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'280 HISTORY OF GREECE. raent made upon his imagination, we are indebted for ou knowledge of the precise period at which the secret of Phenieiah commerce at Tartessus first became known to the Greeks. The voyage of Kolaeus opened to the Greeks of that day a new world hardly less important regard being had to their previous aggre- gate of knowledge than the discovery of America to the Eu- ropeans of the last half of the fifteenth century. But Koloeus did little more than make known the existence of this distant and lucrative region : he cannot be said to have shown the way to it : nor do we find, in spite of the foundation of Kyrene and Barka, which made the Greeks so much more familiar with the coast of Libya than they had been before, that the route by which he had been carried against his own will was ever deliberately pursued by Greek traders. Probably the Carthaginians, altogether unscrupulous in pro- ceedings against commercial rivals, 1 would have aggravated its natural maritime difficulties by false information and hostile pro- ceedings. The simple report of such gains, however, was well calculated to act as a stimulus to other enterprising navigators ; and the Phokaeans, during the course of the next half-century, pushing their exploring voyages both along the Adriatic and along the Tyrrhenian coast, and founding Massalia in the year GOO B. c., at length reached the Pillars of Herakles and Tartes- sus along the eastern coast of Spain. These men were the most adventurous mariners 2 that Greece had yet produced, creating a jealous uneasiness even among their Ionian neighbors : 3 their voyages were made, not with round and bulky merchant-ships, calculated only for the maximum of cargo, but with armed pen- tekonters, and they were thus enabled to defy the privateers of the Tyrrhenian cities on the Mediterranean, which had long de- terred the Greek trader from any habitual traffic near the strait 1 Strabo, xvii, p. 802 ; Aristot. Mirab. Ausc. c. 84-132.

  • Hcrodot. i, 163. Oi Se ^unaiseg OVTOI vavTiAir/ai /j.a.Kpfiat rcpuToi.

veil- ixP?/ ffavTO > Ka % r ^ v 'AdpiJ?v KOI T?/V TvpcTivirfV KO.I T?/V 'IQr/pi-qv Kal rbv TnfjT?/'aabv ovroi slaiv ol Karadei^avTe f ivavri^ovro tie ov CTpoyyv^^ai vi/valv, <i?i/la TrevrriKovTEpoiaiv, the expressions are remarkable. 3 Hcrodot. i, 164-165, gives an example of the jealousy of the Chian* ( respect to the islands called (Enussse.