A great wave of renewed colonization beginning in the eighth century BCE brings Dorian settlers to the island of Corcyra (modern Corfu), to Syracuse and Gela in Sicily, to Taras (now Taranto) in Italy, and to Cyrene in North Africa, as well as to scattered sites in the Crimea and along the Black Sea.

Sparta, Corinth, and Argos are among the most important cities of Doric origin.

The Greeks of Megara begin active colonization, founding Megara Hyblaea in Sicily and Chalcedon on the Bosporus.

Expansion and accompanying colonization from about 700 BCE bring the Ionians of Euboea to eastern Sicily and Cumae near Naples, and Samians to Nagidus and Celenderis in Pamphylia.

The Phocaeans, lacking arable land, establish colonies in the Dardanelles at Lampsacus, on the Black Sea at Amisus, and in the Crimea.

The Greek colonists begin to disseminate their culture throughout the Mediterranean and even into the southern Ukraine, opening new markets for Greek oil, wine, and other wares in return for precious metals, timber, grain, and other goods.

The historian Thucydides describes the Lelantine War, a military conflict between the two Greek city-states Chalkis and Eretria, as the most widespread war in Greece between the mythical Trojan War and the Persian Wars of the early fifth century BCE.

An acropolis site of the Monte Vico area of Ischia, a volcanic island in the Tyrrhenian Sea, at the northern end of the Gulf of Naples, had been inhabited from the Bronze Age, as Mycenaean and Iron Age pottery finds attest.

Euboean Greeks from Eretria and Chalkis arrive in the eighth century BCE to establish an emporium for trade with the Etruscans of the mainland.

This settlement becomes home not only to Greeks, but a mixed population of Greek, Etruscan and Phoenician inhabitants.

Because of its fine harbor, the settlement of Pithecusae will become successful through trade in iron and with mainland Italy; at its peak, Pithecusae would house about ten thousand people. (The ceramic Euboean artifact inscribed with a reference to "Nestor's cup" will be discovered in a grave on the island in 1953. Engraved upon the cup are a few lines written in the Cumae alphabet. Dating from around 730 BCE, it is the oldest written reference to the Iliad and may be the earliest extant precursor to the Latin alphabet.)

Cumae is probably the first Greek mainland colony in the west and home of a sibyl (Greek prophetess, whose cavern still exists).

Founded about 750 BCE by Greeks from Chalcis and Eretria in a location that was already occupied, about twelve miles (nineteen kilometers) west of modern Naples, Cumae comes to control the most fertile portions of the Campanian plain.

Corinthians send out agricultural settlers in about 734 BCE to Corfu (Kérkira), a Greek island of two hundred and twenty-nine square miles (five hundred and ninety-three square kilometers) that lies in the Ionian Sea, just off the coast of Epirus in northwest Greece, thereby supplanting a settlement of Eretrians from Euboea, who retire to the Albanian coast.

The island derives its name from the Greek word “coryphai,” meaning "crests" (the fertile island, flat in the south, has mountain ranges in its northern and central regions).

According to legend, the island was Scheria, home of the Phaeacians in Homeric epic.

The cities of Chalcis and Eretria (both on the island of Euboea) had jointly founded Cumae in Italy in about 750 BCE.

When they fall out in the late eighth century BCE over colonial disputes and trade rivalry, the war between them splits the Greek world in two: Samos, Corinth, Thessaly, and perhaps Erythrae (an Ionian city) join Chalcis, while Miletus, Megara, and perhaps Chios take the Eretrian side.

The Lelantine war, which derives its name from the Chalcidic victory won by Thessalian cavalry at the fertile Lelantine Plain separating Eretria and Chalcis, is the earliest Greek war (after the mythical “Trojan War”) that has any claim to be considered “general,” in the sense that it involves distant allies on each side.

Eretria is to become the more prominent city in the home island of Euboea, while its allies Miletus and Megara prosper and soon colonize the best sites of the Bosporus. (An interesting modern suggestion has Lefkandi itself as the site of Old Eretria, abandoned about 700 BCE in favor of the classical site of Eretria at the east end of the plain, perhaps as a consequence of Eretria's defeat in the Lelantine War. This theory, however, needs to account for Herodotus' statement that at the early sixth-century entertainment of the suitors of Cleisthenes of Sicyon there was one Lysanias from Eretria, “then at the height of its prosperity.”)

The Boeotian cities of Chalkis and Eretria battle on the Lelantine Plain, the natural boundary between them, in the culmination of a mercantile conflict known as the Lelantine War.

Corinth, Samos, and the Thessalian League back Chalkis; Aegina and Miletos (and possibly Megara) back Eretria.

In the final battle, from which the war derives its name, Thessalian cavalry defeat the Eretrian forces.

Indirect evidence in Thucydides points towards a date circa 705 BCE, situating the conflict halfway between history and legend.

As a consequence, Eretria loses control of Andros, Tenos, and Kea islands.

Lefkandi may have been the predecessor of Eretria and abandoned as the result of the victory of Chalkis in the war.

The Lelantine War (for which there is no contemporary account, as Greek historiography lies two centuries in the future) appears to have consisted of a series of loosely connected contests all over the Greek world, with no decisive overall result.

Peisistratos has lived in exile in northern Greece for several years, laying a solid base for his return, exploiting the silver and gold mines of Mount Pangaeum and gaining the support of conservatives in Thebes, Argos, Naxos, and elsewhere.

He goes in 546 to Eretria on the island of Euboea, with the force provided by his own funds and by his friends, and from this base, …