As the British classicist Peter Jones explains in Ancient and Modern, The Two Libyas, the famous Oracle of Delphi played an instigating role in the initial colonization of north Africa by the Greeks:"Herodotus tells the story. A deputation from Thera (modern Santorini) had gone to Delphi to consult the oracle on various matters and was told to found a city among the Libyans. By Libyans, Greeks meant the people who inhabited north Africa. But since no attention was paid to this command, Thera suffered a seven-year drought.
"A mission to Delphi to discover the reason was reminded of that command, and, after some help from Crete and many false starts, a settlement was finally founded at Cyrene in 630 BC. Despite some hostility from local Berbers, other Greek towns sprang up — one was Berenice, modern Benghazi (c. 250 BC)—and the whole region became known as Cyrenaica. Cyrene itself was the jewel in its crown, a magnificent city famed for its medical school and philosophers."
Temple of Zeus, Cyrene
Meanwhile, the western area of Libya had been settled centuries earlier by the Phoenicians. Under the Romans it became known as "Punic" Africa, and it grew into a large and flourishing settlement, much as did its later Greek counterpart to the east. The two regions were 1200 miles apart by land, 700 miles by sea, but because of the strong trade winds and notorious dangers of shipping along the coast, they remained largely separate from one another throughout their long history--up until 1911 when the Italians invaded and consolidated both into modern Libya. Cyrenaicans resisted for years, but were finally quashed by Mussolini in 1934.
According to Jones, if the two Libyas once again split into what they had always been prior to il Duce, it would be "a very sensible idea."
I wonder if the Oracle of Delphi would agree?
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