Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/27

 HISTORY AND ORIGIN OF THE PHRYGIANS. 1 1 these manifold pursuits, and share the ebb and flow which attends on commercial enterprise. Built upon the shore, where its sinuous windings form natural havens, the vast majority of these centres owned but a narrow strip of land outside their walls ; their population was not sufficiently large to render extension far inland advisable, for they would have run up against warlike tribes, the Carians and the Lydians, the Phrygians and the Mysians. The situation these populations held on the heights which dominate, whilst separating one from the other, the lower valleys of the Cayster, the Hermus, the Caicos, and the Mseander, gave them the control of the fertile plains washed by these streams in their lower course. The main outlet and general outflow of the inhabitants of these maritime cities was towards the sea ; but most of the commodities for home consumption, as well as merchandise for exchange, were gotten from their inland borders, and further still. In order, therefore, to procure the necessaries of life and foster their trade, they were obliged to have friends, or, as we should now say, agents, in such districts as were closed to them, and where they could not settle with any chance of success. Thus commercial and personal intercourse led the way to relations of a friendly and social nature, between the chiefs of the great Achaean houses and those of the less barbarous tribes of the tableland ; similar connections were sometimes drawn closer by matrimonial alliances. During the seventh and the sixth centuries the kings of Lydia regularly chose their consorts from, or gave their daughters to, the patrician families of Ionia. In the preceding age, ere the Lydian empire had become supreme and interposed between the townships of the seaboard and the populations located on the central plateau, the Codrids and the Neleidae, those presiding families of the Greek colonies, had entered into similar relations with the sovereigns of the state that subsequently destroyed and absorbed Lydia. In the seventh century, a king of Phrygia espoused the daughter of Agamemnon, king of Cymae, celebrated for her beauty and wisdom. 1 A certain Phrygios, 2 a prominent 1 Heraclides of Pontus, -n-epl TroXirtiwv (Frag. Hist. Grcec., MULLER, torn. ii. p. 216). Pollux (ix. p. 83) calls this same woman Demodike. She must have been the wife of the last king Midas, for to her was ascribed the introduction of coined money into Cymoe, Cumae. 3 PLUTARCH, Fern. Virt., 16.