The History of Ancient Greece: 3rd millennium B.C. - 323 B.C.. John Bagnell Bury
colonisation; it is one of the few facts about the earlier settlements on the Asiatic coast of which we can be certain.
SECT. 2. COLONIES ON THE COASTS OF THE EUXINE, PROPONTIS, AND NORTH AEGEAN
The voyage of the Argonauts in quest of the golden fleece commemorates in a delightful legend the memorable day on which Greek sailors for the first time burst into the waters of the Euxine Sea. Accustomed to the island straits and short distances of the Aegean, they fancied that when they had passed the Bosphorus they were embarking on a boundless ocean, and they called it the “Main”, Pontos. Even when they had circumnavigated its shores it might still seem boundless, for they knew not where the great rivers, the Ister, the Tanais, the Danapris, might lead. The little preliminary sea into which the Hellespont widens, to contract again into the narrow passage of the Bosphorus, was appropriately named the “vestibule of the Pontus”—Propontis. Full of creeks and recesses, it is happily described by Euripides as the “bayed water-key of the boundless Sea”. The Pontus was a treacherous field for the barques of even experienced mariners, and it was supposed to have received for this reason its name “Euxine”, or Hospitable, in accordance with a habit of the Greeks to seek to propitiate adverse powers by pleasant names. It was when the compass of the Euxine was still unknown, and men were beginning shyly to explore its coasts, that the tale of the wanderings of Odysseus took form. He was imagined to have sailed from Troy into the Pontus, and, after having been driven about in its waters, to have at last reached Ithaca by an overland journey through Thrace and Epirus. In the Odyssey, as we have it now, compounded of many different legends and poems, this is disguised; the island of Circe has been removed to the far west, and the scene of the Descent to the Underworld translated to the Atlantic Ocean. But Circe, the daughter of the Sun, and sister of King Aeetes who possessed the golden fleece, belongs to the seas of Colchis; and the world of shades beyond the Cimmerians is to be sought near the Cimmerian Bosphorus. The mention of Sicily in some of the later parts of the poem, and the part played by Ithaca, which, with the other islands of the Ionian Sea, lay on the road to the western Mediterranean, reflect the beginning of the expansion of Greece in that direction. But the original wanderings of Odysseus were connected, not with the west, but with the exploration of the Euxine.
A mist of obscurity hangs about the beginnings of the first Greek cities which arose on the Pontic shores. Here Miletus was the pioneer. Merchants carrying the stuffs which were manufactured from the wool of Milesian sheep may have established trading-stations along the southern coast. Flax from Colchis, steel and silver, slaves were among the chief products which their wool bought. But the work of colonisation beyond the gate of the Bosphorus can hardly have fully begun until the gate itself was secured by the enterprise of Megara, which sent out men, in the first part of the seventh century, to found the towns of Chalcedon and Byzantium. Byzantium could command the trade of the Black Sea, but the great commercial and political importance of her situation was not fully appreciated until a thousand years had passed, when she became the rival and successor of Rome and took, in honour of her second founder, the name Constantinople. This is the first appearance of the little state of Megara in Greek history; and none of her contemporaries took a step that was destined to lead to greater things than the settlement on the Bosphorus. The story was that Chalcedon was founded first, before the Megarians perceived the striking advantages of the opposite shore, and the Delphic oracle, which they consulted as a matter of course, chid them as “blind men”. Westward from Byzantium they also founded Selymbria, on the north coast of the Propontis; eastward they established “Heraclea in Pontus”, on the coast of Bithynia.
