But the Æginetans also engaged in foreign trade, sending ships to Tartessos towards the west, and to the Black Sea towards the east. It is related, for example, that when Xerxes was at Abydos, he saw merchantmen sailing down the Dardanelles with corn for Ægina and the Peloponnesos,[1511] which were stopped by his fleet with the design of taking both ships and men. But when Xerxes learned they were bound for Greece, he dismissed them, considering the corn as so much provision for his own army, which, he doubted not, would be able to subjugate the whole country. From which Müller conjectures, but without reason, that the great corn markets of the Black Sea were at that time exclusively in the hands of the Æginetans; though afterwards, during the Peloponnesian war, when Ægina fell, they passed over to the Athenians. The reason “that the Æginetans stood so much in need of the supply, that they would not have endured a rival,” could only hold good if they had the power to command a monopoly, which, for any length of time at least, is highly improbable, since although they are said to have been masters of the sea about the age of Darius Hystaspes,[1512] their domination was extremely short-lived.[1513] It would seem, however, that they were at that time in the habit of supplying the Peloponnesos with grain. Slaves they imported both from Pontos and from Crete, and it is doubtful whence they obtained the greater number. A large proportion of their exports found their way into Crete, where they had established a colony at Cydonia. Besides lying one day’s sail distant from the Peloponnesos, and that of a day and a night from Africa, this great island formed an excellent midway station between Ægina and the mouth of the Nile. ----- Footnote 1511: Herod. vii. 147. Polyæn. Stratag. vii. 15. 3. Footnote 1512: Perizon. ad Æl. xii. 10. Gog. v. 302. Footnote 1513: The jealousy excited in antiquity by the Æginetæ, was, in the seventeenth century, inspired into all the maritime states of Europe by the Dutch, who somewhat resembled those hardy and unscrupulous islanders. Observe the ingenuous alarms of our countryman, Sir Josiah Child, whose studies had evidently carried him beyond the counting-house,—“I think no true Englishman will deny that the season cries aloud to us to be up and doing, before our fields become unoccupied, and before the Dutch get too much the whip-hand of us, whom (in such a case, were they freed from their French fears which they labour under at present) I fear we should find as severe task-masters as ever the Athenians were to the lesser trading cities of Greece.” Discourse of Trade, Preface, p. 39. -----