About twenty-five miles eastward of Siris, on the coast of the Tarentine gulf, was situated Metapontium, a Greek town which was affirmed by some to draw its origin from the Pylian companions of Nestor,—by others, from the Phocian warriors of Epeius, on their return from Troy. The proofs of the former were exhibited in the worship of the Neleid heroes,—the proofs of the latter in the preservation of the reputed identical tools with which Epeius had constructed the Trojan horse.[735] Metapontium was planted on the territory of the Chônians or Œnotrians, but the first colony is said to have been destroyed by an attack of the Samnites,[736] at what period we do not know. It had been founded by some Achæan settlers,—under the direction of the œkist Daulius, despot of the Phocian Krissa, and invited by the inhabitants of Sybaris, who feared that the place might be appropriated by the neighboring Tarentines, colonists from Sparta and hereditary enemies in Peloponnesus of the Achæan race. Before the new settlers arrived, however, the place seems to have been already appropriated by the Tarentines; for the Achæan Leukippus only obtained their permission to land by a fraudulent promise, and, after all, had to sustain a forcible struggle both with them and with the neighboring Œnotrians, which was compromised by a division of territory. The fertility of the Metapontine territory was hardly less celebrated than that of the Siritid.[737]

Farther eastward of Metapontium, again at the distance of about twenty-five miles, was situated the great city of Taras, or Tarentum, a colony from Sparta founded after the first Messenian war, seemingly about 707 B. C. The œkist Phalanthus, said to have been an Herakleid, was placed at the head of a body of Spartan emigrants,—consisting principally of some citizens called Epeunaktæ, and of the youth called Partheniæ, who had been disgraced by their countrymen on account of their origin, and were on the point of breaking out into rebellion. It was out of the Messenian war that this emigration is stated to have arisen, in a manner analogous to that which has been stated respecting the Epizephyrian Lokrians. The Lacedæmonians, before entering Messenia to carry on the war, had made a vow not to return until they should have completed the conquest; a vow in which it appears that some of them declined to take part, standing altogether aloof from the expedition. When the absent soldiers returned after many years of absence consumed in the war, they found a numerous progeny which had been born to their wives and daughters during the interval, from intercourse with those (Epeunaktæ) who had stayed at home. The Epeunaktæ were punished by being degraded to the rank and servitude of Helots; the children thus born, called Partheniæ,[738] were also cut off from all the rights of citizenship, and held in dishonor. But the parties punished were numerous enough to make themselves formidable, and a conspiracy was planned among them, intended to break out at the great religious festival of the Hyacinthia, in the temple of the Amyklæan Apollo. Phalanthus was the secret chief of the conspirators, who agreed to commence their attack upon the authorities at the moment when he should put on his helmet. The leader, however, never intending that the scheme should be executed, betrayed it beforehand, stipulating for the safety of all those implicated in it. At the commencement of the festival, when the multitude were already assembled, a herald was directed to proclaim aloud, that Phalanthus would not on that day put on his helmet,—a proclamation which at once revealed to the conspirators that they were betrayed. Some of them sought safety in flight, others assumed the posture of suppliants; but they were merely detained in confinement, with assurance of safety, while Phalanthus was sent to the Delphian oracle to ask advice respecting emigration. He is said to have inquired whether he might be permitted to appropriate the fertile plain of Sikyon, but the Pythian priestess emphatically dissuaded him, and enjoined him to conduct his emigrants to Satyrium and Tarentum, where he would be “a mischief to the Iapygians.” Phalanthus obeyed, and conducted the detected conspirators as emigrants to the Tarentine gulf,[739] which he reached a few years after the foundation of Sybaris and Krotôn by the Achæans. According to Ephorus, he found these prior emigrants at war with the natives, aided them in the contest, and received in return their aid to accomplish his own settlement. But this can hardly have consisted with the narrative of Antiochus, who represented the Achæans of Sybaris as retaining, even in their colonies, the hatred against the Dorian name which they had contracted in Peloponnesus.[740] Antiochus stated that Phalanthus and his colonists were received in a friendly manner by the indigenous inhabitants, and allowed to establish their new town in tranquillity.

