VI. THE NORTHERN EMPIRE

North of Lesbos is little Tenedos, whose women were accounted by some ancient travelers to be the most beautiful in Greece.⁹³ Then one follows the adventurous Hellenes into the northern Sporades: to Imbros, and Lemnos, and Samothrace. The Milesians, seeking to control the Hellespont, founded, about 560, the still-living town of Abydos on its south shore;* here Leander and Byron swam the straits, and Xerxes’ army crossed to Europe on a bridge of boats. Farther eastward the Phocaeans settled Lampsacus, birthplace of Epicurus. Within the Propontis lay two groups of islands: the Proconnesus, rich in the marble that gave the Propontis its current name, the Sea of Marmora; and the Arctonnesus, on whose southernmost tip the Milesians established in 757 the great port of Cyzicus. Along the coast rose one Greek city after another: Panormus, Dascylium, Apameia, Cius, Astacus, Chalcedon. Up through the Bosporus the Greeks advanced, hungry for metals, grain, and trade, founding Chrysopolis (now Scutari) and Nicopolis—“city of victory.” Then they made their way along the southern shore of the Black Sea, depositing towns at Heracleia, Pontica, Tieum, and Sinope—a city splendidly adorned, says Strabo,⁹⁴ with gymnasium, agora, and shady colonnades; Diogenes the Cynic was not above being born here. Then Amisus, Oenoe, Tripolis, and Trapezus (Trebizond, Trabzon)—where Xenophon’s Ten Thousand shouted with joy at the sight of the longed-for sea. The opening up of this region to Greek colonization, perhaps by Jason, later by the Ionians, gave the mother cities the same outlet for surplus population and trade, the same resources in food, silver, and gold, that the discovery of America gave to Europe at the beginning of modern times.⁹⁵

Following the eastern shores of the Euxine northward into Medea’s Colchis, the Greeks founded Phasis and Dioscurias, and Theodosia and Panticapaeum in the Crimea. Near the mouths of the Bug and the Dnieper they established the city of Olbia (Nikolaev); at the mouth of the Dniester, the town of Tyras; and on the Danube, Troesmis. Then, moving southward along the west shore of the Black Sea, they built the cities of Istrus (Constanta, Kustenje), Tomi (where Ovid died), Odessus (Varna), and Apollonia (Burgas). The historically sensitive traveler stands appalled at the antiquity of these living towns; but today’s residents, engrossed in the tasks of their own generation, are undisturbed by the depth of the centuries that lie silent beneath them.

Then again at the Bosporus the Megarians, about 660, built Byzantium*—yesterday Constantinople, now Istanbul. Even before Pericles this strategic port was becoming what Napoleon would call it at the Peace of Tilsit—the key to Europe; in the third centuryB.C. Polybius described its maritime position as “more favorable to security and prosperity than that of any other city in the world known to us.”⁹⁷ Byzantium grew rich by exacting tolls from passing vessels, and exporting to the Greek world the grain of southern Russia (“Scythia”) and the Balkans, and the fish that were netted with shameful ease as they crowded through the narrow straits. It was its curving form, and the wealth derived from this fishing industry, that gave the city its later name, the “Golden Horn.” Under Pericles Athens dominated Byzantine polities, levied tolls there to fill her treasury in time of emergency, and regulated the export of grain from the Black Sea as a contraband of war.⁹⁸

Along the northern or Thracian shore of the Propontis the Greeks built towns at Selymbria, Perinthus (Eregli), Bisanthe, Callipolis (Gallipoli), and Sestus. Later settlements were established on the southwestern coast of Thrace at Aphrodisias, Aenus, and Abdera—where Leucippus and Democritus would propound the philosophy of atomistic materialism. Off the coast of Thrace lay the island of Thasos, “bare and ugly as a donkey’s back in the sea,” Archilochus described it,⁹⁹ but so rich in gold mines that their proceeds paid all the expenses of the government. On or near the eastern coast of Macedonia Greek goldseekers, chiefly Athenians, founded Neapolis and Amphipolis—whose capture by Philip would lead to the war in which Athens was to lose her liberty. Other Greeks, mostly from Chalcis and Eretria, conquered and named the three-fingered peninsula of Chalcidice, and by 700 had established thirty towns there, several of them destined to play a role in Greek history: Stageirus (birthplace of Aristotle), Scione, Mende, Potidaea, Acanthus, Cleonae, Torone, and Olynthus—captured by Philip in 348 and known to us now through the oratory of Demosthenes. Recent excavations at Olynthus have unearthed a town of considerable extent, with many houses of two stories and some of twenty-five rooms. In the time of Philip Olynthus appears to have had 60,000 inhabitants; we may judge from this figure for a minor city the abounding fertility and energetic expansion of the pre-Periclean Greeks.

Finally, between Chalcidice and Euboea, Ionian migrants peopled the Euboean Isles—Gerontia, Polyaegos, Icos, Peparethos, Scandile, Scyros. The orbit of empire in east and north had come full turn, the circuit was complete; Greek enterprise had transformed the islands of the Aegean and the coasts of Asia Minor, the Hellespont, the Black Sea, Macedonia, and Thrace into a busy network of Hellenized cities, throbbing with agriculture, industry, trade, politics, literature, religion, philosophy, science, art, eloquence, chicanery, and venery. It only remained to conquer another Greece in the West, and build a bridge between ancient Hellas and the modern world.