Page:History of Greece Vol I.djvu/283

 -EETES.-CIECE.-^A. 51 Strubo vanity tries to refute him), that neither Homer nor Mim- nermus designates Kolchis either as the residence of JEetes, or as the terminus of the Argonautic voyage. Hesiod carried the returning Argonauts through the river Phasis into the ocean. But some of the poems ascribed to Eumelus were the first which mentioned JEetes and Kolchis, and interwove both of them into the Corinthian mythical genealogy. 1 These poems seem to have been composed subsequent to the foundation of Sinope, and to the commencement of Grecian settlement on the Borys- thenes, between the years 600 and 500 B. c. The Greek mari- ners who explored and colonized the southern coast of the Eux- ine, found at the extremity of their voyage the river Phasis and its barbarous inhabitants : it was the easternmost point which Grecian navigation (previous to the time of Alexander the Great) ever attained, and it was within sight of the impassable barrier of Caucasus. 2 They believed, not unnaturally, that they had here found " the house of Eos (the morning) and the rising place of the sun," and that the river Phasis, if they could follow it to its unknown beginning, would conduct them to the circum- fluous ocean. They gave to the spot the name of JEa, and the fabulous and real title gradually became associated together into one compound appellation, the Kolchian JEa, or JEa of Kol- chis. 3 "While Kolchis was thus entered on the map as a fit re- presentative for the Homeric " house of the morning," the nar- row strait of the Thracian Bosporus attracted to itself the poetical fancy of the Symplegades, or colliding rocks, through which the heaven-protected Argo had been the first to pass. The powerful Greek cities of Kyzikus, Herakleia and Sinope, each fertile in local legends, still farther contributed to give this direction to the voyage ; so that in the time of Hekataeus it had become the established belief that the Argo had started frorr lolkos and gone to Kolchis. JEetes thus received his home from the legendary faith and tion between the small town Skepsis and its powerful neighbor Kyzikus, respecting points of comparative archaeology. 1 Eumelus, Fragm. Evpuma 7, Kopiv&iaKu 2-5. pp. 63-68, DQntzer. the Caucasus from Dioskurias.
 * Arrian, Periplus Pont. Euxin. p. 1 2 ; ap. Geogr. Minor, vol. i. He saw
 * Heroilot i. 2 ; vii. 193-197. Eurip. Med. 2. Valer. Flacc. v. 57