If such was really the fact, it proves that the native inhabitants of the soil must have been of purely inland habits, making no use of the sea either for commerce or for fishery, otherwise they would hardly have relinquished such a site as that of Tarentum,—which, while favorable and productive, even in regard to the adjoining land, was with respect to sea-advantages without a parallel in Grecian Italy.[741] It was the only spot in the gulf which possessed a perfectly safe and convenient harbor,—a spacious inlet of the sea is there formed, sheltered by an isthmus and an outlying peninsula, so as to leave only a narrow entrance. This inlet, still known as the Mare Piccolo, though its shores and the adjoining tongue of land appear to have undergone much change, affords at the present day a constant, inexhaustible, and varied supply of fish, especially of shell-fish; which furnish both nourishment and employment to a large proportion among the inhabitants of the contracted modern Taranto, just as they once served the same purpose to the numerous, lively, and jovial population of the mighty Tarentum. The concentrated population of fishermen formed a predominant element in the character of the Tarentine democracy.[742] Tarentum was just on the borders of the country originally known as Italy, within which Herodotus includes it, while Antiochus considers it in Iapygia, and regards Metapontium as the last Greek town in Italy.

Its immediate neighbors were the Iapygians, who, under various subdivisions of name and dialect, seem to have occupied the greater part of south-eastern Italy, including the peninsula denominated after them,—yet sometimes also called the Salentine,—between the Adriatic and the Tarentine gulf,—and who are even stated at one time to have occupied some territory on the south east of that gulf, near the site of Krotôn. The Iapygian name appears to have comprehended Messapians, Salentines, and Kalabrians; according to some, even Peuketians and Daunians, as far along the Adriatic as Mount Garganus, or Drion; Skylax notices in his time (about 360 B. C.) five different tongues in the country which he calls Iapygia.[743] The Messapians and Salentines are spoken of as emigrants from Krête, akin to the Minoian or primitive Kretans; and we find a national genealogy which recognizes Iapyx son of Dædalus, an emigrant from Sicily. But the story told to Herodotus was, that the Kretan soldiers who had accompanied Minos in his expedition to recover Dædalus from Kamikus in Sicily, were on their return home cast away on the shores of Iapygia, and became the founders of Hyria and other Messapian towns in the interior of the country.[744] Brundusium also, or Brentesion, as the Greeks called it,[745] inconsiderable in the days of Herodotus, but famous in the Roman times afterwards, as the most frequented seaport for voyaging to Epirus, was a Messapian town. The native language spoken by the Iapygian Messapians was a variety of the Oscan: the Latin poet Ennius, a native of Rudiæ in the Iapygian peninsula, spoke Greek, Latin, and Oscan, and even deduced his pedigree from the ancient national prince or hero Messapus.[746]

We are told that during the lifetime of Phalanthus, the Tarentine settlers gained victories over the Messapians and Peuketians, which they commemorated afterwards by votive offerings at Delphi,—and that they even made acquisitions at the expense of the inhabitants of Brundusium,[747]—a statement difficult to believe, if we look to the distance of the latter place, and to the circumstance that Herodotus, even in his time, names it only as a harbor. Phalanthus too, driven into exile, is said to have found a hospitable reception at Brundusium, and to have died there. Of the history of Tarentum, however, during the first two hundred and thirty years of its existence, we possess no details; we have reason to believe that it partook in the general prosperity of the Italian Greeks during those two centuries, though it remained inferior both to Sybaris and to Krotôn. About the year 510 B. C., these two latter republics went to war, and Sybaris was nearly destroyed; while in the subsequent half-century, the Krotoniates suffered the terrible defeat of Sagra from the Lokrians, and the Tarentines experienced an equally ruinous defeat from the Iapygian Messapians. From these reverses, however, the Tarentines appear to have recovered more completely than the Krotoniates; for the former stand first among the Italiots, or Italian Greeks, from the year 400 B. C. down to the supremacy of the Romans, and made better head against the growth of the Lucanians and Bruttians of the interior.

