404 HISTORY OF GREECE ship with a triple bank of oars, was introduced, and it was prob- ably from Corinth that this improvement passed to Korkyra, as it did to Samos. In early times, the Korkyrzean navy was in a condition to cope with the Corinthian, and the most ancient naval battle known to Thucydides 1 was one between these two states, in 664 B. C. As far as we can make out, it appears that Korky- ra maintained her independence, not only during the government of the Bacchiads at Corinth, but also throughout the long reign of the despot Kypselus, and a part of the reign of his son Peri- ander. But towards the close of this latter reign, we find Kor- kyra subject to Corinth ; and the barbarous treatment inflicted by Periander, in revenge for the death of his son, upon three hundred Korkyrrean youths, has already been recounted in a former chapter. 2 After the death of Periander, the island seems to have regained its independence, but we are left without any particulars respecting it, from about 585 B. c. down to the period shortly preceding the invasion of Greece by Xerxes, nearly a century. At this later epoch the Korkyrreans possessed a naval force hardly inferior to any state in Greece. The expulsion of Kypselids from Corinth, and the reestablishment of the previous oligarchy, or something like it, does not seem to have reconciled the Korkyrasans to their mother-city; for it was immediately pre- vious to the Peloponnesian war that the Corinthians preferred the bitterest complaints against them, 3 of setting at nought those obligations which a colony was generally understood to be oblig ed to render. No place of honor was reserved at the public festivals of Korkyra for Corinthian visitors, nor was it the prac- tice to offer to the latter the first taste of the victims sacrificed, observances which were doubtless respectfully fulfilled at Ambra kia and Leukas. Nevertheless, the Korkyraeans had taken part conjointly with the Corinthians in favor of Syracuse, when that city was in imminent danger of being conquered and enslaved by Hippokrates 4 despot of Gela (about 492 B. c.), an incident which shows that they were not destitute of generous sympathy with sister states, and leads us to imagine that their alienation 1 Thucyd. i : 13. 1 Hcrodot. iii, 49-51 : see above, chap, ix, p. 42 of this volume. 1 Thucyd. i, 25-37. 4 Herodct. vii. 155
