There is no wonder that legend should surround the beginnings of the imperial city of the East. Men from Argos and Megara under the navigator Byzas founded it about 657 B.C. But mythology made the founder the son of Neptune the sea god, and said that Io, changed into a heifer, swam across the narrow strait that divides Europe from Asia, and so gave it the name of Bosphorus, which means literally Oxford. The Delphic oracle told men to settle "opposite the land of the blind," for blind were those men of Megara who some years before had chosen Chalcedon on the Asiatic shore instead of the matchless site on which rose the city of Byzantium. The early history can be briefly told. Byzantium was the first of the cities of Europe to fall into the hands of Darius. It was burned to the ground by the Persians, rescued and rebuilt by Pausanias, was threatened by the Ten Thousand on their retreat, and saved by the eloquence of Xenophon. Two years it was besieged by Philip of Macedon, and was saved by the Athenians. When Rome first showed her power in those lands Byzantium was her ally; but her chequered fortunes ended their first epoch with destruction at the hands of Septimius Severus in 196 A.D. She waited then for a century till her real founder came. Byzantine coins go back as far as the fifth century B.C., and there were in the early Middle Ages many surviving memorials of pre-Christian times; of these there are now left only the striking Corinthian column standing on a high granite base in the garden of the old Seraglio, which almost certainly commemorates a victory of the Emperor Claudius Gothicus, some parts of the foundations of the Hippodrome, an inscription in the Doric dialect which formerly stood in the Stadium, and that wonderful serpent column, which only came, it is true, to the city after Constantine rebuilt it, but which was centuries before in the temple of Apollo at Delphi. 2. FROM CONSTANTINE TO JUSTINIAN.