Such were the chief cities of the Italian Greeks from Tarentum on the upper sea to Poseidonia on the lower; and if we take them during the period preceding the ruin of Sybaris (in 510 B. C.), they will appear to have enjoyed a degree of prosperity even surpassing that of the Sicilian Greeks. The dominion of Sybaris, Krotôn, and Lokri extended across the peninsula from sea to sea, and the mountainous regions of the interior of Calabria were held in amicable connection with the cities and cultivators in the plain and valley near the sea,—to the reciprocal advantage of both. The petty native tribes of Œnotrians, Sikels, or Italians, properly so called, were partially Hellenized, and brought into the condition of village cultivators and shepherds, dependent upon Sybaris and its fellow cities; a portion of them dwelling in the town, probably, as domestic slaves of the rich men, but most of them remaining in the country as serfs, penestæ, or coloni, intermingled with Greek settlers, and paying over parts of their produce to Greek proprietors.

But this dependence, though accomplished in the first instance by force, was yet not upheld exclusively by force,—it was to a great degree the result of an organized march of life, and of more productive cultivation brought within their reach,—of new wants, both created and supplied,—of temples, festivals, ships, walls, chariots, etc., which imposed upon the imagination of the rude landsman and shepherd. Against mere force the natives could have found shelter in the unconquerable forests and ravines of the Calabrian Apennines, and in that vast mountain region of the Sila, lying immediately behind the plains of Sybaris, where even the French army, with its excellent organization, in 1807, found so much difficulty in reaching the bandit villagers.[748] It was not by arms alone, but by arms and arts combined,—a mingled influence, such as enabled imperial Rome to subdue the fierceness of the rude Germans and Britons,—that the Sybarites and Krotoniates acquired and maintained their ascendency over the natives of the interior. The shepherd of the banks of the river Sybaris or Krathis not only found a new exchangeable value for his cattle and other produce, becoming familiar with better diet and clothing, and improved cultivation of the olive and the vine,—but he was also enabled to display his prowess, if strong and brave, in the public games at the festival of the Lakinian Hêrê, or even at the Olympic games in Peloponnesus.[749] It is thus that we have to explain the extensive dominion, the great population and the wealth and luxury of the Sybarites and Krotoniates,—a population of which the incidental reports as given in figures are not trustworthy, but which we may well believe to have been very numerous. The native Œnotrians, while unable to combine in resisting Greek force, were at the same time less widely distinguished from the Greeks, in race and language, than the Oscans of middle Italy, and therefore more accessible to Greek pacific influences; while the Oscan race seem to have been both fiercer in repelling the assaults of the Greeks, and more intractable as to their seductions. Nor were the Iapygians modified by the neighborhood of Tarentum, in the same degree as the tribes adjoining to Sybaris and Krotôn were by their contact with those cities. The dialect of Tarentum,[750] as well as of Herakleia, though a marked Doric, admitted many local peculiarities, and the farces of the Tarentine poet Rhinthon, like the Syracusan Sophron, seem to have blended the Hellenic with the Italic in language as well as in character.

