Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/419

 KORKYRA. 408 they were dealt with, we cannot clearly make out. The inland was generally conceived in antiquity as the residence of the Ho- meric Phrcakians, and it is to this fact that Thucydidcs ascribes in part the eminence of the Korkyraan marine. 1 According to another story, some Eretrians from Eubcea had settled there, and were compelled to retire. A third statement represents the Li- htirnians- as the prior inhabitants, and this perhaps is the most probable, since the Liburnians were an enterprising, mari- time, piratical race, who long continued to occupy the more north- erly islands in the Adriatic along the Illyrian and Dalmatian coast. That maritime activity, and number of ships, both war- like and commercial, which we find at an early date among the Korkyrojans, and in which they stand distinguished from the Italian and Sicilian Greeks, may be plausibly attributed to their partial fusion with preexisting Liburnians ; for the ante-Hellenic natives of Magna Groscia and Sicily, as has been already no- ticed, were as unpractised at sea as the Liburnians were expert. At the time when the Corinthians were about to colonize Sic- ily, it was natural that they should also wish to plant a settlement at Ivorkyra, which was a post of great importance for facilitating the voyage from Peloponnesus to Italy, and was farther conveni- ent for traffic with Epirus, at that period altogether non-Hellenic. Their choice of a site was fully justified by the prosperity and power of the colony, which, however, though sometimes in com- bination with the mother-city, was more frequently alienated from her and hostile, and continued so from an early period throughout most part of the three centuries from 700-400 B. c. 3 Perhaps also Molykreia and Chalkis, 4 on the south-western coast of JEto- lia, not far from the mouth of the Corinthian gulf, may have been founded by Corinth at a date hardly less early than Ivor- kyra. It was at Corinth that the earliest improvements in Greek ship-building, and the first construction of the trireme or war- 1 Thucyd. i, 25. Narrat. 3, ap. rhotiuir. Cod. 86. 3 Herodot. iii, 49. < Thucyd. i, 108 ; iii, 102.
 * Strabo, I. c.; Plutarch, Qu.-est. Graec. c. 11 ; a different fable in Conon.