern coast, at Medma and Hipponium. Its wealth from agriculture and forests was considerable, but its position between neighbours so powerful and strongly characterized as Croton and Rhegium was seldom an easy one. This probably explains its spasmodic friendship with Syracuse, and its eventual utility to Dionysius. Its sympoliteia or coequal citizenship with the Locrians of Opus in central Greece is an exceptional example of long intimacy between colony and metropolis.

Tarentum, which in spite of its Spartan step-mother belongs essentially to this group, substitutes for the low-lying alluvium of its westward neighbours the corn-cities, a higher, harder subsoil with scrub and open grazing, but only patches of arable. Sheltered below the bluff edge of this plateau, olives grow luxuriantly; upon it were the great horse-ranches, and ‘Tarentine horsemen’ were in wide demand later as mercenaries. Its re­markable lagoon-like harbour, besides naval and mercantile uses, has inexhaustible fishery; and from the fifth century onwards Tarentine purple, ingrained in wool from the local moors, had worldwide repute. After supplying the necessary vessels for its other commodities, Tarentum had pottery for export, and was the outlet for the produce of a large part of the Apulian table-land, traded for Greek manufactured goods. Its principal oversea partner seems to have been Cnidus, in Asiatic Doris, a port well situated at a junction of main routes, for distributing or collecting western cargo, and eventually a partner in independent adventures around Sicily.

Almost unbroken prosperity—apart from a disastrous quarrel about 500 with the Iapygian natives of the moorland—conserved little trace of Laconian or even Dorian institutions; aristocracy was early superseded by a liberal government representing all interests, and it is only later that we have glimpses of the mob-rule which compromised Tarentum in its final dispute with Rome. Of its colonies, Heraclea alone was of considerable importance, as adjacent and friendly corn-land.

(2) Chalcidian Cumae. Beyond the Strait of Messina, both to north and to south, a different situation grew out of different and rather less complicated origins. In Sicily two principal adventures, originating in Chalcis and in Corinth respectively, were supplemented or superseded locally by settlements from Megara and from the Dorian cities along the Carian coast. North of the Strait, and beyond it, Chalcis exploited the north coast of Sicily, and the Campanian shore; and Phocaea monopolized vast and remote areas between the Riviera and the mouth of the Ebro.

In both directions Chalcis was reputed to have had priority, by a few months only in Sicily, but in Campania by more; though the earliest date, in the tenth or eleventh century, to which Cumae was assigned in antiquity, is more probably that of its namesake, Cyme in Asiatic Aeolis, which was believed, without much other evidence, to have had some share in founding it. Both cities probably took their name from an older community in Euboea. Traditions connecting the Campanian Cumae with the survivors of the Thespiad settlement ‘founded by Iolaus for Hercules’ in Sardinia, and attributing the first occupation of Parthenope to Rhodians ‘before the first Olympiad,’may deserve greater attention than they have received hitherto, now that early tombs are being recovered at Cumae itself. Ancient as it was reputed to be, however, Cumae with its strong rock citadel and twofold frontage on the mainland was admittedly but a second stage in a venture which began as a mixed-Euboean settlement on those ‘Monkey­islands’, Pithecusae, which prolong the hilly promontory north of the bay of Naples; and it was eclipsed in turn, after the conquest of Campania by the Samnites and the sack of the city in 421, by its own colony Neapolis, which held an ampler site facing south and better screened by the same high ground. With the exceptional fertility of the volcanic Phlegraean country inland, Cumae combined valuable fisheries on the coasts and in the Lucrine lake; there seems to have been gold on ‘Monkey-island,’ and the sanctuary of the Sibyl attracted pilgrims.