About the year 560 B. C., the time of the accession of Peisistratus at Athens, the close of what may properly be called the first period of Grecian history, Sybaris and Krotôn were at the maximum of their power, which each maintained for half a century afterwards, until the fatal dissension between them. We are told that the Sybarites, in that final contest, marched against Krotôn with an army of three hundred thousand men: fabulous as this number doubtless is, we cannot doubt that, for an irruption of this kind into an adjoining territory, their large body of semi-Hellenized native subjects might be mustered in prodigious force. The few statements which have reached us respecting them touch, unfortunately, upon little more than their luxury, fantastic self-indulgence, and extravagant indolence, for which qualities they have become proverbial in modern times as well as in ancient. Anecdotes illustrating these qualities were current, and served more than one purpose, in antiquity. The philosopher recounted them, in order to discredit and denounce the character which they exemplified,—while among gay companies, “Sybaritic tales,” or tales respecting sayings and doing of ancient Sybarites, formed a separate and special class of excellent stories, to be told simply for amusement,[751]—with which view witty romancers multiplied them indefinitely. It is probable that the Pythagorean philosophers (who belonged originally to Krotôn, but maintained themselves permanently as a philosophical sect in Italy and Sicily, with a strong tinge of ostentatious asceticism and mysticism), in their exhortations to temperance and in their denunciations of luxurious habits, might select by preference examples from Sybaris, the ancient enemy of the Krotonians, to point their moral,—and that the exaggerated reputation of the city thus first became the subject of common talk throughout the Grecian world; for little could be actually known of Sybaris in detail, since its humiliation dates from the first commencement of Grecian contemporaneous history. Hekatæus of Milêtus may perhaps have visited it in its full splendor, but even Herodotus knew it only by past report, and the principal anecdotes respecting it are cited from authors considerably later than him, who follow the tone of thought so common in antiquity, in ascribing the ruin of the Sybarites to their overweening corruption and luxury.[752]

Making allowance, however, for exaggeration on all these accounts, there can be no reason to doubt that Sybaris, in 560 B. C., was one of the most wealthy, populous, and powerful cities of the Hellenic name; and that it also presented both comfortable abundance among the mass of the citizens, arising from the easy attainment of fresh lots of fertile land, and excessive indulgences among the rich,—to a degree forming marked contrast with Hellas proper, of which Herodotus characterized poverty as the foster-sister.[753] The extraordinary productiveness of the neighboring territory,—alleged by Varro, in his time, when the culture must have been much worse than it had been under the old Sybaris, to yield an ordinary crop of a hundred-fold,[754] and extolled by modern travellers, even in its present yet more neglected culture,—has been already touched upon. The river Krathis,—still the most considerable river of that region,—at a time when there was an industrious population to keep its water-course in order, would enable the extensive fields of Sybaris to supply abundant nourishment for a population larger perhaps than any other Grecian city could parallel. But though nature was thus bountiful, industry, good management, and well-ordered government were required to turn her bounty to account: where these are wanting, later experience of the same territory shows that its inexhaustible capacities may exist in vain. That luxury, which Grecian moralists denounced in the leading Sybarites, between 560 and 510 B. C., was the result of acquisitions vigorously and industriously pushed, and kept together by an orderly central force, during a century and a half that the colony had existed. Though the Trœzenian settlers who formed a portion of the original emigrants had been expelled when the Achæans became more numerous, yet we are told that, on the whole, Sybaris was liberal in the reception of new emigrants to the citizenship,[755] and that this was one of the causes of its remarkable advance. Of these additional comers, we may presume that many went to form its colonies on the Mediterranean sea, and some to settle both among its four dependent inland nations, and its twenty-five subject towns. Five thousand horsemen, we are told, clothed in showy attire, formed the processional march in certain Sybaritic festivals,—a number which is best appreciated by comparison with the fact, that the knights or horsemen of Athens, in her best days, did not exceed twelve hundred. The Sybaritic horses, if we are to believe a story purporting to come from Aristotle, were taught to move at the sound of the flute; and the garments of these wealthy citizens were composed of the finest wool from Milêtus in Ionia,[756]—the Tarentine wool not having then acquired the distinguished renown which it possessed five centuries afterwards towards the close of the Roman republic. Next to the great abundance of home produce,—corn, wine, oil, flax, cattle, fish, timber, etc.,—the fact next in importance which we hear respecting Sybaris is, the great traffic carried on with Milêtus: these two cities were more intimately and affectionately connected together than any two Hellenic cities within the knowledge of Herodotus.[757] The tie between Tarentum and Knidus was also of a very intimate character,[758] so that the great intercourse, personal as well as commercial, between the Asiatic and the Italic Greeks, appears as a marked fact in the history of the sixth century before the Christian era.

