Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/58

 40 HISTORY OF GREECE. of the interior had come to copy Kyrensean tastes and customs.' The Theraan colonists, having obtained not merely the consent but even the guidance of the natives to their occupation of Ky- rene, constituted themselves like privileged Spartan citizens in the midst of Libyan Perioeki. 2 They seem to have married Libyan wives, whence Herodotus describes the women of Kyrene and Barka as following, even in his time, religious observances indig- enous and not Hellenic. 3 Even the descendants of the primitive oekist Battus were semi-Libyan. For Herodotus gives us the curious information that Battus was the Libyan word for a king, deducing from it the just inference, that the name Battus was not originally personal to the rekist, but acquired in Libya first as a title, 4 and that it afterwards passed to his descendants as a proper name. For eight generations the reigning princes were called Battus and Arkesilaus, the Libyan denomination alternat- ing with the Greek, until the family was finally deprived of its power. Moreover, we find the chief of Barka, kinsman of Ar- kesilaus of Kyrene bearing the name of Alazir ; a name certainly not Hellenic, and probably Libyan. 5 We are, therefore, to con- ceive the first Therasan colonists as established in their lofty for- tified post Kyrene, in the centre of Libyan Perioeki, till then strangers to walls, to arts, and perhaps even to cultivated land. Probably these Perioeki were always subject and tributary, in a greater or less degree, though they continued for half a century to retain their own king. To these rude men the Theraeans communicated the elements of Hellenism and civilization, not without receiving themselves much that was non-Hellenic in return; and perhaps the reaction- ary influence of the Libyan element against the Hellenic might have proved the stronger of the two, had they not been rein forced by new-comers from Greece. After forty years of Battus 1 Heroiot. iv, 170. vofiovf Ae rot>f x/.c iarovf (ii/tfccr&ai t^irr/ievovai rov^ Kvprjvaluv. 3 Hcrodot. iv, 186-189. Compare, also, the story in Pindar, Pyth. ix 109-126, abcut Alexidamus, the ancestor of Telesikrates the Kyrensan how the former won, by his swiftness in running, a Libyan maiden, dauglt ter of Antaeus of Irasa. and Kallimachns. Hymn. Apoll. 86. 4 Herodot iv. 155 a Herodot iv, 164.
 * Herodot. iv, 161 Qnoaiuv nai rtiv Trepioinuv, etc.