ewise formed and colonized by the Milesians: its port could
contain 100 ships. Tanais, on the Cimmerian Bosphorus; Olbia and
Borysthenes, both situated near the mouth of the river from which the
latter took its name; Panagorea and Hermonassa on the Bosphorus, and
several others. Besides these colonies in this part of the world, the
Greeks founded others, for the express purposes of commerce; as Syracuse,
in Sicily; Marseilles, in Gaul, the mother of several colonies established
on the neighbouring coasts, and, as we shall afterwards notice, a place of
very considerable wealth, consequence, and strength, derived entirely from
commerce, as well as the seat of the arts and sciences; Cyrene, an opulent
city in Africa, and Naucratis, situated on one of the mouths of the Nile.
They likewise formed settlements in Rhodes and Crete, in the islands of the
Egean Sea, on the opposite coasts of Asia, &c.; most of which were of
importance to the mother country, from the facilities they offered to the
extension of its commerce.

The war between the Romans, and Philip king of Macedon, which intervened
between the second and third Punic war, first afforded the former an
opportunity and an excuse for interfering in the affairs of Greece. Till
the time of Philip, the father of Alexander, Macedonia does not appear to
have had any connexion with the rest of this celebrated portion of the
ancient world; the Greeks, indeed, regarded its inhabitants as savages; but
from that period, Macedonia became the most important and influential state
in Greece. Its boundaries varied at different periods of its history: it
seems originally to have been bounded on the east by the Egean Sea; on the
south by Thessaly and Epirus; on the west by the Ionian Sea; and on the
north by the river Strymon, at the mouth of which, as has been already
mentioned, the Athenians founded one of their most flourishing and useful
colonies. The princes of Macedonia viewed with jealousy, but for a long
time were unable to prevent the states of Greece from forming colonies in
the immediate vicinity of their dominions: their union, however, with the
king of Persia, when he first fixed his ambition on Greece, was rewarded by
a great accession of territory, which enabled them to contest the
possession of the sea-coasts with the most powerful of the Greek republics.
They then extended their territories to the Eastern Sea, but there were
till the reign of Philip, the father of Alexande