Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/292

 976 HISTORY OF (JKKECIv Phenicized. 1 In his time, the circumstances favorable to ne Phenician emigrations had been long past and gone, and there can be little hesitation in ascribing the preponderance, which this foreign element had then acquired, to a period several centuries earlier, beginning at a time when Tyre and Sidon enjoyed both undisputed autonomy at home, and the entire monopoly of Ibe- rian commerce, without interference from the Greeks. The earliest Grecian colony founded in Sicily was that of Naxos, planted by the Chalkidians in 735 B. c. : Syracuse fol- lowed in the next year, and during the succeeding century many flourishing Greek cities took root on the island. These Greeks found the Phenicians already in possession of many outlying islets and promontories all around the island, which served them in their trade with the Sikels and Sikans who occupied the inte rior. The safety and facilities of this established trade were to so great a degree broken up by the new-comers, that the Pheni- cians, relinquishing their numerous petty settlements round the island, concentrated themselves in three considerable towns at the south-western angle near Lilybrcum, 2 Motye, Soloeis, and Panormus, and in the island of Malta, where they were least widely separated from Utica and Carthage. The Tyrians of that day were hard-pressed by the Assyrians under Salmaneser, and the power of Carthage had not yet reached its height ; otherwise probably this retreat of the Sicilian Phenicians before the Greeks would not have taken place without a struggle. But the early Phenicians, superior to the Greeks in mercantile activity, and not disposed to contend, except under circumstances of very superior force, with warlike adventurers bent on permanent settlement took the prudent course of circumscribing their sphere of opera- tions. A similar change appears to have taken place in Cyprus, the other island in which Greeks and Phenicians came into close contact. If we may trust the Tyrian annals consulted by the his- torian Menander, Cyprus was subject to the Tyrians even in the time of Solomon. 3 We do not know the dates of the establish- 1 Strabo, iii, pp. 141-150. QVTOI -yfip $oiviiv otJrwf tyivovro ucfTE ruf Tr^eiovf TUV ev ry TovpdiTcvia TTO'MUV Kal T<JV irfjoiov TOTTUV vir 9 I.KEIVUV vvv oiKelo&ai. See the reference in Joseph. Anticf. Jud. viii, 5, 3, and Joseph, cont
 * Thucyd. vi, 3 ; Diodor. v, 12.