[538] Ephorus, Fragm. 52, ed. Marx; Strabo, vi, p. 267. [539] Herodot. i, 165. By such steps did the Greeks gradually track out the lines of Phenician commerce in the Mediterranean, and accomplish that vast improvement in their geographical knowledge,—the circumnavigation of what Eratosthenes and Strabo termed “our sea,” as distinguished from the external ocean.[540] Little practical advantage, however, was derived from the discovery, which was only made during the last years of Ionian independence. The Ionian cities became subjects of Persia, and Phôkæa especially, was crippled and half-depopulated in the struggle. Had the period of Ionian enterprise been prolonged, we should probably have heard of other Greek settlements in Iberia and Tartêssus, over and above Emporia and Rhodus, formed by the Massaliots between the Pyrenees and the Ebro,—as well as of increasing Grecian traffic with those regions. The misfortunes of Phôkæa and the other Ionic towns saved the Phenicians of Tartêssus from Grecian interference and competition, such as that which their fellow-countrymen in Sicily had been experiencing for a century and a half. [540] Ἡ καθ᾽ ἡμᾶς θάλασσα (Strabo); τῆσδε τῆς θαλάττης (Herod. iv, 41). But though the Ephesian Artemis, the divine protectress of Phôkæan emigration, was thus prevented from becoming consecrated in Tartêssus along with the Tyrian Hêraklês, an impulse not the less powerful was given to the imaginations of philosophers like Thalês and poets like Stesichorus,—whose lives cover the interval between the supernatural transport of Kôlæus on the wings of the wind, and the persevering, well-planned exploration which emanated from Phôkæa. While, on the one hand, the Tyrian Hêraklês with his venerated temple at Gadês furnished a new locality and details for mythes respecting the Grecian Hêraklês,—on the other hand, intelligent Greeks learned for the first time that the waters surrounding their islands and the Peloponnesus formed part of a sea circumscribed by assignable boundaries; continuous navigation of the Phôkæans round the coasts, first of the Adriatic, next of the gulf of Lyons to the Pillars of Hêraklês and Tartêssus, first brought to light this important fact. The hearers of Archilochus, Simonidês of Amorgus, and Kallinus, living before or contemporary with the voyage of Kôlæus, had known no sea-limit either north of Korkyra or west of Sicily: those of Anakreon and Hippônax, a century afterwards, found the Euxine, the Palus Mæotis, the Adriatic, the western Mediterranean, and the Libyan Syrtes, all so far surveyed as to present to the mind a definite conception, and to admit of being visibly represented by Anaximander on a map. However familiar such knowledge has now become to us, at the time now under discussion it was a prodigious advance. The Pillars of Hêraklês, especially, remained deeply fixed in the Greek mind, as a terminus of human adventure and aspiration: of the ocean