They used its southern ports for refitting and repairing their ships, but did not penetrate into the interior, must less attempt to take possession of the whole extensive territory.

It was otherwise with the smaller islands.

Cythera is said to have derived its name from the Phoenician who colonised it, and the same is also reported of Melos.[560] Ios was, we are told, originally called Phoenice;[561] Anaphe had borne the name of Membliarus, after one of the companions of Cadmus;[562] Oliarus, or Antiparos, was colonised from Sidon.[563] Thera's earliest inhabitants were of the Phoenician race;[564] either Phoenicians or Carians had, according to Thucydides,[565] colonised in remote times "the greater part of the islands of the AEnean." There was a time when probably all the AEgean islands were Phoenician possessions, or at any rate acknowledged Phoenician influence, and Siphnus gave its gold, its silver,[566] and its lead,[567] Cythera its shell-fish,[568] Paros its marble, Melos its sulphur and its alum,[569] Nisyrus its millstones,[570] and the islands generally their honey,[571] to increase the wealth and advance the commercial interests of their Phoenician masters.
From the Sporades and Cyclades the advance was easy to the islands of the Northern AEgean, Lemnos, Imbrus, Thasos, and Samothrace.

The settlement of the Phoenicians in Thasos is attested by Herodotus, who says that the Tyrian Hercules (Melkarth) was worshipped there,[572] and ascribes to the Phoenicians extensive mining operations on the eastern shores of the island between AEnyra and Coenyra.[573] A Phoenician occupation of Lemnos, Imbrus, and Samothrace is indicated by the worship in those islands of the Cabeiri,[574] who were undoubtedly Phoenician deities.

Whether the Phoenicians passed from these islands to the Thracian mainland, and worked the gold-mines of Mount Pangaeus in the vicinity of Philippi, may perhaps be doubtful, but such seems to have been the belief of Strabo and Pliny.[575] Strabo also believed that there had been a Semitic element in the population of Euboea which had been introduced by Cadmus;[576] and a Phoenician settlement in Boeotia was the current tradition of the Greek writers upon primitive times, whether historians or geographers.[577] The further progress of the Phoenician settlements northward into the Propontis and the Euxine is a point whereon different opinions may be entertained.