Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/118

 102 HISTORY OF GREECE. conclude that Korkyra, Italy, and Sicily were not wholly unknown to the poet : among seafaring Greeks, the knowledge of the latter implied the knowledge of the two former, since the habi- tual track, even of a well-equipped Athenian trireme during the Peloponnesian war, from Peloponnesus to Sicily, was by Korkyra and the Gulf of Tarentum. The Phokasans, long afterwards, were the first Greeks who explored either the Adriatic or Tyr- rhenian sea. 1 Of the Euxine sea no knowledge is manifested in Homer, who, as a general rule, presents to us the names of dis- tant regions only in connection with romantic or monstrous ac- companiments. The Kretans, and still more the Taphians (who are supposed to have occupied the western islands off the coast of Acarnania), are mentioned as skilful mariners, and the Taphian Mentes professes to be conveying iron to Temesa to be there ex- changed for copper ; 2 but both Taphians and Kretans are more corsairs than traders. 3 The strong sense of the dangers of the sea, expressed by the poet Hesiod, and the imperfect structure of the early Grecian ship, attested by Thucydides (who points out the more recent date of that improved ship-building which pre- vailed in his time), concur to demonstrate the then TWTTCW of nautical enterprise. 4 Such was the state of the Greeks, as traders, at a time Babylon combined a crowded arid industrious population with extensive commerce, and when the Phoenician merchant-ships visited in one direction the southern coast of Arabia, perhaps even the island of Ceylon, in another direction, the British islands. The Phoenician, the kinsman of the ancient Jew, exhibits the type of character belonging to the latter, with greater enterprise Korkyra, and that of the Homeric Thrinakia with Sicily, appear to me not at all made out. Both Welcker and Klausen treat the Phaeakians as purely mythical persons (see W. C. Miiller, De Corcyrseoruin Eepublitii, Getting. 1835, p. 9). 1 Herodot. i. 163. whether it is to be placed in Italy or in Cyprus, has been a disputed point among critics, both ancient and modern. Dimeter, v. 123. 4 Hesiod. Opp. Di. 615-684; Thucyd. i. 13.
 * Nitzsch. ad Odyss. i. 181 ; Strabo, i. p. 6. The situation of Temesa,
 * Odyss. xv. 426. Td^ot, T-rjiarope^ uvdpef, and xvi. 426. Hymn to