Page:History of Greece Vol X.djvu/41

 HELLENISM IN CYPRD!,. 19 may conclude it to have been about 411 or 410 B. c. It seems to have been shortly after that period that he was visited by Ando- kides the Athenian ; J moreover, he must have been a prince not merely established, but powerful, when he ventured to harbor Konon in 405 B. c., after the battle of .ZEgospotami. He invited to Salamis fresh immigrants from Attica and other parts of Greece, as the prince Philokyprus of Soli had done under the auspices of Solon, 2 a century and a half before. He took especial pains to revive and improve Grecian letters, arts, teaching, music, and in- tellectual tendencies. Such encouragement was so successfully administered, that in a few years, without constraint or violence, the face of Salamis was changed. The gentleness and sociability, the fashions and pursuits, of Hellenism, became again predomi- nant ; with great influence of example over all the other towns of the island. Had the rise of Evagoras taken place a few years earlier, Athens might perhaps have availed herself of the opening to turn her ambition eastward, in preference to that disastrous impulse which led her westward to Sicily. But coming as he did only at that later moment when she was hard pressed to keep up even a defensive war, he profited rather by her weakness than by her strength. During those closing years of the war, when the Athe- nian empire was partially broken up, and when the JEgean, in- stead of the tranquillity which it had enjoyed for fifty years under Athens, became a scene of contest between two rival money-levy- ing fleets, many out-settlers from Athens, who had acquired property in the islands, the Chersonesus, or elsewhere, under her guarantee, found themselves insecure in every way, and were tempted to change their abodes. Finally, by the defeat of JEgos- potami (B. c. 405), all such out-settlers as then remained were expelled, and forced to seek shelter either at Athens (at that mo- ment the least attractive place in Greece), or in some other local- ity. To such persons, not less than to the Athenian admiral Konon with his small remnant of Athenian triremes saved out of the great defeat, the proclaimed invitations of Evagoras would present a harbor of refuge nowhere else to be found. According- ly, we learn that numerous settlers of the best character, from
 * Lysias cont. AndokH. s. 28. z Plutarch, Solon, c. 2fi