Page:History of Greece Vol II.djvu/129

 PIRACY 113 Delus seems to attest such occupation as an historical fact. 1 Ae cordin<* to the legendary account, espoused both by Herodotus and by Thucydides, it was the Kretan Minos who subdued these islands and established his sons as rulers in them ; either expel- ling the Karians, or reducing them to servitude and tribute. 2 Thucydides presumes that he must of course have put down piracy, in order to enable his tribute to be remitted in safety., like the Athenians during the time of their hegemony. 3 Upon the legendary thalassocraty of Minos, I have already remarked in another place: 4 it is sufficient here to repeat, that, in the Homeric poems (long subsequent to Minos in the current chro- nology), we find piracy both frequent and held in honorable esti- mation, as Thucydides himself emphatically tells us, remarking, moreover, that the vessels of those early days were only half- decked, built and equipped after the piratical fashion, 5 in a man- ner upon which the nautical men of his time looked back with disdain. Improved and enlarged shipbuilding, and the trireme, or ship with three banks of oars, common for warlike purposes during the Persian invasion, began only with the growing skill, activity, and importance of the Corinthians, three quarters of a century after the first Olympiad. 6 Corinth, even in the Homeric poems, is distinguished by the epithet of wealthy, which it ac- quired principally from its remarkable situation on the Isthmus, and from its two harbors of Lechaeum and Kenchreae, the one on the Corinthian, the other on the Saronic gulf. It thus supplied a convenient connection between Epirus and Italy on the on* side, and the JEgean -sea on the other, without imposing upon the unskilful and timid navigator of those days the necessity of circumnavigating Peloponnesus. The extension of Grecian traffic and shipping is manifested 1 Thucyd. i. 4-8. rf/f vvv 8 Herodot. i. 1 7 1 ; Thucyd. i. 4-8. Isokrates (Panathenaic. p. 241) takes credit to Athens for having finally expelled the Karians oat of these islands at the time of the Ionic emigration. 3 Thucyd. i. 4. TO re tyaTinbv uf etxdf, Kadgpei. IK. rye &akdaar)f if laov r/6vva,To, TOV Tuf Trpoaodovg <uuP.Xov ievai O.VTU, 4 Sec the preceding volume of this History, Chap. xii. p. 227. 5 Thucyd. i. 10. rci Tra/laiui rpoTw /.yarpftij-repov TrapeoufvaauEva. 6 Thucyd. i. 13. vol. ii. 8oc.