In the early history of navigation and exploration, striking features of this outer coast edge, like headlands and capes, became important sea marks.  The promontory of Mount Athos, rising 6,400 feet above the sea between the Hellespont and the Thessalian coast, and casting its shadow as far as the market-place of Lemnos, was a guiding point for mariners in the whole northern Aegean.[425] For the ancient Greeks Cape Malia was long the boundary stone to the unknown wastes of the western Mediterranean, just as later the Pillars of Hercules marked the portals to the mare tenebrosum of the stormy Atlantic.  So the Sacred Promontory (Cape St. Vincent) of the Iberian Peninsula defined for Greeks and Romans the southwestern limit of the habitable world.[426] Centuries later the Portuguese marked their advance down the west coast of Africa, first by Cape Non, which so long said “No!” to the struggling mariner, then by Cape Bojador, and finally by Cape Verde.

In coastwise navigation, minor headlands and inshore islands were points to steer by; and in that early maritime colonization, which had chiefly a commercial aim, they formed the favorite spots for trading stations.  The Phoenicians in their home country fixed their settlements by preference on small capes, like Sidon and Berytus, or on inshore islets, like Tyre and Aradus,[427] and for their colonies and trading stations they chose similar sites, whether on the coast of Sicily,[428] Spain, or Morocco.[429] Carthage was located on a small hill-crowned cape projecting out into the Bay of Carthage.  The two promontories embracing this inlet were edged with settlements, especially the northern arm, which held Utica and Hippo,[430] the latter on the site of the modern French naval station of Bizerta.

[Illustration:  MAP OF ANCIENT PHOENICIAN AND GREEK COLONIES.]

[Sidenote:  Outer edge and piracy.]

In this early Hellenic world, when Greek sea-power was in its infancy, owing to the fear of piracy, cities were placed a few miles back from the coast; but with the partial cessation of this evil, sites on shore and peninsula were preferred as being more accessible to commerce,[431] and such of the older towns as were in comparatively easy reach of the seaboard established there each its own port.  Thus we find the ancient urban pairs of Argos and Nauplia, Troezene and Pogon, Mycenae and Eiones, Corinth commanding its Aegean port of Cenchreae 8 miles away on the Saronic Gulf to catch the Asiatic trade, and connected by a walled thoroughfare a mile and a half long with Lechaeum, a second harbor on the Corinthian Gulf which served the Italian commerce.[432] In the same group belonged Athens and its Piraeus, Megara and Pegae, Pergamus and Elaae in western Asia Minor.[433] These ancient twin cities may be taken to mark the two borders of the coast zone.  Like the modern ones which we have considered above, their historical development has shown an advance from the inner toward the outer