there or was to arise to dispute her monopoly till she herself, long
after our date, would provoke Rome. The Greek colonies in Sicily and
Italy, which looked westward, failed to make head against her at the
first, and soon dropped out of the running; nor did the one or two
isolated centres of Hellenism on other shores do better. On the other
hand, in the eastern basin of the Mediterranean, although it was her own
home-sea, Tyre never succeeded in establishing commercial supremacy, and
indeed, so far as we know, she never seriously tried to establish it. It
was the sphere of the Aegean mariners and had been so as far back as
Phoenician memory ran. The Late Minoan Cretans and men of Argolis, the
Achaean rovers, the Ionian pirates, the Milesian armed merchantmen had
successively turned away from it all but isolated and peaceful ships of
Sidon and Tyre, and even so near a coast as Cyprus remained foreign to
the Phoenicians for centuries after Tyre had grown to full estate. In
the Homeric stories ships of the Sidonians, though not unknown, make
rare appearances, and other early legends of the Greeks, which make
mention of Phoenician visits to Hellenic coasts, imply that they were
unusual phenomena, which aroused much local curiosity and were long
remembered. The strangeness of the Phoenician mariners, the unfamiliar
charm of their cargoes--such were the impressions left on Greek story by
the early visits of Phoenician ships.

That they did pay such visits, however, from time to time is certain.
The little Egyptian trinkets, which occur frequently in Hellenic strata
of the eighth to the sixth centuries, are sufficient witness of the
fact. They are most numerous in Rhodes, in Caria and Ionia, and in the
Peloponnese. But the main stream of Tyrian commerce hugged the south
rather than the north coasts of the Eastern Mediterranean. Phoenician
sailors were essentially southerners--men who, if they would brave now
and again the cold winds of the Aegean and Adriatic, refused to do so