But the chief significance of Cumae was as an easy avenue for Greek wares, and Greek customs and ideas, into the richest districts of Middle Italy. That this connection was early, follows from the persistence of the Aeginetan standard for currency here until the fifth century; its extent is indicated by the prevalence of Hellenic arts and the almost complete absence of Punic imports throughout the Campanian lowlands. Before Etruscan domination of Latium and Campania in the sixth century, everything south of the Tiber lay within its influence, and the intimacy of its tyrant Aristodemus with the house of Tarquin shows this position recovered under the new regime. It was the Chalcidian alphabet, with very little change, that became the standard system of writing, not only among Oscan and Latin-speaking neighbours, but throughout Etruria, and it was probably from Cumae that the name ‘Grai’ or ‘Graeci,’ originally borne by emigrants from the neighbourhood of Boeotian Tanagra facing southern Euboea, came to be the common designation of Hellenes in the speech of Latium. So thorough, indeed, was the Hellenization of some Campanian communities, that Nola, Abella, and the Faliscan towns were considered by later antiquaries as in some sense Chalcidian: probably there was some intermarriage, as well as pacific penetration. Such an agency, however, inevitably became an object of hostility to aggressive peoples of the mainland, Etruscans in the sixth century, and Samnites at the end of the fifth, and for the same reason was a valuable strategic outpost in the defence of Greek interests by Hiero and Dionysius in turn; perhaps also by Athens, during the vigorous exploitation which followed the foundation of Thurii in 443, and led to the adoption of Thurian coin-types by Neapolis, from which we may perhaps infer some Athenian emigration thither.

South of Campania, the more abrupt coastline, the prevalence of forests and unkindly folk, and still more the use of its few serviceable coves as posterns of Sybaris and other Achaean ports, secluded Cumae and its whole regime from the other Chalcidian cities. The fateful voyage of Theocles down the east coast of Sicily seems to presume some Chalcidian interests in the west already; but the formal colonization of the region between the Strait and the Simaethus valley, in 735, opens a new chapter of Greek enterprise. Whatever the motives which originally drew Chalcidians into the west, the successive convovs of settlers—for Theocles was not their only ‘founder’—which populated at least seven cities within twenty-five years, can hardly have been recruited in Chalcis only; and Zancle at any rate had a ‘piratical’ contingent from Cumae, if indeed it was not already a Cumaean colony, reinforced now to fill a new role at this parting of the ways. They were a mixed body, including probably Naxians, as the name of the first colony shows; certainly Megarians under a leader of their own, though these were expelled from Leontini before long, and occupied a minute peninsula farther down the coast; and like Croton a very few years later, they had official sanction from Delphi, and the miscellaneous following which such publicity might attract. Though Naxos, Catana, Zancle and the rest were established on the coast, Leontini, which alone lay south of the Simaethus river, lay also some miles inland, depending, as the symbolic corn-grain on its coins suggests, on its agricultural resources, and making a new departure in its necessary relations with the Sicel natives, the full significance of which appeared when its dissident Megarian element made common cause with a local chieftain and established a new Megara in the Sicel township of Hybla.

The first two generations had enough to do in occupying the promontory behind Zancle, and the coast-region south of it, of which they had seized the most promising sites at the outset; but in 649 Zancle, with reinforcements from Mylae and (once more) from Chaicis, and Dorian adventurers too from Syracuse, seized a strongly-posted site where the ‘lovely river’ Himera breaks through to the steep northern coast, some sixty miles from the strait, and thus foreclosed a multitude of sheltered and fertile patches against Punic aggression from the west end of the island. Even beyond this fortress and its river frontier, the famous hot springs in a nook of the next bay, with a defensible post on the ridge under which they rise, became a Greek health-resort of some importance. Later, like Cumae, Himera became one of the cockpits of the west; and it was here that Gelon’s forces turned the fortune of war against the Carthaginians, on the same day as won freedom at Salamis.

Obviously the control of the Strait, which the natural ‘sickle port of Zancle had given to those old ‘pirates from Cumae’, was not complete without a counterwork on the Italian shore, especially with the veering currents that located Homer’s Scylla and Charybdis here: but the founding of Rhegium—the ‘city in the breach’—was as casual and tumultuary as its later fortunes. Here too, as in the Achaean cities, refugees from Messenia played a part from the first; famine in Chaicis had compelled a fresh exodus; there was Delphic guidance, as at the first Chalcidian effort; and there was also a native element, driven coastwards by some disturbance farther north. The result was a colony mainly Chalcidian, but with a large territorial annexe like an Achaean city, guarded by frontier outposts against Locri, and cursed with inveterate jealousy of its opposite neighbour. Only under exceptional circumstances, and usually after forcible intervention of the one state in the affairs of the other, could Zancle and Rhegium make common cause.

