On the eastern side of the Ionian Sea were situated the Grecian colonies of Korkyra, Leukas, Anaktorium, Ambrakia, Apollonia, and Epidamnus.

Among these, by far the most distinguished, for situation, for wealth, and for power, was Korkyra—now known as Corfu, the same name belonging, as in antiquity, both to the town and the island, which is separated from the coast of Epirus by a strait varying from two to seven miles in breadth. Korkyra was founded by the Corinthians, at the same time (we are told) as Syracuse. Chersikratês, a Bacchiad, is said to have accompanied Archias on his voyage from Corinth to Syracuse, and to have been left with a company of emigrants on the island of Korkyra, where he founded a settlement. What inhabitants he found there, or how they were dealt with, we cannot clearly make out: the island was generally conceived in antiquity as the residence of the Homeric Phæakians, and it is to this fact that Thucydidês ascribes in part the eminence of the Korkyrsean marine: according to another story, some Eretrians from Eubœa had settled there, and were compelled to retire; a third statement represents the Liburnians as the prior inhabitants—and this perhaps is the most probable, since the Liburnians were an enterprising, maritime, piratical race, who long continued to occupy the more northerly islands in the Adriatic along the Illyrian and Dalmatian coast. That maritime activity, and number of ships both warlike and commercial, which we find at an early date among the Korkyræans, and in which they stand distinguished from the Italian and Sicilian Greeks, may be plausibly attributed to their partial fusion with preexisting Liburnians; for the ante-Hellenic natives of Magna Grsecia and Sicily (as has been already noticed) were as unpractised at sea as the Liburnians were expert.