We catch glimpses indeed of the history of the island long before its purchase by the aged Emperor. Its commanding position at the mouth of the great Campanian bay raised it into importance at a very early period. The Teleboes whom tradition named as its first inhabitants have left only a trace of their existence in the verse of Vergil; but in the great strife between the Hellenic and Tyrrhenian races for the commercial monopoly of Southern Italy Capri, like Sorrento, was seized as a naval station by the Etruscans, whose alliance with the Phoenicians in their common war against the Greeks may perhaps explain the vague legends of a Semitic settlement on the island. The Hellenic victory of Cumæ however settled the fate of Capri, as it settled the fate of the coast; and the island fell to the lot of Neapolis when the "new city" rose in the midst of the bay to which it has since given its name. The most enduring trace of its Greek colonization is to be found in the Greek type of countenance and form which endears Capri to artists; but like the cities of the mainland it preserved its Greek manners and speech long after it had passed with Neapolis into the grasp of Rome. The greater proportion of its inscriptions, even when dating from the Imperial period, are in Greek. Up to the time of Augustus however it played in Roman story but the humble part of lighting the great corn-fleet from Egypt through the Strait of Sorrento. Statius tells us of the joy with which the sailors welcomed the glare of its Pharos as they neared the land, the greeting they addressed to its cliff, while on the other hand they poured their libations to the goddess whose white temple gleamed from the headland of Sorrento. Its higher destinies began with a chance visit of Augustus when age and weakness had driven him to seek a summer retreat on the Campanian shore. A happy omen, the revival of a withered ilex at his landing, as well as the temperate air of the place itself so charmed the Emperor that he forced Naples to accept Ischia in exchange for it, and chose it as his favourite refuge from the excessive heat. Suetonius gives a pleasant gossiping picture of the old man's life in his short holidays there, his delight in idly listening to the prattle of his Moorish and Syrian slave-boys as they played knuckle-bones on the beach, his enjoyment of the cool breeze which swept through his villa even in summer or of the cool plash of water from the fountain in the peristyle, his curiosity about the big fossil bones dug up in the island which he sent to Rome to be placed in the galleries of his house on the Palatine, his fun in quizzing the pedants who followed him by Greek verses of his own making. But in the midst of his idleness the indefatigable energy which marked the man was seen in the buildings with which Suetonius tells us he furnished the island, and the progress of which after his death may possibly have been the inducement which drew his successor to its shores.