The enterprise of the Megarians stimulated Miletus, and she determined to anticipate others in seizing the best sites on the Pontic shore. At the most northerly point of the southern coast a strait-necked cape forms two natural harbours, an attractive site for settlers, and here the Milesians planted the city Sinope. Farther east, half-way to that extreme eastern point of the sea where the Phasis flows out at the foot of Mount Caucasus, arose another Milesian colony, Trapezus. At the Bosphorus the Milesians had been anticipated by Megara, but they partly made up for this by planting Abydos on the Hellespont opposite Sestos, and they also seized a jutting promontory on the south coast of the Propontis, where a narrow neck, as at Sinope, forms two harbours. The town was named Cyzicus, and the peninsula was afterwards transformed into an island; the tunny-fish on the coins of the city shows what was one of the chief articles of her trade. Lampsacus, at the northern end of the Hellespont, once a Phoenician factory, was colonised by another Ionian city, Phocaea, about the same time, and the winged sea-horse on Lampsacene coins speaks of naval enterprise which led afterwards to wealth and prosperity. The foundation of Paron was due to a joint undertaking of Miletus and Erythrae; and Clazomenae joined Miletus in planting Cardia at the neck of the Thracian Chersonese, in the important position of an advance fort against Thrace. On the southern side of the Hellespont the lands of the Scamander invited the Greeks of Lesbos, and a number of small Aeolian settlements arose.
Greek settlements also sprang up in the more remote parts of the Euxine. Dioscurias and Phasis were founded in the far east, in the fabled land of Colchis. On the Tauric Chersonesus or “peninsula” (now the Crimea), Panticapaeum was founded over against Phanagoria at the entrance to the Maeotic lake, and Tanais at the mouth of the like-named river. Heraclea, or Chersonesus, on the western side of the peninsula, was destined to preserve the municipal forms of an old Greek city for more than a thousand years. Olbia at the mouth of the Dnieper, Odessus, Istrus, Mesembria were only some of the Greek settlements which complete the circuit of the Black Sea.
This sea and the Propontis were the special domain of the sea-god Achilles, whose fame grew greater by his association as a hero with the legend of Troy. He was worshipped along the coasts as “lord of the Pontus”; and in Leuce, the “shining island” near the Danube’s mouth, the lonely island where no man dwelled, he had a temple, and the birds of the sea were said to be its warders.
If Miletus and Megara took the most prominent part in extending the borders of the Greek world eastward of the Hellespont, the northwestern corner of the Aegean was the special domain of Euboea. The barren islands of Sciathus and Peparethus were the bridge from Euboea to the coast of Macedonia, which, between the rivers Axius and Strymon, runs out Potidaea into a huge three-pronged promontory. Here Chalcis planted so many towns that the whole promontory was named Chalcidice. Some of the chief cities, however, were founded by other states, notably Corinthian Potidaea on the most westerly of the three prongs, which was called Pallene. Sithonia was the central prong, and Acte, ending in Mount Athos, the eastern. Many of the colonies on Pallene were founded by Eretria, and those on Acte by Andros, which was dependent on Eretria. Hence we may regard this group of cities as Euboean, though we cannot regard it as Chalcidian. On the west side of the Thermaic Bay, two Euboean colonies were planted, Pydna and Methone, on Macedonian soil.
SECT. 3. COLONIES IN THE WESTERN MEDITERRANEAN
The earliest mention of Sicilian and Italian regions in literature is to be found in some later passages of the Odyssey, which should perhaps be referred to the eighth century. There we meet with the Sicels, and with the sland of Sicania; while Temesa, where Greek traders could buy Tuscan copper, has the distinction of being the first Italian place mentioned by name in a literary record. By the end of the seventh century Greek states stood thick on the east coast of Sicily and round the sweep of the Tarentine Gulf. These colonies naturally fall into three groups:
(1) The Euboean, which were both in Sicily and in Italy.
(2) The Achaean, which were altogether on Italian soil.
(3) The Dorian, which were, with few exceptions, in Sicily.
The chronology is uncertain, and we cannot say whether the island or the mainland was first colonised.
The oldest stories of the adventures of Odysseus were laid, as we have seen, in the half-explored regions of the Black Sea. Nothing shows more impressively the life of this poetry, and the power it had won over the hearts of the Greek folks, than the fact that when the navigation of the Italian and Sicilian seas began, these adventures were transferred from the east to the west; and in the further growth of this cycle of poems a new mythical geography was adopted. At a time when the Greeks knew so little of Italy that the