80 ON THE DATE AND ORIGIN 
Greece, notwithstanding these advantages, which seem sufficient to 
have secured her maritime ascendency. 
The Gods?° of Phrygia avenged the disasters of Troy, and the 
triumphant heroes of Greece were scattered in unknown regions, or 
fell by the hand of domestic treason ; the attention of the powerful 
was withdrawn from commercial speculations to the recovery or es- 
tablishment of kingdoms and dominions, and the regal enormities 
that fired the imagination of the dramatist diverted the people from 
a useful art, natural toan insular and maritime region. Seven cen- 
turies elapsed from the Trojan to the Peloponnesian war, during 
which the commerce of the Mediterranean was engrossed by an ad- 
venturous tribe insignificant as a nation amongst men, and afflicted 
by the especial wrath of the deity.3* 
Nor were the intestine calamities of the Greeks counteracted by 
their local advantages. The conformation of their coasts was, it is 
true, eminently calculated to encourage early navigation. The har- 
bours, creeks, and small rivers, with which they were minutely inter- 
sected, furnished ample employment for the light craft of a coasting 
trade ; but they were cut off from all communication with the nations 
of the east by the entire breadth of the Mediterranean Sea, which, 
in the infancy of navigation, must have been an almost insurmountable 
obstacle to mariners who seldom ventured beyond the sight of land,3 
and who, even if they had overcome that difficulty, would have learn- 
ed the Indian route by sea or land later than the inhabitants of Egypt 
or of Syria; and when in possession of its knowledge, had no terri- 
30 In an argument conversant with the materials of antiquity, it is diffi- 
cult, perhaps painful, to abjure the aid of a machinery by whose means truth, 
if it be not illustrated, is, at least, rendered more attractive. 
81 Tt must not, however, be forgotten, that the obstinate disobedience of 
the chosen seed had fanned the wrath of Jehovah into a denunciation which 
was fulfilled to the letter. The Philistine and the Canaanite were left as 
a thorn in the side of Israel ; and it would not be easy to establish the asser- 
tion of some commentators, that the sea coasts of Palestine had ever been 
subjugated by the HeBrews. 
32 The modern improvements in navigation are attributable to the disco- 
very of the magnet, (as is generally supposed) by Flavio Gioia, a Neapolitan 
of the thirteenth century. The discovery might interest a few friends, or 
assist in the aggrandizement of a family, but the whole human race owes a 
debt of gratitude to a man through whose agency national and religious pre- 
judices are lapsing into harmony and toleration. The discovery of a few 
imponderable and invisible agents of nature is heaving up the whole system 
of ancient socialism, and a vast moral excellence is following upon the phy- 
sical discoveries of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 
