Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/286

 270 HISTORY OF GREECE. Persian gulf, while others treated the Mediterranean Pheniciana as original, and the others as colonists. Whether such be the fact or not, history knows them in no other portion of Asia earlier than in Phenicia proper. Though the invincible industry and enterprise of the Pheni- cians maintained them as a people of importance down to the period of the Roman empire, yet the period of their widest range and greatest efficiency is to be sought much earlier, an- terior to 700 B. c. In these remote times they and their colonists were the exclusive navigators of the Mediterranean : the rise of the Greek maritime settlements banished their commerce to a great degree from the ^ZEgean sea, and embarrassed it even in the more westerly waters. Their colonial establishments were formed in Africa, Sicily, Sardinia, the Balearic Isles, and Spain : the greatness as well as the antiquity of Carthage, Utica, and Gades, attest the long-sighted plans of Phenician traders, even in days anterior to the 1st Olympiad. We trace the wealth and industry India, which voyage would suffice, he thought, to fill up the eight years Others supposed that Menclaus had sailed first up the Nile, and then into the Red sea, by means of the canal (diupv!; ) which existed in the time of the Alexandrine critics between the Nile and that sea; to which Strabo replies that this canal was not made until after the Trojan war. Eratosthenes started a still more remarkable idea : he thought that in the time of Homer the strait of Gibraltar had not yet been burst open, so that the Mediterra- nean was on that side a closed sea ; but, on the other hand, its level wag then so much higher that it covered the isthmus of Suez, and joined tho Red sea. It was, he thought, the disruption of the strait of Gibraltar which first lowered the level of the water, and left the isthmus of Suez dry ; though Menclaus, in his time, had sailed from the Mediterranean into the Red sea without difficulty. This opinion Eratosthenes had imbibed from Straton of Lampsakus, the successor of Theophrastus : Hipparchus contro- verted it, together with many other of the opinions of Eratosthenes (see Strabo, i, pp. 38, 49, 56 ; Seidel, Fragmcnta Eratosthenis, p. 39). In reference to the view of Krates, that Menelaus had sailed round Africa, it is to be remarked that all the geographers of that day formed to themselves a very insufficient idea of the extent of that continent, believing that it did not even reach so far southward as the equator. Strabo himself adopts neither of these three opinions, but construes the Homeric words describing the wanderings of Menelaus as applying only to the coasts of Egypt, Libya, Phenicia, etc ; he suggests various reasons, more curious than convincing, to prove that Menclaus may easily have speut eight years in these visits of mixed friendship and piracy.