The distinction which Homer does know is that between god-fearing men, with cities, laws, and rulers, on one hand, and men who are like the Cyclops, lonely, and lawless (_Od._ ix. 112-115). The Cyclops is not so godless as he boasts himself to be; he does pray to his father Poseidon, but he is wholly lawless, and each man is king in his own family. The cannibal Laestrygones, even, have a king and a city, though their manners are disgusting. Homer cannot easily, we see, conceive of men whose polity and cities are not like those with which he is familiar. He may have heard vaguely of far northern tribes abiding by their fiords in the land of amber, the land of the nightless summer and of the sunless winter. Such tales would come with the amber from the Baltic coasts, for which merchants bartered the bronze swords and vessels of their own civilisation. He had certainly heard of "the proud Hippemolgoi," drinkers of mares' milk, nomad Scythians north of the Danube, living like Tartars on koumiss.[14] If he has heard of any empire in the Asian _hinterland_, he may speak of it as one of the two Ethiopian realms; but here all is mythical. Egypt, too, appears in the tales of Odysseus when he represents himself as a Cretan adventurer, a raider in the lands by the river Aegyptus. Helen has been in Egypt, and received the drug _nepenthes_ from the wife of the king, just as she has been in Egyptian Thebes, and carried treasures thence (_Od_. iv. 130 ff.). Achilles[15] knows the wealth of Egyptian Thebes, and its hundred gates, and countless charioteers. Sicily is known to the _Odyssey_, a poem of Ithaca and the west, and of "perilous seas in fairy lands forlorn"; it is not mentioned in the _Iliad_, a poem of the east and the Asian shore. The Phoenicians are familiar as traders (_Iliad_, xxiii. 743), and are much better known, as is natural, to the sea-poem, the _Odyssey_. The appearance of the Phoenicians in the _Odyssey_, when they sell jewels to the women and kidnap the child Eumaeus, has been spoken of as work of the seventh century B.C.; a scene of contemporary life in that late age. But Mr. H. R. Hall, writing on early relations between Greece and Egypt, as depicted in Egyptian wall-paintings of the eighteenth Egyptian dynasty, represents commerce between the Aegean peoples of Greece and Crete as filtering through "Phoenician channels." The Phoenicians were active navigators and were merchants then and afterwards, that is, from the sixteenth century B.C. onwards. A fresco in an Egyptian tomb of the early date shows the arrival of "beaknosed" Phoenicians "in voluminous and multi-coloured robes," one of them carrying "a small Mycenaean amphora," at the Theban quays.[16] This being so, it is not so easy to bring down the Phoenicians of the _Odyssey_ to the seventh century B.C. The Sidonians make the goods which the Phoenicians transport, but the Phoenician slave of the father of Eumaeus declares that she comes