[529] Tarsus is mentioned by Dio Chrysostom as a colony from the Phenician Aradus (Orat. Tarsens. ii, p. 20, ed. Reisk.), and Herodotus makes Kilix brother of Phœnix and son of Agênôr (vii, 92). Phenician coins of the city of Tarsus are found, of a date towards the end of the Persian empire: see Movers, Die Phönizier, i, p. 13. Such was the manner in which the Phenicians found themselves affected by the spread of Greek settlements; and if the Ionians of Asia Minor, when first conquered by Harpagus and the Persians, had followed the advice of the Prienean Bias to emigrate in a body, and found one great Pan-Ionic colony in the island of Sardinia, these early merchants would have experienced the like hindrance[530] carried still farther westward,—perhaps, indeed, the whole subsequent history of Carthage might have been sensibly modified. But Iberia, and the golden region of Tartêssus, remained comparatively little visited, and still less colonized, by the Greeks; nor did it even become known to them until more than a century after their first settlements had been formed in Sicily. Easy as the voyage from Corinth to Cadiz may now appear to us, to a Greek of the seventh or sixth centuries B. C. it was a formidable undertaking. He was under the necessity of first coasting along Akarnania and Epirus, then crossing, first to the island of Korkyra, and next to the gulf of Tarentum; he then doubled the southernmost cape of Italy and followed the sinuosities of the Mediterranean coast, by Tyrrhenia, Liguria, southern Gaul, and eastern Iberia, to the Pillars of Hêraklês or strait of Gibraltar: or if he did not do this, he had the alternative of crossing the open sea from Krête or Peloponnesus to Libya, and then coasting westward along the perilous coast of the Syrtes until he arrived at the same point. Both voyages presented difficulties hard to be encountered; but the most serious hazard of all, was the direct transit across the open sea from Krête to Libya. It was about the year 630 B. C. that the inhabitants of the island of Thêra, starved out by a seven years’ drought, were enjoined by the Delphian god to found a colony in Libya. Nothing short of the divine command would have induced them to obey so terrific a sentence of banishment; for not only was the region named quite unknown to them, but they could not discover, by the most careful inquiries among practised Greek navigators, a single man who had ever intentionally made the voyage to Libya.[531] One Kretan only could they find,—a fisherman named Korôbius,—who had been driven thither accidentally by violent gales, and he served them as guide. [530] Herodot. i, 170. [531] Herodot. iv, 151.