During the first two centuries after the founding of Naxos, in Sicily, Grecian settlements were extended over the eastern, southern, and western sides of the island, while Him'era was the only Grecian town on the northern coast. These two hundred years were a period of prosperity among the Sicilian Greeks, who dwelt chiefly in fortified towns, and exercised authority over the surrounding native population, which gradually became assimilated in manners, language, and religion to the higher civilization of the Greeks. "It cannot be doubted," says GROTE, "that these first two centuries were periods of steady increase among the Sicilian Greeks, undisturbed by those distractions and calamities which supervened afterward, and which led indeed to the extraordinary aggrandizement of some of their communities, but also to the ruin of several others; moreover, it seems that the Carthaginians in Sicily gave them no trouble until the time of Ge'lon. Their position will seem singularly advantageous, if we consider the extraordinary fertility of the soil in this fine island, especially near the sea; its capacity for corn, wine, and oil, the species of cultivation to which the Greek husbandman had been accustomed under less favorable circumstances; its abundant fisheries on the coast, so important in Grecian diet, and continuing undiminished even at the present day--together with sheep, cattle, hides, wool, and timber from the native population in the interior."[Footnote: "History of Greece," vol. iii., p. 367.] During the sixth century before the Christian era the Greek cities in Sicily and Southern Italy were among the most powerful and flourishing that bore the Hellenic name. Ge'la and Agrigentum, on the south side of Sicily, had then become the most prominent of the Sicilian governments; and at the beginning of the fifth century we find Gelon, a despot of the former city, subjecting other towns to his authority. Finally obtaining possession of Syracuse, he made it the seat of his empire (485 B.C.), leaving Gela to be governed by his brother Hi'ero, the first Sicilian ruler of that name.