Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/224

 206 HISTORY OF GREECE, wives and children, in sixty pentekontrs, or armed ships, and established themselves along with the previous settlers. They remained there for five years, 1 during which time their indiscrim- inate piracies had become so intolerable (even at that time, piracy committed against a foreign vessel seems to have been both frequent and practised without much disrepute), that both the Tyrrhenian seaports along the Mediterranean coast of Italy, and the Carthaginians, united to put them down. There sub- sisted particular treaties between these two, for the regulation of the commercial intercourse between Africa and Italy, of which tli: ancient treaty preserved by Polybius between Rome and Carthage (made in 509 B.C.) may be considered as a specimen. 2 Sixty Carthaginian and as many Tuscan ships attacked the sixty Phokaean ships near Alalia, and destroyed forty of them, yet not without such severe loss to themselves that the victory was said to be on the side of the latter; who, however, in spite of this Kadmeian victory (so a battle Avas denominated in which the vic- tors lost more than the vanquished), were compelled to carry back their remaining twenty vessels to Alalia, and to retire with their wives and families, in so far as room could be found for them, to Rhegium. At last, these unhappy exiles found a perma- nent home by establishing the new settlement of Elea, or Velia, in the gulf of Policastro, on the Italian coast (then called CEno- trian) southward from Poseidonia, or Pacstum. It is probable that they were here joined by other exiles from Ionia, in partic- ular by the Kolophonian philosopher and poet Xenophanes, from whom what was afterwards called the Eleatic school of philosophy, distinguished both for bold consistency and dialectic acuteness, took its rise. The Phokoean captives, taken prisoners in the naval combat by Tyrrhenians and Carthaginians, were stoned to death ; but a divine judgment overtook the Tyrrhenian town of Agylla, in consequence of this cruelty ; and even in the time of Herodotus, a century afterwards, the Agyllasans were still expi- ating the sin by a periodical solemnity and agon, pursuant to the penalty which the Delphian oracle had imposed upon them. 3 Such was the fate of the Phoka?an exiles, while their brethren 1 Horodot. i, 166. * Aristot. Polit. iii, 5, 1 1 ; Polyb. iii. 22. 1 Hcrodot. i, 167.