514 COSMOS. 



existence has so often been contested, and is, at any rate, 

 wrapped in the deepest obscurity. 



The characteristics by which the Greek colonies differed 

 so widely from all others, especially from the less flexible 

 Phoenicians, and which affected the whole organisation of their 

 system, arose from the individuality and the primitive dif- 

 ferences existing in the tribes which constituted the whole 

 mother country, and thus gave occasion to a mixture of con- 

 necting and separating forces in the colonies as well as in Greece 

 itself. These contrasts occasioned diversities in the direction 

 of ideas and feelings, and in the form of poetry and harmoni- 

 ous art, and created a rich fulness of life, in which all the appa- 

 rently hostile elements were dissolved, according to a higher 

 law of universal order, into a gentle harmonious unison. 



Notwithstanding that Miletus, Ephesus, and Colophon were 

 Ionic; Cos, Rhodes, and Halicarnassus Doric; and Croton 

 and Sybaris Achaic ; the power and the inspired poetry of 

 the Homeric song everywhere made their power appreciable 

 in the midst of this diversity of cultivation, and even in Lower 

 Italy, in the many contiguous colonial cities founded by diffe- 

 rent races. Amid the most firmly rooted contrasts in man- 

 ners and political institutions, and notwithstanding the fluc- 

 tuations to which the latter were subject, Greece retained its 

 nationality unbroken, and the wide domain of ideal and artistic 

 creations achieved by the separate tribes was regarded as the 

 common property of the whole nation. 



It still remains for me to mention, in the present section, 

 the third point which we have already indicated, as having, 

 conjointly with the opening of the Euxine, and the establish- 

 ment of colonies on the basin of the Mediterranean, exercised 

 so marked an influence on the history of the contemplation of 

 the universe. The foundation of Tartessus and Gades, where 

 a temple was dedicated to the wandering divinity Melkart (a 

 son of Baal), and of the colonial city of Utica, which was older 

 than Carthage, remind us that the Phoenicians had already 

 navigated the open sea for many centuries before the Greeks 

 passed beyond the straits termed by Pindar the " Gadeirian 

 Gate."* In the same manner as the Milesians in the East, 



* Strabo, lib. iii. p. 172 (Bokh, Pind. Fragm. v. 155). The expedi- 

 tion of Colaeus of Samos falls, according to Otfr. Muller (Prolegomena 

 zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie), in Olymp. 31, and according to 



