Moneyers’ names are known earlier on the coins of Barka, and the appearance of the name Allat(eir) between 435-322[246] may be interpreted to mean that noble families were taking their share in the work of minting. Cyrene’s influence on the Libyans of her neighbourhood finds expression in the imitations of Cyrenean staters found in Egypt.[247]
We have noted the finds of Panathenaic prize amphorae in Cyrenaica, which evidence the city’s rapprochement with Athens in her democratic period. Ferrabino interpreted the granting of citizen-rights to Theran residents[248] as a first step on the part of Cyrene towards a political rapprochement with Athens’ renewed maritime league, of which Thera was a member.[249] The League was reestablished in 376, shortly before the year we have thought marked the establishment of Cyrene’s “Cleisthenic” democracy. Whether or not Ferrabino was right, the kindred feeling with Athens found material expression later under the rule of Ophelias, when 10,000 Athenians who had been deprived of their citizenship migrated to Cyrene.
A difficult problem is posed by the alleged war between Cyrene and Carthage. Until the Italian excavations carried out at Cyrene between 1924 and 1931, authority for this was to be found only in the works of Sallust,[250] Valerius Maximus,[251] and Pomponius Mela,[252] and as all these sources mention the event only in connection with the mythical story of the Philaenan brothers,[253] and there is no parallel Greek source, Robinson and others have rejected its authenticity. Nor does the seabattle said by Servius[254] to have been fought between Barka and Carthage find confirmation in other sources. The possibility of such a collision is nevertheless entirely reasonable on general grounds, granted the assumption that Cyrene was interested in the desert trade-routes which debouch upon the Syrtic Gulf, where the emporia appear to have lain under Punic control from the end of the 6th century. It is necessary therefore to investigate whether the desert routes played any part in Cyrenean commerce in this period.
The ancient evidence for Carthage’s trade through the ports of the Syrtis is very vague.[255] The harbours themselves are not mentioned prior to Polybius, who writes of them in connection with the treaty signed between Rome and Carthage in 509 B.C. Apart from the trade in gems,[256] there is no allusion to products of Central Africa being brought through the Syrtic ports between Herodotus’ time and the 2nd century B.C., and Pseudo-Scylax’ report in the 4th century of the export of ivory, skins and gold from the Atlantic coast, hints only by its silence that the ports of the Syrtis may then have been entirely under Carthaginian control.[257] The whole assumption of the existence of a commerce between the north African coast and the centre of the continent, indeed, is based on the reference to emporia, on the supposition that the caravan routes have not altered in the course of time, on references to various wares from Central Africa used chiefly by the Romans, and on medieval analogies.[258] There is, indeed, no doubt that elephants from inland were exported by Lepcis Magna.[259] Yet Hey-wood writes:[260] “No ancient source states that there was such a trade”. Nor does the outlook of recent geographers incline to assume links between Cyrene, the desert routes and Central Africa in ancient times. Cary, for example,[261] affirms that “Cyrenaica in ancient times was never the terminal region of a caravan route”; Goodchild, citing his opinion,[262] adds,[263] that the road from Aujila to Ajedabia and Bengazi could not have been as important to trade as was that traversing Fezzan to Tripoli. They are followed by Burney and Hey,[264] also by Jones and Little;[265] Burney and Hey state that there is no sign of an ancient north-south route coming from the Jebel into the Desert, and remark that the existing road from Aujila through Kufra and Tibesti was opened up only at the beginning of the 19th century.
So much for the arguments against Cyrenean connections with the desert routes, or at least against direct links. It may however be argued that Cyrene aspired to communication not through Aujila and Fezzan, but through the Oasis of Ammon, Fezzan and the Gulf of Syrtis; the historical and numismatic evidence, indeed, points in that direction. In the Fourth Pythiad of Pindar echoes are heard of an interest of the Cyrenean monarchy in the Syrtic region, and under Arkesilaos IV ties were formed between Cyrene and the Oasis of Ammon. Herodotus[266] knew of Ammon salt; he had heard the story of the journey of some Nasamonean Libyans into Central Africa, from Cyreneans who had visited the Oasis.[267] Rhys Carpenter[268] has shown that this journey was carried out along the desert route linking Thebes, Hargiyeh, Siwa (Ammon), Aujila and Fezzan, whence it turned south across the mountains of Tibesti to the region of Bodele north-east of Lake Chad. This route, he observed, is a very ancient road for the transport of salt. Herodotus also knew something of the settlements of the Libyan coast as far as the Isle of Jerba near the Syrtis, but his knowledge of the shoreline west of there was vague in the extreme.[269] This would seem to mean that the Carthaginians held the Syrtic harbours at the time, and that they were closed to Greek trade. In 503 the former expelled the Spartan expedition that had seized the Cynips region on the same coast in an attempt to settle there.[270] The situation, at any rate, is such as to explain Cyrene’s interest in the Oasis of Ammon, since it stood on the route linking Egypt with the land of the Garamantes (Fezzan) and with Central Africa, and its use would have avoided the Syrtic route by going further south.