140 PRINCIPAL EPOCHS IN THE HISTORY OF THE 



North Eastern part of the Euxine. These Greek colonies 

 were far more varied in their political constitution, and far 

 more favourable to the progress of intellectual cultivation, 

 than those of the Phoenicians and Carthaginians in the 

 ^Egean Sea, in Sicily, Iberia, and on the North and West 

 Coasts of Africa. 



The pressing forwards towards the East about twelve 

 centuries before our era and a century and a half after 

 Ramses Miamoun (Sesostris), when regarded as an historical 

 event, is called the " expedition of the Argonauts to Colchis/' 

 The actual reality which, in this narration, is clothed in a 

 mythical garb, or mingled with ideal features to which the 

 minds of the narrators gave birth, was the fulfilment 

 of a national desire to open the inhospitable Euxine. The 

 legend of Prometheus, and the unbinding the chains of the 

 fire-bringing Titan on the Caucasus by Hercules in jour- 

 neying eastward, the ascent of lo from the valley of the 

 Hybrites ( 198 ) towards the Caucasus, and the mythus of 

 Phryxus and Helle, all point to the same path on which 

 Phoenician navigators had earlier adventured. 



Before the Doric and ^Eolic migration, the Boeotian Or- 

 chomenus, near the north end of the Lake of Copais, was a 

 rich commercial city of the Minyans. The Argonautic ex- 

 pedition, however, began at lolchus, the chief seat of the 

 Thessalian Minyans on the Pagassean Gulf. The locality of 

 the legend, which, as respects the aim and supposed termi- 

 nation of the enterprise, has at different times undergone 

 various modifications, ( 199 ) became attached to the mouth of 

 the Phasi (Eion), and to Colchis, a seat of more ancient 

 civilisation^ instead of to the undefined distant land of M&. 

 The voyages of the Milesians, and the numerous towns 



