J46 LEADING EPOCHS IN THE HISTORY OF THE 



Euxine ( 2 7 ), laid the groundwork of communications wliich 

 led to an active overland commerce with the north of Europe 

 and Asia, and in much later times with the Oxus and the 

 Indus, so the Samians ( 208 ) and the Phocreans ( 209 ) were the 

 first among the Greeks who sought to penetrate to the west 

 beyond the limits of the Mediterranean. 



Colseus of Samos sailed for Egypt, where at that 

 time an intercourse with the Greeks (which perhaps was 

 only the renewal of former communications) had begun 

 to take place under Psammetichus ; he was driven by 

 easterly winds and tempests to the island of Platea, and 

 thence, Herodotus significantly adds "not without divine 

 direction/' through the Straits into the ocean. It was not 

 merely the magnitude of the unexpected gain of a commerce 

 opened with the Iberian Tartessus, but still more the dis- 

 covery in space, the entrance into a world before unknown 

 or thought of only in mythical conjectures, which gave to 

 this event grandeur and celebrity throughout the Mediter- 

 ranean, wherever the Greek tongue was understood. Here, 

 beyond the Pillars of Hercules (earlier called the Pillars of 

 Briareus, of ^Egseon, and of Cronos), at the western margin 

 of the Earth, on the way to the Elysian regions and to the 

 Hesperides, the Greeks first saw the primeval waters of the 

 all-encircling ocean (wpavoe) ( 21 ), the origin, as they believed, 

 of all rivers. 



On arriving at the Phasis, the explorers of the Euxine 

 had found that sea terminated by a shore, beyond which a 

 fabled "Sun lake" was supposed to exist; but the Greeks 

 who reached the Atlantic, on looking southward from 

 Gadeira and Tartessus, gazed onward into a boundless 

 region. It was this which, for fifteen hundred years, gave 



