The earliest Grecian colony founded in Sicily was that of Naxos, planted by the Chalkidians in 735 B. C.: Syracuse followed in the next year, and during the succeeding century many flourishing Greek cities took root on the island. These Greeks found the Phenicians already in possession of many outlying islets and promontories all around the island, which served them in their trade with the Sikels and Sikans who occupied the interior. The safety and facilities of this established trade were to so great a degree broken up by the new-comers, that the Phenicians, relinquishing their numerous petty settlements round the island, concentrated themselves in three considerable towns at the south-western angle near Lilybæum,[526]—Motyê, Soloeis, and Panormus,—and in the island of Malta, where they were least widely separated from Utica and Carthage. The Tyrians of that day were hard-pressed by the Assyrians under Salmaneser, and the power of Carthage had not yet reached its height; otherwise probably this retreat of the Sicilian Phenicians before the Greeks would not have taken place without a struggle. But the early Phenicians, superior to the Greeks in mercantile activity, and not disposed to contend, except under circumstances of very superior force, with warlike adventurers bent on permanent settlement, took the prudent course of circumscribing their sphere of operations. A similar change appears to have taken place in Cyprus, the other island in which Greeks and Phenicians came into close contact. If we may trust the Tyrian annals consulted by the historian Menander, Cyprus was subject to the Tyrians even in the time of Solomon.[527] We do not know the dates of the establishment of Paphos, Salamis, Kitium, and the other Grecian cities there planted,—but there can be no doubt that they were posterior to this period, and that a considerable portion of the soil and trade of Cyprus thus passed from Phenicians to Greeks; who on their part partially embraced and diffused the rites, sometimes cruel, sometimes voluptuous, embodied in the Phenician religion.[528] In Cilicia, too, especially at Tarsus, the intrusion of Greek settlers appears to have gradually Hellenized a town originally Phenician and Assyrian; contributing, along with the other Grecian settlements—Phasêlis, Aspendus, and Sidê—on the southern coast of Asia Minor, to narrow the Phenician range of adventure in that direction.[529] [526] Thucyd. vi, 3; Diodor. v, 12. [527] See the reference in Joseph. Antiq. Jud. viii, 5, 3, and Joseph. cont. Apion. i, 18; an allusion is to be found in Virgil, Æneid, i, 642, in the mouth of Dido.— “Genitor tum Belus opimam Vastabat Cyprum, et late ditione tenebat.” (t. v.) [528] Respecting the worship at Salamis (in Cyprus) and Paphos, see Lactant. i, 21; Strabo, xiv, p. 683.