Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/99

Rh His sons conquered Mycenæ. A Semitic life also ruled in Orchomenos a few generations before the Trojan War. The city was wealthy, and the extensive plain was made tillable by an extensive system of aqueducts. Thebes, which was also founded by immigrants from the East, was the rival of this colony. The mythical hero Cadmus built the Cadmeian citadel and surrounded the city with the famous walls; he taught the nomadic people agriculture and the Phoenician writing, opened mines, and constructed aqueducts. The colony flourished rapidly, and accomplished the ruin of the formerly rich Orchomenos. Lastly, the myths tell of the doughty Sisyphus, who founded Corinth and established there the Semitic worship and Eastern civilization.

A lively activity went out from these and other colonists and colonies. Even the Semitic religion was partly accepted by the Greeks. The gloomy and repulsive service of Melkarth was always strange and abhorrent to them, but the worship of the fructifying Dionysus with its jolly festivals was warmly received. It entered into the life of the Hellenes and became national not only in the strongly Semitic islands, but everywhere on the Grecian mainland. The lascivious, mystic worship of the Semitic goddess of love, although humanized and beautified, was also one of the peculiarities of the Grecian people.

Notwithstanding this many-sided and powerful Semitic influence, which lasted for several centuries, the striving for national independence was strong even in the time of the earlier myths. Theseus, about a hundred years before the Trojan War, freed Athens from the island-chief Minos, to whom the state was then tributary. The Argonauts went out from Orchomenos and sought the distant metal-bearing land of Aja. The sons of the Argonauts besieged Troy, where they obtained treasures, the multitude and splendor of which astonished them. These were the first efforts of the Greeks to try their strength with the higher civilized Asiatics.

The great dispersion of the Grecian tribes took place in the succeeding times. The vigorous people spread on every side, and developed an unprecedented colonial activity. In the tenth and ninth centuries it settled numerous islands, and established a constant connection with the Asiatic mainland. The Milesians founded in the Pontus in the eighth century the city of Sinope, where they traded in iron and slaves, and Trapezium flourished in the ore-bearing country of the Chalybes. Syracuse, the metropolis of Italian Greece, was founded, and the colonization of Agrigentum from Rhodes followed. In the seventh century rose the cities of Selinus, Sybaris, and Croton. While the Corinthians were spreading out in the Mediterranean, the dominions of the Milesians were growing up on the Black Sea. In the sixth century, they had more than seventy colonies in those regions, and the productions of Colchis, of the Caucasus, and Armenia, of the Ural and the Danubian countries were flowing to them.

The ancient Oriental civilization, however, still long kept a