In this respect, as well as in several others, the Hellenic world wears a very different aspect in 560 B. C. from that which it assumed a century afterwards, and in which it is best known to modern readers. At the former period, the Ionic and Italic Greeks are the great ornaments of the Hellenic name, and carried on a more lucrative trade with each other, than either of them maintained with Greece proper; which both of them recognized as their mother-country, though without admitting anything in the nature of established headship. The military power of Sparta is indeed at this time great and preponderant in Peloponnesus, but she has no navy, and she is only just essaying her strength, not without reluctance, in ultramarine interference. After the lapse of a century, these circumstances change materially. The independence of the Asiatic Greeks is destroyed, and the power of the Italic Greeks is greatly broken; while Sparta and Athens not only become the prominent and leading Hellenic states, but constitute themselves centres of action for the lesser cities, to a degree previously unknown.

It was during the height of their prosperity, seemingly, in the sixth century B. C., that the Italian Greeks either acquired for, or bestowed upon, their territory the appellation of Magna Græcia, which at that time it well deserved; for not only were Sybaris and Krotôn then the greatest Grecian cities situated near together, but the whole peninsula of Calabria may be considered as attached to the Grecian cities on the coast. The native Œnotrians and Sikels occupying the interior had become Hellenized, or semi-Hellenized, with a mixture of Greeks among them,—common subjects of these great cities; so that the whole extent of the Calabrian peninsula, within the line which joins Sybaris with Poseidonia, might then be fairly considered as Hellenic territory. Sybaris maintained much traffic with the Tuscan towns in the Mediterranean, and the communication between Greece and Rome, across the Calabrian isthmus,[759] may perhaps have been easier during the time of the Roman kings—whose expulsion was nearly contemporaneous with the ruin of Sybaris—than it became during the first two centuries of the Roman republic. But all these relations underwent a complete change after the breaking up of the power of Sybaris in 510 B. C., and the gradual march of the Oscan population from middle Italy towards the south. Cumæ was overwhelmed by the Samnites, Poseidonia by the Lucanians; who became possessed not only of these maritime cities, but also of the whole inland territory—now called the Basilicata, with part of the hither Calabria—across from Poseidonia to the neighborhood of the gulf of Tarentum: while the Bruttians,—a mixture of outlying Lucanians with the Greco-Œnotrian population once subject to Sybaris, speaking both Greek and Oscan,[760]—became masters of the inland mountains in the farther Calabria, from Consentia nearly to the Sicilian strait. It was thus that the ruin of Sybaris, combined with the spread of the Lucanians and Bruttians, deprived the Italian Greeks of that inland territory which they had enjoyed in the sixth century B. C., and restricted them to the neighborhood of the coast. To understand the extraordinary power and prosperity of Sybaris and Krotôn, in the sixth century B. C., when the whole of this inland territory was subject to them, and before the rise of the Lucanians, and Bruttians, and when the name Magna Græcia was first given, it is necessary to glance by contrast at these latter periods; more especially since the name still continued to be applied by the Romans to Italian Greece after the contraction of territory had rendered it less appropriate.

