ABSTRACT
The geographical conditions which helped to foster the growth of so many autonomous Cretan cities were also a potent factor operating against natural or enforced unification. Though Strabo could refer to Knossos, Gortyna and Kydonia as the greatest and most famous of the cities, he tells us that Knossos and Gortyna had to co-operate to ensure the subjection of the remainder; and that, when they quarrelled, there was strife throughout the island. Neither of the two most powerful cities could ever command the necessary economic and military resources to advance a stable dominion beyond the mountain barriers which alike protected and circumscribed their respective spheres of influence. These spheres of influence would, as people have seen, include any communities reduced to periodic subjection. This central and unresolved contradiction between mutual interest and mutual hostility of the ruling classes becomes more marked with the onset of the Hellenistic period.
