hastening to its
end.

[Sidenote: Fictitious marvels replaced by grand actualities.]

Nor was it maritime discovery only that thus removed fabulous prodigies
and gave rise to new ideas. In due course of time the Macedonian
expedition opened a new world to the Greeks and presented them with real
wonders; climates in marvellous diversity, vast deserts, mountains
covered with eternal snow, salt seas far from the ocean, colossal
animals, and men of every shade of colour and every form of religion.
The numerous Greek colonies founded all over Asia gave rise to an
incessant locomotion, and caused these natural objects to make a
profound and permanent impression on the Hellenic mind. If through the
Bactrian empire European ideas were transmitted to the far East, through
that and other similar channels Asiatic ideas found their way to Europe.

[Sidenote: Development of Mediterranean commerce.]

At the dawn of trustworthy history, the Phoenicians were masters of
the Mediterranean Sea. Europe was altogether barbarous. On the very
verge of Asiatic civilization the Thracians scalped their enemies and
tattooed themselves; at the other end of the continent the Britons
daubed their bodies with ochre and woad. Contemporaneous Egyptian
sculptures show the Europeans dressed in skins like savages. It was the
instinct of the Phoenicians everywhere to establish themselves on
islands and coasts, and thus, for a long time, they maintained a
maritime supremacy. By degrees a spirit of adventure was engendered
among the Greeks. In 1250 B.C. they sailed round the Euxine, giving rise
to the myth of the Argonautic voyage, and creating a profitable traffic
in gold, dried fish, and corn. They had also become infamous for their
freebooting practices. From every coast they stole men, women, and
children, thereby maintaining a considerable slave-trade, the relic of
which endures to our time in the traffic for Circassian women. Minos,
King of Crete, tried to suppress these piracies. His attempts to obtain
the dominion of the Mediterranean were imitated in succession by the
Lydians, Thracians, Rhodians, the latter being the inventors of the
first maritime code, subsequently incorporated into Roman law. The
manner in which these and the inhabitants of other towns and islands
supplanted one another shows on what trifling circumstances the dominion
of the eastern basin depended. Meantime Tyrian seamen stealthily sailed
beyond the Pillars of Hercules, vi