previous next
163.

Phocaea was the first Ionian town that he attacked. These Phocaeans were the earliest of the Greeks to make long sea-voyages, and it was they who discovered the Adriatic Sea, and Tyrrhenia, and Iberia, and Tartessus,1 [2] not sailing in round freightships but in fifty-oared vessels. When they came to Tartessus they made friends with the king of the Tartessians, whose name was Arganthonius; he ruled Tartessus for eighty years and lived a hundred and twenty.2 [3] The Phocaeans won this man's friendship to such a degree that he invited them to leave Ionia and settle in his country wherever they liked; and then, when he could not persuade them to, and learned from them how the Median power was increasing, he gave them money to build a wall around their city. [4] He gave it generously: for the circuit of the wall is of not a few stades, and all this is made of great stones well fitted together.

1 The lower valley of the Guadalquivir. Later Tartessus was identified with Gades (Cadiz), which Herodotus (Hdt. 4.8) calls Gadira.

2 A common Greek tradition, apparently; Anacreon (Fr. 8) says “I would not... rule Tartessus for an hundred and fifty years.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

load focus Notes (W. W. How, J. Wells)
load focus Greek (1920)
hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Gades (Spain) (3)
Phocaea (Turkey) (1)
Ionia (1)
Iberia (1)
Guadalquivir (Spain) (1)
Adriatic Sea (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide References (32 total)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: