Ancient Libya valley, Cowper says, "There had been originally no less than eighteen or twenty megalithic trilithons, in a line, each with its massive altar placed before it." In ancient times, the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, the Persian Achaemenid Empire ("see Libya (satrapy)"), the armies of Alexander the Great and his Ptolemaic successors from Egypt, then Romans, Vandals, and local representatives of the Byzantine Empire ruled all or parts of Libya. The territory of modern Libya had separate histories until Roman times, as Tripoli and Cyrenaica. Cyrenaica, by contrast, was Greek before it was Roman. It was also known as Pentapolis, the "five
Names of the Greeks against the Ottomans. General Makrygiannis recalled a friend asking him: "What say you, is the Roman State far away from coming? Are we to sleep with the Turks and awaken with the Romans?" "Greek" (Γραικός) was the least popular of the three terms, but received disproportionately larger attention by scholars compared to its popular use. Adamantios Korais, a renowned Greek classicist, justified his preference in "A Dialogue between Two Greeks": "Our ancestors used to call themselves Greeks but adopted afterwards the name Hellenes by a Greek who called himself Hellen. One of the above two, therefore, is our true name.