EARLIEST SETTLEMENTS	11
and invitation of the coast-line, and left no doubt as to their existence.
   There has always been a tradition of a Phoenician and Greek colonization along the coast; and egend—probably unfounded—brought Jason and he Argonauts as far up the Adriatic as Duino, north of Trieste. Certain it is that Syracusan Greeks were in Lissa in 390 B.C. There are cyclopean walls at Gelsa, in the island of Lesina, whose Croat name is Hvar, a transliteration of its Greek name Pharos. Greeks were settled at Curzola, Melida and Lagosta; Greek coins, inscriptions and pottery have been found, chiefly at Lesina and Lissa ; Epidaurus, now Ragusa Yecchia, was certainly a Greek colony as late as a.d. 639, when the Avar invasion drove its inhabitants to found the modern Ragusa; so far down the centuries did Greek influence come.
  With the fourth century b.c. we hear of an invasion of a fair-haired race of Celts from the Save valley, who are said to have descended on the coast from the crests of the Dinaric Alps, thus inaugurating that fatal flow ; but of their blue eyes, blond hair and Celtic manners we gather no traces now among the dwellers in Dalmatia. Farther south, about the year 300 b.c. we find the population