Nevertheless, this doubly Chalcidian wardenship of the Strait had profound effects on the general history of the west. On the one hand, rival traders in the lucrative Etruscan market found it prudent, if not actually cheaper or quicker, to break journey at Sybaris and re-embark their cargoes at its postern-ports, not always into Greek vessels; and the wealth of Sybaris, so lightly won, was as lightly squandered, in ways that became a by-word. As Chalcis had enduring intimacy with Samos and its friends, it is not surprising to find that the bosom-friend of Sybaris was Miletus; and also that Sybarite interest in Miletus, being essentially material, did not survive Crotoniate conquest of the portage­way. And it was no less fitting that after the heritage of Miletus had fallen into Athenian hands, and those hands were freed for a while by the Thirty Years’ Truce, they should plant on the site of Sybaris their chief western agency, Periclean Thurii.

(3) The Phocaean Colonies. Conversely, it was Phocaea, a close ally of Samos, which alone had such freedom of the Strait as made possible its Ligurian and Celtic enterprises. These seem to have begun early, for the chance discovery of Tartessus in south-eastern Spain by Colaeus of Samos, at the time of the founding of Cyrene), was exploited not by Samians, but by their Phocaean partners, and remained their monopoly for over half a century. But their greatest achievement, the creation of Massilia, with its up-river traffic as far as Arles and Nismes, and its profound influence on the Celtic peoples, falls rather later, about 600. To the numerous Phocaean colonies, among which Monaco, Nice, Antibes, and Ampurias retain their ancient names today, this region owes its Hellenic olive-industry, and the high degree of culture which made so easy the Romanization of Provence; it was a whole empire of the outer West, such as Miletus achieved in Pontus, and its reflection in Aegean politics is the Phocaea which ‘held the seas’ for forty years before the fall of Sardes, and was the champion of Ionian independence in the disastrous revolt of Pactyas against Cyrus the Persian. It was in this last crisis that Phocaea literally ‘called in a new world’ to maintain the balance of the old, for its city-wall, believed impregnable till Harpagus brought up the siege-engines of oriental warfare, had been expressly built with a gift from the king of Tartessus.

Inevitably, domains and traffic so enviable as those of the Phocaean west, were ill regarded by Punic, and still more by Etruscan rivals. Phocaean vessels therefore ran the gauntlet of two sea-powers, from the friendly Strait to their haven of the ‘Lonely House’, and there had been an earlier attempt to establish a half-way-house at Alalia, on the east coast of Corsica, before Phocaea itself fell and the survivors forswore Ionia and joined their oversea cousins. But this desperate contingent, reinforcing a post so dangerously near Elba and Populonia, was more than Etruria could tolerate. After a drawn sea-fight, Alalia was evacuated, and all that could be done was to head for the best remaining site within reach, and establish the remnant at Elea, between southern Campania and the Sybarite remnant at Laus. Henceforward the Phocaean colonies, rallying round Massilia, maintained an independent and almost self-sufficient existence in their own region, secluded from Etruscan raiders by the rugged coast­line of Apennine Liguria, and from Punic aggression by no less difficult country south of the Ebro. On their Tartessian friends a great silence falls till the days of Hannibal.

