At this juncture, Egypt had only been recently opened to Greek commerce,—Psammetichus having been the first king who partially relaxed the jealous exclusion of ships from the entrance of the Nile, enforced by all his predecessors; and the incitement of so profitable a traffic emboldened some Ionian traders to make the direct voyage from Krête to the mouth of that river. It was in the prosecution of one of these voyages, and in connection with the foundation of Kyrênê (to be recounted in a future chapter), that we are made acquainted with the memorable adventure of the Samian merchant Kôlæus. While bound for Egypt, he had been driven out of his course by contrary winds, and had found shelter on an uninhabited islet called Platea, off the coast of Libya,—the spot where the emigrants intended for Kyrênê first established themselves, not long afterwards. From hence he again started to proceed to Egypt, but again without success; violent and continuous east winds drove him continually to the westward, until he at length passed the Pillars of Hêraklês, and found himself, under the providential guidance of the gods,[532] an unexpected visitor among the Phenicians and Iberians of Tartêssus. What the cargo was which he was transporting to Egypt, we are not told; but it sold in this yet virgin market for the most exorbitant prices: he and his crew (says Herodotus)[533] “realized a profit larger than ever fell to the lot of any known Greek except Sostratus the Æginetan, with whom no one else can compete.” The magnitude of their profits may be gathered from the votive offering which they erected on their return, in the sacred precinct of Hêrê at Samos, in gratitude for the protection of that goddess during their voyage,—a large bronze vase, ornamented with projecting griffins’ heads, and supported by three bronze kneeling figures of colossal stature: it cost six talents, and represented the tithe of their gains. The aggregate of sixty talents[534] (about sixteen thousand pounds, speaking roughly), corresponding to this tithe, was a sum which not many even of the rich men of Athens in her richest time, could boast of possessing.
To the lucky accident of this enormous vase and the inscription doubtless attached to it, which Herodotus saw in the Hêræon at Samos, and to the impression which such miraculous enrichment made upon his imagination,—we are indebted for our knowledge of the precise period at which the secret of Phenician commerce at Tartêssus first became known to the Greeks. The voyage of Kôlæus opened to the Greeks of that day a new world hardly less important—regard being had to their previous aggregate of knowledge—than the discovery of America to the Europeans of the last half of the fifteenth century. But Kôlæus did little more than make known the existence of this distant and lucrative region: he cannot be said to have shown the way to it: nor do we find, in spite of the foundation of Kyrênê and Barka, which made the Greeks so much more familiar with the coast of Libya than they had been before, that the route by which he had been carried against his own will was ever deliberately pursued by Greek traders.
Probably the Carthaginians, altogether unscrupulous in proceedings against commercial rivals,[535] would have aggravated its natural maritime difficulties by false information and hostile proceedings. The simple report of such gains, however, was well calculated to act as a stimulus to other enterprising navigators; and the Phôkæans, during the course of the next half-century, pushing their exploring voyages both along the Adriatic and along the Tyrrhenian coast, and founding Massalia in the year 600 B. C., at length reached the Pillars of Hêraklês and Tartêssus along the eastern coast of Spain. These men were the most adventurous mariners[536] that Greece had yet produced, creating a jealous uneasiness even among their Ionian neighbors:[537] their voyages were made, not with round and bulky merchant-ships, calculated only for the maximum of cargo, but with armed pentekonters,—and they were thus enabled to defy the privateers of the Tyrrhenian cities on the Mediterranean, which had long deterred the Greek trader from any habitual traffic near the strait of Messina.