Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/157

Rh we recall the circumstance that the earliest navigation was and remained essentially of a coasting character, it is plain that scarcely any country on the Mediterranean lay so remote from the Phœnicians as the Italian continent. They could only reach it from the west coast of Greece or from Sicily; and it is very probable that the seamanship of the Hellenes became developed early enough to anticipate the Phœnicians in braving the dangers of the Adriatic and of the Tyrrhene seas. There is no ground therefore for the assumption that any direct influence was originally exercised by the Phœnicians over the Italians. To the subsequent relations between the Phœnicians holding the supremacy of the western Mediterranean and the Italians inhabiting the shores of the Tyrrhene sea our narrative will return in the sequel.

To all appearance the Hellenic mariners were the first among the inhabitants of the eastern basin of the Mediterranean to navigate the coasts of Italy. Of the important questions, however, as to the region from which, and as to the period at which, the Greek seafarers came thither, only the former admits of being answered with some degree of precision and fulness. The Æolian and Ionian coast of Asia Minor was the region where Hellenic maritime traffic first became developed on a large scale, and whence issued those Greeks who explored the interior of the Black Sea on the one hand and the coasts of Italy on the other. The name of the Ionian Sea, which was retained by the waters intervening between Epirus and Sicily, and that of the Ionian gulf, the term by which the Greeks in earlier times designated the Adriatic Sea, are memorials of the fact that the southern and eastern coasts of Italy were once upon a time discovered by seafarers from Ionia. The oldest Greek settlement in Italy, Kyme, was, as its name and legend bear, founded by the town of the same name on the Anatolian coast. According to trustworthy Hellenic tradition, the Phocæans of Asia Minor were the first of the Hellenes to traverse the more remote western sea. Other Greeks soon followed in the paths which those of Asia Minor had opened up: Ionians from Naxos and from Chalcis in Eubœa, Achæans, Locrians, Rhodians, Corinthians, Megarian, Messenians, Spartans. After the discovery of America, the civilized nations of Europe vied with one another in sending out expeditions and forming settlements