(4) Corinthian Colonies. While Chalcidians and their Ionian friends were exploring north-westward, a quite different regime was being created in south-eastern Sicily by men of Dorian antecedents. Thucydides puts the foundation of Syracuse by Archias of Corinth in the year following that of Naxos by Theocles, but there was another tradition which placed it as early as 757. Though the private affairs of Archias were the occasion of his enterprise, there can be little doubt that this expedition belongs essentially to the same series of events as the Achaean and Chalcidian outflows. Archias was believed to have helped Myscellus in early troubles at Croton. There were Syracusan families which claimed origin from Tenea, Argos and Olympia; and the legend of Arethusa’s fountain combines the folklore of Aetolia with that of Chaicis. We may infer that Corinth, like Chaicis, gave form rather than substance to the new city, and that the Messenian troubles were responsible for the supply of homeless men. Corinth usually maintained cordial relations with both Chaicis and Samos, and the situation of Syracuse, on the next important site beyond Leontini, is in accord with the view that in its origin it was no open rival. Originally confined to Ortygia, ‘Quail-island’, within bow-shot of the shore, it soon dominated the defensible plateau which overlooked it, and from this strong position exercised the same kind of overlordship over the neighbouring Sicels as the Dorian aristocracies of the Argolid over their serfs. In this way, Syracuse was able, like Sybaris and Heraclea Pontica, to create a territorial community round a Greek polis governed by a landed nobility, but sustained no less by native or half-breed peasantry than by those industrial and commercial elements which its superb facilities attracted. Usually, therefore, unlike the Chalcidian colonies, Syracuse could deal with its own increase without colonizing: and the date (664) of its earliest offshoot ‘on the heights’ at Acrae coincides so closely with the great quarrel between Corinth and Corcyra, that it should be regarded as a measure of emergency. The other Syracusan foundations, Casmenae in 644, and the more important Camarina in 599, resulted from political secessions, and were uneasy neighbours always; though the troubles of Camarina were not wholly of its own making, as we shall see.

But Syracusan prospects of spacious overgrowth in one of the richest regions of Sicily were marred by three circumstances, which explain much of its later fortune. Probably about the same time as the voyage of Archias, an older Eretrian settlement in Corcyra (itself the successor and perhaps in part the heir of the Phaeacian city, Scheria), was reinforced or superseded by a Corinthian colony, which expelled Liburnian ‘pirates’ who had come down from the Adriatic, and dominated, as at Syracuse, a populace which did not love the new occupants, and continued to venerate the ‘sacred grove of Alcinous,’ who had entertained Odysseus and sent his ships ‘as far as Euboea.’ For this, and more material reasons—the value of an open door and of equal treatment for all comers, to a state which could trade on its situation as half-way-house to the new West—Corcyra repudiated from the first the rather exceptional restraints and preferential treatment which Corinth seems to have imposed on its nearer colonies; and as Corinthian operations in the west could only proceed freely with the goodwill of Corcyra, this unfilial conduct festered into grievous feud. Only under the Cypselid tyranny was there temporary and partial appeasement, and it is noteworthy that now it was rather towards the few profitable bits of the backward and difficult mainland of north-western Greece, on the hither-side of Corcyra, that Corinth turned its attention, and that the worst later embitterment of the old feud arose from the Corinthian claim to regulate the affairs of the only one of these north-westerly colonies, Epidamnus, which lay beyond Corcyra, and had in fact been established by it. Even the exceptional loyalty and close co-operation of such cities as Ambracia, Leucas, Anactorium and Oeniadae with their metropolis was probably as much the fruit of local quarrels with Corcyra, as of Corinthian precautions due to earlier disappointment. In the west, meanwhile, there were no more colonies from Corinth directly; only those occasional offshoots of Syracuse which have already been named.

(5) Megarian Colonies. But while Corinth itself was hampered thus in its western enterprises, and cherished all the more dearly the goodwill which it invariably found in Syracuse, other peoples’ projects restricted the opportunities of Syracuse itself. Northwards, Hyblaean Megara was no better neighbour than its mother-city was to Corinth, and it was only after at least three generations that the Megarians shifted their base for the fourth time, summoned a fresh ‘founder’ (and probably other emigrants) from their mother-city, and founded Selinus far away on the south-west coast, interrupting the line of Phoenician settlements already established there, and succeeding as ill in conciliating the native population of Segesta immediately inland, as they had fared well at the outset with the king of Hybla. It is to the late date, and systematic construction of this new city that we owe the notable temples whose ruins mark the site; and the similar temple at Segesta shows how deeply Megarian culture affected even uncongenial neighbours. If the earlier date (651) for the migration to Selinus is the true one, it would be almost contemporary with that to Himera (649), the most westerly colony of the Chalcidians on the northern coast; each of these westward thrusts facilitating the other, in face of the common enemy.

