HISTORY 47It has been resolved by the assembly; since Apollo spontaneously told Battos and
the Theraeans to found a colony in Cyrene, it has been decided by the Theraeans
to send Battus to Libya as Founder and as king, and for the Theraeans to sail as
his companions; they are to sail on equal and similar terms according to family and
one son shall be enlisted. Those who sail shall be adults, and any free man from
the Theraeans who wishes, may also sail.
(Meiggs & Lewis 5)The role of the founder involved the establishment of approved sanctuaries and
the allotment of land. If the colony was successful, he might be accorded hero status
after his death. While naturally affiliated to the mother city, the colony became
autonomous with colonists losing their citizenship in the mother city.
There were obvious advantages in this process for the colonizing city. Corinth,
for example, ideally situated just south of the isthmus that joined the Peloponnese to
northern Greece, established colonies in the island of Corcyra, and in Syracuse in
Sicily in the eighth century. Later she had colonies at Apollonia and at Epidamnus
(founded jointly with Corcyra) both in Illyria, on the Balkan side of the Adriatic coast
and at Potidea on the Chalcidice in northern Greece These colonies facilitated trade
to the west, and the north east. Corinthian pottery (see fig. 45) dating from this period
is widely found throughout the Mediterranean.
Increased trade resulted in greater cross-cultural interchange. The most momen-
tous of foreign influences into Greece came with the adaptation some time in the
eighth century of the Phoenician alphabet. The earliest examples of the script in use
are to be found on fragments from eighth century vases, one of which discovered at
Pithekoussae in a boy’s tomb and dated to 750–700 reads:
Nestor’s cup was good to drink from,
But whoever drinks from this cup will immediately
Beseized with desire for beautifully-crowned Aphrodite.
(Meiggs & Lewis 1)The earliest surviving civic use is found on a stone inscription in Crete dated around
- It is in the second half of the eighth century that art historians date the beginnings
of the orientalising style in pottery of which the Corinthians and the Athenians were
great exponents. Obvious symptoms are Oriental decorative motifs such as the
sphinx and the lotus. The Greeks had had sanctuaries from time immemorial but it
was in the eighth century that they first began to build temples, partly under Egyptian
influence.
Another major change in the archaic period, though not in this instance con-
nected with foreign influence, occurred in the conduct of Greek warfare. Vases from