to conjecture that the increasing predominance of the Karian element at Halikarnassus had some effect in producing the exclusion, as well as the individual misbehavior of the victor Agasiklês. [371] See the Inscriptions in Boeckh’s collection, 2483-2671: the latter is an Iasian Inscription, reciting a Doric decree by the inhabitants of Kalymnæ; also Ahrens, De Dialecto Doricâ, pp. 15, 553; Diodor. v, 53-54. [372] Polyb. xvi, 5. [373] Herodot. i, 144. CHAPTER XVI. NATIVES OF ASIA MINOR WITH WHOM THE GREEKS BECAME CONNECTED. From the Grecian settlements on the coast of Asia Minor, and on the adjacent islands, our attention must now be turned to those non-Hellenic kingdoms and people with whom they there came in contact. Our information with respect to all of them is unhappily very scanty. Nor shall we improve our narrative by taking the catalogue, presented in the Iliad, of allies of Troy, and construing it as if it were a chapter of geography: if any proof were wanting of the unpromising results of such a proceeding, we may find it in the confusion which darkens so much of the work of Strabo,—who perpetually turns aside from the actual and ascertainable condition of the countries which he is describing, to conjectures on Homeric antiquity, often announced as if they were unquestionable facts. Where the Homeric geography is confirmed by other evidence, we note the fact with satisfaction; where it stands unsupported or difficult to reconcile with other statements, we cannot venture to reason upon it as in itself a substantial testimony. The author of the Iliad, as he has congregated together a vast body of the different sections of Greeks for the attack of the consecrated hill of Ilium, so he has also summoned all the various inhabitants of Asia Minor to coöperate in its defence, and he has planted portions of the Kilikians and Lykians, whose historical existence is on the southern coast, in the immediate vicinity of the Troad. Those only will complain of this who have accustomed themselves to regard him as an historian or geographer: if we are content to read him only as the first of poets, we shall no more quarrel with him for a geographical misplacement, than with his successor Arktinus for bringing on the battle-field of Ilium the Amazons or the Æthiopians.