338 HISTORY OF GKKHCE. had permitted such establishment, may doubtless be regarded { having given organization to the factories, and as having placed the Greeks on a more comfortable footing of security than they had ever enjoyed before. This Egyptian king manifested several other evidences of his phil-Hellenic disposition, by donations to Delphi and other Gre- cian temples, and he even married a Grecian wife from the city of Kyrene. 1 Moreover, he was in intimate alliance and relations of hospitality both with Polykrates despot of Samos, and with Croesus king of Lydia. 2 He conquered the island of Cyprus, and rendered it tributary to the Egyptian throne: his fleet and army were maintained in good condition, and the foreign merce- naries, the great strength of the dynasty which he had supplant- ed, were not only preserved, but even removed from their camp near Pelusium to the chief town Memphis, where they served as the special guards of Amasis. 3 Egypt enjoyed under him a de- gree of power abroad, and prosperity at home the river having been abundant in its overflowing which was the more tena ciously remembered on account of the period of disaster and sub- jugation immediately following his death. And his contributions. in architecture and sculpture, to the temples of Sais 1 and Mem- phis, were on a scale of vastness surpassing everything before known in lower Egypt. she greatly derided him for this proceeding, a song which doubtless He- rodotus knew, and which gives to the whole anecdote a complete authen- ticity. Now we can hardly put the age of Sappho lower than 600-580 B. c. (see Mr. Clinton, Fasti Hellen ad ann. 595 B. c., and Ulrici, Geschichte dcr Griech. Lyrik, ch. xxiii, p. 360) : Alkacns, too, her contemporary, had him- self visited Egypt (Alcsei Fragm. 103, ed. Bergk; Strabo, i, p. 63). The Greek settlement at Naukratis, therefore, must be decidedly older than Ama- sis, who began to reign in 570 B. c., and the residence of Rhodopis in that town must have begun earlier than Amasis, though Herodotus calls her /tar 1 'Apaaiv uKfiu&vaa (ii, 134). Nor can we construe the language of Herodo tus strictly, when he says that it was Amasis who permitted the residence of Greeks at Naukratis (ii, 178). 1 Herodot. ii, 181. * Hcrodot i, 77 ; iii, 39.
- Hcrodot. ii, 182, 154. KOTOIKKTS t^ Me/t$iv, jvhaKijv [uvroi
frpdf A.lyvirriu'>. Herodot. ii, 175-177.