(6) Rhodian (Triopian-Dorian) Colonies. Southward, too, the opportunities of Syracusan expansion were restricted at an early stage (about 690) through the foundation of Gela by Dorians from Rhodes and other Triopian towns and also (perhaps rather later) from Crete. As these insular Dorians traced their descent from Argos, their institutions and manners differed from those of Corinthian colonists; and inherited contrasts, embittered by local rivalry, were complicated by the griefs of the unfilial Camarina, hemmed in by the converging hinterlands of its stronger neighbours and ever making mischief between them. The site of Gela was originally an inshore islet like Ortygia, but instead of prolonging a headland, as at Syracuse, it divided the mouth of the torrential river which gave the city its name. Its prosperity rested on the wide level cornfield of the Gela valley, sheltered landwards by the olive-clad escarpment of a pasturable moorland. The valley-head offers shorter access to the upper basin of the Simaethus and the leading Sicel stronghold at Enna, than was open to Syracuse or even to Catana; and as markets for its produce Carthage and Hadrumetum lay within easy sail. About a century later, and shortly after the foundation of Camarina on the eastern edge of its territory, Gela flung an offshoot west­ward, to the vast natural fortress-site of Acragas, a little in­land between deep valleys, with fenland and open beaches where they reach the sea. Acragas, like Gela itself, was wholly agricultural, with the same African markets at its door: with fens drained and ports scoured by the engineering skill of Empedocles, it rose to great wealth and rivalled Syracuse in population and material splendour.

Nearly the whole south coast of Sicily had thus fallen easily into a few strong hands, and about the time of the founding of Acragas a concerted attempt seems to have originated, like Gela, in the Triopian cities, Cnidus and Rhodes, to challenge the Punic occupation of the western districts, and establish a colony at Lilybaeum. But one of the numerous quarrels between Selinus and Segesta squandered its forces; the colony was abandoned, and the remnant settled in Lipara, reinforcing the last survivors of an ‘Aeolian’ community which had preserved traditions and institutions of very archaic look. Lipara long did valuable police­work against Etruscan piracy, and was one of the cities which harboured Samian refugees after the downfall of Polycrates half a century later.

(7) Supplementary colonial enterprises in later sixth century. For as Phocaea risked all, when Ionian independence was threatened after the fall of Sardes, so Samos, under its great sea-lord, organized a blockade of the Great King’s foreshore so effective as to exasperate all parties alike; with the result that—what with medizing aristocrats, expelled during the rule of Polycrates, and his own followers and mercenaries after his fall—the world was too full of people’ as it had been in the days of Agamemnon, and it fell to the Spartans, who had already interfered once with Polycrates, to restore order in the Aegean and dispose of the refugees. A similar problem confronts the Greek government today. The Spartan solution was a series of colonial enterprises, in which it is not difficult to trace both the master-mind and the headstrong temper of Cleomenes, whose accession was a little later than the death of Polycrates. First, Dorieus, the man who might have been king, the best Spartan of his day, led a large expedition to the Cinyps river, in Tripolitan Africa, with intent to repeat here the great achievements of Cyrene, in which Samos, as we have seen, had had some recent share. But Punic prospectors had been beforehand; the Libyan natives were unfriendly; and the dunes and low moors between the two Quicksands were no site for another Cyrene. It was a later age and another economic situation which permitted the prosperity of Roman Leptis and her sisters of the Tripolis. Dorieus was beaten off, and it was one of the grievances of Gelon of Syracuse in 480 that when he too had tried to ‘liberate the emporia—which was long the cantterm for this section of African coast—Sparta had sent no help.

Baffled southward, Sparta had turned next to the west. In Dorian Sicily there still seemed to be scope for a colony. The raid on Lilybaeum had shown what might be done with ampler forces and better plans; there was high talk about the ‘Minoan heritage’ and the ‘labours of Hercules,’ to encourage recruits; and about 510 Dorieus set out again, this time with the Delphic authorization which had been omitted on his first adventure. But just as the Lilybaean raid had been deranged at Selinus, so Dorieus was drawn into the local quarrel which ended so disastrously for Sybaris. Some of his followers extricated themselves, and pressed on, but only to fall, like their predecessors, into the snare of Selinuntine intrigue; and though ‘Heraclea-Minoa,’ some way beyond the actual limits of Greek occupation, was reached and formally constituted, the great design foundered. Gelon, here too, did what he could to retrieve the fiasco, but again without help from Sparta, and the age of Greek colonization closed in disaster and disappointment.

