The trade of the Phoenicians necessarily brought them soon into correspondence with the Greeks who were scattered over the islands and the shores of the Ægean. Their manufactured merchandize, which awakened the admiration of a rude people, was bartered for the natural productions of the land, and, perhaps, more frequently for slaves. Thus the prophet Ezekiel mentions the blue and purple from the isles of Elisha; and at the same time he says, “Javan, Tubal, and Meshech were thy merchants: they traded the persons of men and vessels of brass in thy market.” The nature of the motives which actuated the Greeks in their earliest naval enterprises is sufficiently manifest from the first paragraph of Herodotus, who ascribes the origin of the wars between the Greeks and barbarians to a series of piratical abductions. Io, daughter of the king of Argus, was carried away by the Phoenicians. Europa was then taken off from Tyre by the Cretans: Jason eloped with Medea; and when her father, the king of Colchis, demanded compensation, it was refused, says the historian, because the complaints of Inachus, the father of Io, had been neglected by her ravishers. Then followed reprisals and the rape of Helen.

War is the only art exercised by fierce and uncivilized nations, and captives are their only merchandize. The Phoenicians, no doubt, fomented the feuds by which their markets were supplied: the morality of their dealings sunk to the level of their iniquitous traffic.