The Age of the Nobles mid the Tyrants in Greece 147 the Islands of the Blest. But step by step the dreaded regions were explored. Flourishing cities like Corinth, in trading with the western coast of Greece, pushed northward, where the sea- men could discover the shores of Italy as they looked westward toward the heel of that great peninsula. It was indeed but fifty miles distant from the west coast of Greece. When they had once crossed to it, their trading ventures carried them on coast- ing voyages around Sicily and northward far into the west, at last even to the then unknown shores which we call the French and Spanish coasts. Here was a new world. Its discovery w^as as momentous for the Greeks as that of America for later Europe. By 750 B.C. their colonies appeared in this new western Greek colo- world, and within a century they fringed southern Italy from west— south the heel to a point well above the instep north of Naples, which ^^^ ^^'^ was also a Greek colony known as " Neapolis," or " New City," like our Newburgh or Newtown. So numerous were the Greek settlements that this region of southern Italy came to be known as " Great Greece." ^ Here the Greek colonists looked north- ward to the hills crowned by the rude settlements which were destined to become Rome. They little dreamed that this insig- Rome nificant town w^ould yet rule the world, making even the proud cities of their homeland its tributaries. As the Greeks were superior in civilization to all the other dw^ellers in Italy, the civ- ilized history of that great peninsida begins with the advent of the Hellenes. They first brought in such things as writing, literature, architecture, and art (see headpiece of Chapter VII, p. 166). The Greek colonists crossed over also to Sicily (Fig. 74), siciiyand where they drove out the Phoenician trading posts except at the far west the western end of the island, and there the Phoenicians held their, own. These Greek colonists in the west shared in the higher life of the homeland; and Syracuse, at the southeast 1 One of the oldest of all Greek temples now surviving stands in a wonderful state of preservation on the Italian coast south of Naples at the ancient Posei- donia (Poseidon's town), afterward called Paestum. It was built about 500 B.c, (see the drawing at head of Chapter VII, p. 166),
