Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/298

 282 HISTORY OF GREECE. between the Pyrenees and the Ebro, as well as of increasing Grecian traffic with those regions. The misfortunes of Phoknca and the other Ionic towns saved the Phenicians of Tartessus from Grecian interference and competition, such as that which their fellow-countrymen in Sicily had been experiencing for a century and a half. But though the Ephesian Artemis, the divine protectress of Phokasan emigration, was thus prevented from becoming conse crated in Tartessus along with the Tyrian Herakles, an impulse not the less powerful was given to the imaginations of philoso- phers like Thales and poets like Stesichorus, whose lives cover the interval between the supernatural transport of Kolaeus on the wings of the wind, and the persevering, well-planned explora- tion -which emanated from Phoka-a. While, on the one hand, the Tyrian Herakles with his venerated temple at Gades fur- nished a new locality and details for mythes respecting the Gre- cian Herakles, on the other hand, intelligent Greeks learned for the first time that the waters surrounding their islands and the Peloponnesus formed part of a sea circumscribed by assign- able boundaries ; continuous navigation of the Phokaeans round the coasts, first of the Adriatic, next of the gulf of Lyons to the Pillars of Herakles and Tartessus, first brought to light this im- portant fact. The hearers of Archilochus, Simonides of Amorgus, and Kallinus, living before or contemporary with the voyage of Kolaeus, had known no sea-limit either north of Korkyra or west of Sicily : those of Anakreon and Hipponax, a century afterwards, found the Euxine, the Palus Maeotis, the Adriatic, the western Mediterranean, and the Libyan Syrtes, all so far surveyed as to present to the mind a definite conception, and to admit of being visibly represented by Anaximander on a map. However familiar such knowledge has now become to us, at the time now under discussion it was a prodigious advance. The Pillars of Hera- kles, especially, remained deeply fixed in the Greek mind, as a terminus of human adventure and aspiration : of the ocean be- yond, men were for the most part content to remain ignorant. It has already been stated, that the Phenicians, as coast ex- plorers, were even more enterprising than the Phokreans ; but their jealous commercia. spirit induced them to conceal ttcir