For in the Aegean, too, colonization was almost over, with tragic results for the Greek states there. It was a momentary weakness of Darius which conceded to Histiaeus of Miletus the last remaining region, which was unappropriated, of the north Aegean, the Paeonian district in the Strymon valley; and it was his revocation of this gift, and honorific internment of the concessionnaire that brought Milesian uneasiness to a head, and let loose the Ionian Revolt. No less characteristic of the time, and of Histiaeus’ full knowledge of the situation, was the pretext which he gave to Darius, that if only he might return to Ionia, he would put Sardinia, ‘the greatest of the islands,’ into the Great King’s hands—with himself as his satrap, and a New-Miletus there to avenge old scores on Phocaea and the destroyers of Sybaris. The Sardinian project was an old one, ‘good,’ observes Herodotus, ‘if the game was up in Ionia,’ as Bias had thought it was after the revolt of Pactyas; for the Punic occupants of Tharros had barely sampled its forests, minerals and labour-supply; it was indeed the prize best worth seizing by anyone who could hold it. But things fell otherwise, and the only swarm of Greeks that reached western waters in that generation was no Milesian armada, but draggled waifs, Phocaean, Samian, Milesian alike, fleeing from the wrath to come, while Miletus burned and Chios was depopulated. And the fate of these refugees is instructive. No new colony did they found; for there was no site within their power to occupy. At best, like Dionysius of Phocaea, they took to ‘tub­sinking’ in the Levant or the Tyrrhenian Sea. At Zancle some of them forcibly converted an existing city to their own uses, a new Messene with the blazon of old Samos on its coins; some went to the ‘Fair Point’ (Caleacte) a little farther west, and to the pirates’ nest in Lipara opposite; some to Dicaearchia near Cumae, others elsewhere, a burden and a grievance to involuntary hosts, and a cause of grave trouble later. At Syracuse Gelon had already found in an overgrown populace a ‘most graceless lodger.’

The spread of the Greek city-state system had indeed very nearly reached its natural limits, and where it had failed to do so, it was because Carthaginians and Etruscans had won here and there what, for a century and more, had been a neck-and-neck race for the west. With better luck in its struggle with Cyrus, Phocaea might have made good in Corsica, and maintained its already long connection with Tartessus. With better management, and less divided forces, successive attempts might have succeeded in disrupting the Punic occupation of western Sicily and conciliating its non-Sicel inhabitants—for with the Sicels of the eastern districts there was seldom any trouble at all, till they began to meet Greeks with their own weapons and the latter-day nationalism of Ducetius. With better courage Delphi might have justified the faith of Dorieus, as it had prevailed long before over the doubts of the Theraeans. But on the larger issues Hellenism had won. From the Tanais to the Ebro, from Massilia to the Samian Oasis, almost every stretch of coastline which could maintain a polis had received its apoikia and become a ‘home away from home’ to as many Greeks as it could hold. And the reason why this.great achievement had been possible, was that in the dark ages of reconstruction not only had a new people come into being, the Hellenes of the historic age, but in doing so they had created a form of society unimagined before; as its greatest interpreter described it, ‘originating for the maintenance of life, but in principle, a means for living well.’ Tried by the test of unfamiliar soil, austerer climate, lack of those necessaries of life as Greeks knew it, corn, wine, and oil, with fish, fruit and cheese for simple condiments, the polls wilted because there Greeks could not live—by the quicksands of Africa, under the sheer cliffs of Pisidia and Cilicia, in the sodden summers of the Caucasus or Illyria; but as far as the Mediterranean regime extended within which the city-state originated, it proved its fitness to survive, to spread, to practise the supreme art of ‘living well’; or if here or there it failed to take root, it was because men of other breed—Philistine, Phoenician, Etruscan—had created like­wise, and established there already, institutions so similar, in their working as in their antecedents, that these exceptions ‘prove the rule.’

CHAPTER XXIV

THE GROWTH OF THE GREEK CITY-STATE