ar of piracy, cities were placed a few miles back from
the coast; but with the partial cessation of this evil, sites on shore
and peninsula were preferred as being more accessible to commerce,[431]
and such of the older towns as were in comparatively easy reach of the
seaboard established there each its own port. Thus we find the ancient
urban pairs of Argos and Nauplia, Troezene and Pogon, Mycenae and
Eiones, Corinth commanding its Aegean port of Cenchreae 8 miles away on
the Saronic Gulf to catch the Asiatic trade, and connected by a walled
thoroughfare a mile and a half long with Lechaeum, a second harbor on
the Corinthian Gulf which served the Italian commerce.[432] In the same
group belonged Athens and its Piraeus, Megara and Pegae, Pergamus and
Elaae in western Asia Minor.[433] These ancient twin cities may be taken
to mark the two borders of the coast zone. Like the modern ones which we
have considered above, their historical development has shown an advance
from the inner toward the outer edge, though owing to different causes.
However, the retired location of the Baltic and North Sea towns of
Germany served as a partial protection against the pirates who, in the
Middle Ages, scoured these coasts.[434] Lubeck, originally located nearer
the sea than at present, and frequently demolished by them, was finally
rebuilt farther inland up the Trave River.[435] Later the port of
Travemuende grew up at the mouth of the little estuary.

[Sidenote: Outer edge in colonization.]

The early history of maritime colonization shows in general two
geographic phases: first, the appropriation of the islet and headland
outskirts of the seaboard, and later--it may be much later--an advance
toward the inner edge of the coast, or yet farther into the interior.
Progress from the earlier to the maturer phase depends upon the social
and economic development of the colonizers, as reflected in their
valuation of territorial area. The first phase, the outcome of a low
estimate of the value of land, is best represented by the Phoenician and
earliest Greek colonies, whose purposes were chiefly commercial, and who
sought merely such readily accessible coastal points as furnished the
best trading stations on the highway of the Mediterranean and the
adjacent seas. The earlier Greek colonies, like those of the Triopium
promontory forming the south-western angle of Asia Minor, Chalcidice,
the Thracian Chersonesus, Calchedon, Byzantium, the Pontic H