to work in thofe mines, to labour at the oar in their numerous gallies, and do that species of fervile drudgery which they conceived degrading to freemen. From India, their veffels, in return for the filver of Sunium and the copper of Colonos, of which their admirable works in bronze were fabricated, brought the precious gems and fpiceries native to the Peninfula; the fine and delicate muflins which the ancients called Sindones, and which were tranfported, acrofs the Gauts, in waggons, from the Eaftern coaft of that Peninfula, and from Hindoftan proper, to Barygaza; and the fugar, indigo, and dyed cottons, brought down the Indus to Patala; from Perfia and Arabia they imported brocades, carpets, and the various rich drugs, perfumes, and cof metics, of which the unbounded extravagance of the Grecian courtezans, and, we may add, the degenerate effeminacy of the men, called for conftant and abundant fupplies.

To fecure and protect this extensive and valuable commerce, the Athenians conftantly maintained, in the three bafons of their grand port of Piræus, a very powerful fleet; and the perpetual contefts, in which they were engaged with the maritime ftates around them, failed not to keep alive their martial spirit,

and gradually imprové, beyond even Phœnician excellence, their naval fkill.

After this general view of the Grecian marine and commerce, it is high time that we fhould attend them to the British coaft for that TIN, without which a nation of artists and manufacturers could not poffibly carry on their respective occupations. It was abfolutely neceffary to the chemift, the glazier, the painter, the enameller, the gilder, the potter, and entered largely, as before obferved, into feveral other branches of domeftic trade. It formed the ground of that wonderful fpecimen of the skill of the ancients in engraving and working in metals, the fhield of Achilles, defcribed by Homer, from whom we alfo derive another proof of the early traffic of the Greeks in this commodity; for, in the Odyffey, he introduces Minerva, in the disguise of a stranger, affirming herself to be a foreign merchant, going to Temefe to explore TIN for the purpofe of exchanging it against IRON.* The probable period of the first arrival of the Greeks, as traders in these islands, may be justly inferred from the paffage previously cited from Herodotus, in which he

Odyffey, lib. i. verse 182.

confeffes,

confeffes, that the Greeks of his day (and Herodotus flourished about the middle of the fifth century before Chrift) were ignorant of thofe northern extremities of Europe, whence amber and tin were brought, that is, the fhores of the Baltic and Britain.* The profound fecrecy which the Tyrians and their colonies preferved in regard to the British ifles, and their tract hither, has been alfo noticed, and affords additional teftimony that we ought not to affign for that event a period more carly than the deftruction of Tyre, by Alexander, and the subsequent fubverfion of the Perfian empire; events that rouzed the dormant ambition of Greece widely to expand both her military and naval fame, and explore the most diftant quarters of that globe to which they afpired to give law.

The term Caffiterides, however, which was before obferved to be a Greek tranflation of the Phoenician Baratanac, and by which the Scilly iflands and the Cornish coaft were, in fact, known to the Greek traders, a term ufed both by Herodotus himself, and Strabo afterwards, undeniably proves, that, though not yet geographically defcribed, or commercially

See before, p. p. 359, 60.

visited,

vifited, accident or curiofity muft have led Grecian veffels to our coafts before that æra; for how otherwife fhould the Greeks have given name to an island of which they were in total ignorance? How, on the other hand, could the Greek characters and language have been known, and upon all occafions in which their religious rites and mysterious discipline were not concerned, made use of by the Druids, as is exprefsly affirmed in Cæfar's Commentaries, unlefs a long and intimate connection had previously subsisted between the two people? The truth is, there was another channel by which that language might have come into use, at least in the maritime ports of Britain, and that was by way of Maffilia, now Marfeilles, to which mart we have already obferved a commerce in tin was anciently carried on, through the heart of France, by British and Gallic merchants, in connection with the Phoenicians, and, on their decline, with the Carthaginians and Greeks. Now Maffilia was founded, according to Solinus,* by the Phocæans fix hundred years before Chrift; and, being a Greek colony, having the Greek manners, talking the Greek

* Solinus, cap. viii.

language,

language, and being the only mart in that part of the Mediterranean for the tin of the Caffiterides, it can excite no wonder if, in the courfe of fo many centuries, with the commodities brought back from Marseilles, the merchants imported alfo the language of the place, especially as we learn from Strabo, that, in his time, the Gallic inhabitants of Maffilia and its neighbourhood were affiduous in cultivating every branch of Greek literature, and were fo attached to the Greek language, that not only academies were inftituted in that city for teaching it to their fons, but that the merchants wrote their contracts and made their bargains in it.*

It is rather fingular, that fo profound an adept in British antiquities as Camden should fix the earlieft vifit of the Greeks to these iflands at a period not more remote than about one hundred and fixty years before the arrival of Cæfar, under a certain Phileus Taurominites, when there is fo plain an allufion to this island in that paffage alluded to before in Diodorus Siculus, citing Hecatæus, a ftill more ancient writer, relative to the hyperborean ifland oppofite Gaul, whofe priests fang

* Strabo, lib. iv. p. 231.

the