Of Krotôn at this early period of its power and prosperity we know even less than of Sybaris. It stood distinguished both for the number of its citizens who received prizes at the Olympic games, and for the excellence of its surgeons or physicians. And what may seem more surprising, if we consider the extreme present insalubrity of the site upon which it stood, it was in ancient times proverbially healthy,[761] which was not so much the case with the more fertile Sybaris. Respecting all these cities of Italian Greeks, the same remark is applicable as was before made in reference to the Sicilian Greeks,—that the intermixture of the native population sensibly affected both their character and habits. We have no information respecting their government during this early period of prosperity, except that we find mention at Krotôn, as at the Epizephyrian Lokri, of a senate of one thousand members, yet not excluding occasionally the ekklesia, or general assembly.[762] Probably, the steady increase of their dominion in the interior, and the facility of providing maintenance for new population, tended much to make their political systems, whatever they may have been, work in a satisfactory manner. The attempt of Pythagoras and his followers to constitute themselves a ruling faction as well as a philosophical sect, will be recounted in a subsequent chapter. The proceedings connected with that attempt will show that there was considerable analogy and sympathy between the various cities of Italian Greece, so as to render them liable to be acted on by the same causes. But though the festivals of the Lakinian Hêrê, administered by the Krotoniates, formed from early times a common point of religious assemblage to all,[763]—yet the attempts to institute periodical meetings of deputies, for the express purpose of maintaining political harmony, did not begin until after the destruction of Sybaris, nor were they ever more than partially successful.

One other city, the most distant colony founded by Greeks in the western regions, yet remains to be mentioned; and we can do no more than mention it, since we have no facts to make up its history. Massalia, the modern Marseilles, was founded by the Ionic Phokæans in the 45th Olympiad, about 597 B. C.,[764] at the time when Sybaris and Krotôn were near the maximum of their power,—when the peninsula of Calabria was all Hellenic, and when Cumæ also had not yet been visited by those calamities which brought about its decline. So much Hellenism in the south of Italy doubtless facilitated the western progress of the adventurous Phokæan mariner. It would appear that Massalia was founded by amicable fusion of Phokæan colonists with the indigenous Gauls, if we may judge by the romantic legend of the Protiadæ, a Massaliotic family or gens existing in the time of Aristotle. Euxenus, a Phokæan merchant, had contracted friendly relations with Nanus, a native chief in the south of Gaul, and was invited to the festival in which the latter was about to celebrate the marriage of his daughter Petta. According to the custom of the country, the maiden was to choose for herself a husband among the guests, by presenting him with a cup: through accident, or by preference, Petta presented it to Euxenus, and became his wife. Prôtis of Massalia, the offspring of this marriage, was the primitive ancestor and eponym of the Protiadæ. According to another story respecting the origin of the same gens, Protis was himself the Phokæan leader who married Gyptis, daughter of Nannus king of the Segobrigian Gauls.[765]

Of the history of Massalia we know nothing, nor does it appear to have been connected with the general movement of the Grecian world. We learn generally that the Massaliots administered their affairs with discretion as well as with unanimity, and exhibited in their private habits an exemplary modesty,—that although preserving alliance with the people of the interior, they were scrupulously vigilant in guarding their city against surprise, permitting no armed strangers to enter,—that they introduced the culture of vines and olives, and gradually extended the Greek alphabet, language, and civilization among the neighboring Gauls,—that they possessed and fortified many positions along the coast of the gulf of Lyons, and founded five colonies along the eastern coast of Spain,—that their government was oligarchical, consisting of a perpetual senate of six hundred persons, yet admitting occasionally new members from without, and a small council of fifteen members,—that the Delphinian Apollo and the Ephesian Artemis were their chief deities, planted as guardians of their outlying posts, and transmitted to their colonies.[766] Although it is common to represent a deliberate march and steady supremacy of the governing few, with contented obedience on the part of the many, as the characteristic of Dorian states, and mutability not less than disturbance as the prevalent tendency in Ionia,—yet there is no Grecian community to whom the former attributes are more pointedly ascribed than the Ionic Massalia. The commerce of the Massaliots appears to have been extensive, and their armed maritime force sufficiently powerful to defend it against the aggressions of Carthage,—their principal enemy in the western Mediterranean.