Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/323

 HISTORY OF THE CARIANS. 307 the distinctive of a tribe belonging to the Carian group, is, on the whole, that which seems most probable. 1 Be that as it may, under one name or another, the Leleges certainly played an important part in those far-off days, which merge and disappear in the cloudland preceding the Homeric horizon. Along with the Carians, they would seem to have been the first who boldly turned their light skiffs towards the Sporades and the Cyclades, over the space stretching from Asia Minor to Crete and the more distant coast of the Hellenic peninsula; 2 the first, in fact, who opened up relations between these many lands, which once set on foot were to go on to the end of time. Traders and pirates as occasion served, they sailed, as the Phoenicians had done before them, from Asia to Europe, and from Europe to Asia. Their cargoes consisted of the products of the soil, of fabricated goods, and slaves ; women they had surprised at the public fountain, labourers snatched from their field occupations. The bands would land at night, conceal themselves in the neigh- bouring thicket or a rocky cave, and emerge from their ambush with the first morning light, when, falling upon whatever they found within reach, they carried all on board ere time was given for sounding the alarm. It was a violent procedure, yet, strange as it may seem, productive of the happiest results, in that it brought together people who, but for these compulsive displace- ments, would ever have remained estranged one from another. Interchange, whether of ideas or beliefs, or of outward symbols consequent on the latter, would have been impossible ; nor would instruction of a more practical nature, crafts, and industrial secrets peculiar to each have been learnt. The date when the Carians first began to lose ground may be put at the first appearance of the Punic galleys in the ^gean ; for, as pupils of Egypt and Chaldsea, and intermediaries between these and the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, the 1 Herodotus, i. 171. a Strabo, XII. i. 59; XIV. i. 3; Pausanias, VII. ii. 8. Homer (Iliad, x. 428), in his enumeration of the Trojan allies, distinguishes Carians from Lelegians, the fact in itself does not in any way invalidate the conclusion that the twin groups had originally sprung from the same family. A native historian of Caria, Phillippos of Syangela, states that the Leleges occupied towards the Carians a position akin to that of the Helots towards the Lacedemonians, and the Penestes to the Thessalians (Athenaus, vi. 271, B.). A passage in Plutarch (Qatest. Grcec., 46) would seem to bear out the assertion.