[538] There can be little doubt that the progress of the Phôkæans was very slow, and the foundation of Massalia (Marseilles), one of the most remote of all Greek colonies, may for a time have absorbed their attention: moreover, they had to pick up information as they went on, and the voyage was one of discovery in the strict sense of the word. The time at which they reached Tartêssus may seemingly be placed between 570-560 B. C. They made themselves so acceptable to Arganthônius,—king of Tartêssus, or at least king of part of that region,—that he urged them to relinquish their city of Phôkæa and establish themselves in his territory, offering to them any site which they chose to occupy. Though they declined this tempting offer, yet he still continued anxious to aid them against dangers at home, and gave them a large donation of money,—whereby they were enabled at a critical moment to complete their fortifications. Arganthônius died shortly afterwards, having lived, we are told, to the extraordinary age of one hundred and twenty years, of which he had reigned eighty. The Phôkæans had probably reason to repent of their refusal, since in no very long time their town was taken by the Persians, half their citizens became exiles, and were obliged to seek a precarious abode in Corsica, in place of the advantageous settlement which old Arganthônius had offered to them in Tartêssus.[539]
By such steps did the Greeks gradually track out the lines of Phenician commerce in the Mediterranean, and accomplish that vast improvement in their geographical knowledge,—the circumnavigation of what Eratosthenes and Strabo termed “our sea,” as distinguished from the external ocean.[540] Little practical advantage, however, was derived from the discovery, which was only made during the last years of Ionian independence. The Ionian cities became subjects of Persia, and Phôkæa especially, was crippled and half-depopulated in the struggle. Had the period of Ionian enterprise been prolonged, we should probably have heard of other Greek settlements in Iberia and Tartêssus, over and above Emporia and Rhodus, formed by the Massaliots between the Pyrenees and the Ebro,—as well as of increasing Grecian traffic with those regions. The misfortunes of Phôkæa and the other Ionic towns saved the Phenicians of Tartêssus from Grecian interference and competition, such as that which their fellow-countrymen in Sicily had been experiencing for a century and a half.
But though the Ephesian Artemis, the divine protectress of Phôkæan emigration, was thus prevented from becoming consecrated in Tartêssus along with the Tyrian Hêraklês, an impulse not the less powerful was given to the imaginations of philosophers like Thalês and poets like Stesichorus,—whose lives cover the interval between the supernatural transport of Kôlæus on the wings of the wind, and the persevering, well-planned exploration which emanated from Phôkæa. While, on the one hand, the Tyrian Hêraklês with his venerated temple at Gadês furnished a new locality and details for mythes respecting the Grecian Hêraklês,—on the other hand, intelligent Greeks learned for the first time that the waters surrounding their islands and the Peloponnesus formed part of a sea circumscribed by assignable boundaries; continuous navigation of the Phôkæans round the coasts, first of the Adriatic, next of the gulf of Lyons to the Pillars of Hêraklês and Tartêssus, first brought to light this important fact. The hearers of Archilochus, Simonidês of Amorgus, and Kallinus, living before or contemporary with the voyage of Kôlæus, had known no sea-limit either north of Korkyra or west of Sicily: those of Anakreon and Hippônax, a century afterwards, found the Euxine, the Palus Mæotis, the Adriatic, the western Mediterranean, and the Libyan Syrtes, all so far surveyed as to present to the mind a definite conception, and to admit of being visibly represented by Anaximander on a map. However familiar such knowledge has now become to us, at the time now under discussion it was a prodigious advance. The Pillars of Hêraklês, especially, remained deeply fixed in the Greek mind, as a terminus of human adventure and aspiration: of the ocean beyond, men were for the most part content to remain ignorant.
It has already been stated, that the Phenicians, as coast explorers, were even more enterprising than the Phôkæans; but their jealous commercial spirit induced them to conceal their track,—to give information designedly false,[541] respecting dangers and difficulties,—and even to drown any commercial rivals when they could do so with safety.[542] One remarkable Phenician achievement, however, contemporary with the period of Phôkæan exploration, must not be passed over. It was somewhere about 600 B. C. that they circumnavigated Africa; starting from the Red sea, by direction of the Egyptian king Nekôs, son of Psammetichus,—going round the cape of Good Hope to Gadês,—and from thence returning to the Nile.
