A still more serious source of danger was the approach of the Assyrian power to the Syrian coast. In the course of the ninth century (from 876 B.C.), as has been remarked above, Assyrian armies repeatedly showed themselves in Syria, and their departure had repeatedly to be purchased by tribute. As this pressure increased, and the Assyrian rulers insisted on pushing forward the borders of their kingdom towards Syria as far as the shores of the Mediterranean, as the cities of the Phenicians became subject to a power the centre of which lay in the distant interior, the trade not to the East but to the West came into question, and it was doubtful whether the cities, when embodied in a great land-power, could retain Cyprus in subjection, and keep up the trade with Egypt, and the connection with their colonies in the West. The doubt became greater when, after the beginning of the eighth century B.C., a dangerous opposition rose in the Mediterranean, and a still more serious competition against the Phenicians. Not content with driving the Phenicians out of the Ægean Sea, with obtaining possession of the islands and the west coast of Asia Minor, the Hellenes spread farther and farther to the west. Already they had got Rhodes into their hands; they were already settled off the coast of Syria, on the island of Cyprus, among the ancient cities of the Phenicians. Still more vigorous was the growth of their settlements to the west of the Mediterranean. After founding Cyme (Cumae) on the coast of Lower Italy, they built in Sicily, after the middle of the eighth century, in quick succession, Naxus (738 B.C.), Syracuse (735 B.C.), Catana (730 B.C.), and Megara (728 B.C.), to which were quickly added Rhegium, Sybaris, Croton, and Tarentum in Lower Italy (720-708 B.C.). Were the cities of the Phenicians in Sicily, Rus Melkarth, Motye, Panormus, Soloeis, and Eryx (p. 79), in a position to hold the balance against these rivals and their navigation? The injurious effects of the competition of a rival power by sea for the trade of the Phenicians must have increased when, in the seventh century, the cities of the Greeks in Sicily increased in number, and Egypt was opened to them about the middle of this century; when, in the year 630 B.C., the first Greek city, Cyrene, rose on the shore of Africa, and about the same time the Greeks entered into direct trade connections with Tartessus; when at the close of this century a Greek city was built on the shore of the Ligystian Sea, at the mouth of the Rhone, and soon after the settlements of the Greeks in Sicily and in the west of the Mediterranean began to multiply. While in this manner the field of Phenician trade was limited by the constant advance of the Greeks, the mother-cities, from the same period, the middle of the eighth century, had to feel the whole weight of the development of Assyrian power. And when this pressure ceased, in the second half of the