It appears that Nekôs, anxious to procure a water communication between the Red sea and the Mediterranean, began digging a canal from the former to the Nile, but desisted from the undertaking after having made considerable progress. In prosecution of the same object, he despatched these Phenicians on an experimental voyage round Libya, which was successfully accomplished, though in a time not less than three years; for during each autumn, the mariners landed and remained on shore a sufficient time to sow their seed and raise a crop of corn. They reached Egypt again, through the strait of Gibraltar, in the course of the third year, and recounted a tale,—“which (says Herodotus) others may believe if they choose, but I cannot believe,”—that, in sailing round Libya, they had the sun on their right hand, i. e. to the north.[543]
The reality of this circumnavigation was confirmed to Herodotus by various Carthaginian informants,[544] and he himself fully believes it. There seems good reason for sharing in his belief, though several able critics reject the tale as incredible. The Phenicians were expert and daring masters of coast navigation, and in going round Africa they had no occasion ever to lose sight of land: we may presume that their vessels were amply stored, so that they could take their own time, and lie by in bad weather; we may also take for granted that the reward consequent upon success was considerable. For any other mariners then existing, indeed, the undertaking might have been too hard, but it was not so for them, and that was the reason why Nekôs chose them. To such reasons, which show the story to present no intrinsic incredibility (that, indeed, is hardly alleged even by Mannert and others who disbelieve it), we may add one other, which goes far to prove it positively true. They stated that, in the course of their circuit, they had the sun on their right hand (i. e. to the northward); and this phenomenon, observable according to the season even when they were within the tropics, could not fail to force itself on their attention as constant, after they had reached the southern temperate zone. But Herodotus at once pronounces this part of the story to be incredible, and so it would probably appear to every Greek[545], Phenician, or Egyptian, not only of the age of Nekôs, but even of the time of Herodotus, who heard it; since none of them possessed either actual experience of the phenomenon of a southern latitude, or a sufficiently correct theory of the relation between sun and earth, to understand the varying direction of the shadows; and few men would consent to set aside the received ideas with reference to the solar motions, from pure confidence in the veracity of these Phenician narrators. Now that under such circumstances the latter should invent the tale, is highly improbable; and if they were not inventors, they must have experienced the phenomenon during the southern portion of their transit.
Some critics disbelieve this circumnavigation, from supposing that if so remarkable an achievement had really taken place once, it must have been repeated, and practical application must have been made of it. But though such a suspicion is not unnatural, with those who recollect how great a revolution was operated when the passage was rediscovered during the fifteenth century,—yet the reasoning will not be found applicable to the sixth century before the Christian era.
Pure scientific curiosity, in that age, counted for nothing: the motive of Nekôs for directing this enterprise was the same as that which had prompted him to dig his canal,—in order that he might procure the best communication between the Mediterranean and the Red sea. But, as it has been with the north-west passage in our time, so it was with the circumnavigation of Africa in his,—the proof of its practicability at the same time showed that it was not available for purposes of traffic or communication, looking to the resources then at the command of navigators,—a fact, however, which could not be known until the experiment was made. To pass from the Mediterranean to the Red sea by means of the Nile still continued to be the easiest way; either by aid of the land-journey, which in the times of the Ptolemies was usually made from Koptos on the Nile to Berenikê on the Red sea,—or by means of the canal of Nekôs, which Darius afterwards finished, though it seems to have been neglected during the Persian rule in Egypt, and was subsequently repaired and put to service under the Ptolemies. Without any doubt the successful Phenician mariners underwent both severe hardship and great real perils, besides those still greater supposed perils, the apprehension of which so constantly unnerved the minds even of experienced and resolute men in the unknown ocean. Such was the force of these terrors and difficulties, to which there was no known termination, upon the mind of the Achæmenid Sataspês (upon whom the circumnavigation of Africa was imposed as a penalty “worse than death” by Xerxes, in commutation of a capital sentence), that he returned without having finished the circuit, though by so doing he forfeited his life. He affirmed that he had sailed “until his vessel stuck fast, and could move on no farther,”—a persuasion not uncommon in ancient times, and even down to Columbus, that there was a point, beyond which the ocean,—either from mud, sands, shallows, fogs, or accumulations of sea-weed,—was no longer navigable.[546]