Chapter XXII (3)

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.

[748] See a description of the French military operations in
these almost inaccessible regions, contained in a valuable
publication by a French general officer, on service in that
country for three years, “Calabria during a Military Residence of
three years,” London, 1832, Letter xx, p. 201.

The whole picture of Calabria contained in this volume is both
interesting and instructive: military operations had never before
been carried on, probably, in the mountains of the Sila.

[749] See Theokritus, Idyll, iv, 6-35, which illustrates the
point here stated.

[750] Suidas, v. Ῥίνθων; Stephan. Byz. v. Τάρας: compare
Bernhardy, Grundriss der Römischen Litteratur, Abschnitt ii, pt.
2, pp. 185-186, about the analogy of these φλύακες of Rhinthon
with the native Italic Mimes.

The dialect of the other cities of Italic Greece is very little
known: the ancient Inscription of Petilia is Doric: see Ahrens,
De Dialecto Doricâ, sect. 49, p. 418.

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]

[751] Aristophan. Vesp. 1260. Αἰσωπικὸν γελοῖον, ἢ Συβαριτικόν.
What is meant by Συβαριτικὸν γελοῖον is badly explained by the
Scholiast, but is perfectly well illustrated by Aristophanês
himself, in subsequent verses of the same play (1427-1436), where
Philokleon tells two good stories respecting “a Sybaritan man,”
and a “woman in Sybaris:” Ἀνὴρ Συβαρίτης ἐξέπεσεν ἐξ ἅρματος,
etc.—ἐν Συβάρει γυνή ποτε Κατέαξ᾽ ἐχῖνον, etc.

These Συβάρια ἐπιφθέγματα are as old as Epicharmus, whose mind
was much imbued with the Pythagorean philosophy. See Etymolog.
Magn. Συβαρίζειν. Ælian amused himself also with the ἱστόριαι
Συβαριτικαί (V. H. xiv, 20): compare Hesychius, Συβαριτικοὶ
λόγοι, and Suidas, Συβαριτικαῖς.

[752] Thus Herodotus (vi, 127) informs us that, at the time when
Kleisthenês of Sikyon invited from all Greece suitors of proper
dignity for the hand of his daughter, Smindyridês of Sybaris
came among the number, “the most delicate and luxurious man
ever known,” (ἐπὶ πλεῖστον δὴ χλιδῆς εἷς ἀνὴρ ἀφίκετο—Herodot.
vi, 127), and Sybaris was at that time (B. C. 580-560) in
its greatest prosperity. In Chamæleon, Timæus, and other
writers subsequent to Aristotle, greater details were given.
Smindyridês was said to have taken with him to the marriage
one thousand domestic servants, fishermen, bird-catchers, and
cooks (Athenæ. vi, 271; xii, 541). The details of Sybaritic
luxury, given in Athenæus, are chiefly borrowed from writers of
this post-Aristotelian age,—Herakleidês of Pontus, Phylarchus,
Klearchus, Timæus (Athenæ. xii, 519-522). The best-authenticated
of all the examples of Sybaritic wealth, is the splendid figured
garment, fifteen cubits in length, which Alkimenês the Sybarite
dedicated as a votive offering in the temple of the Lakinian
Hêrê. Dionysius of Syracuse plundered that temple, got possession
of the garment, and is said to have sold it to the Carthaginians
for the price of one hundred and twenty talents: Polemon, the
Periegetes, seems to have seen it at Carthage (Aristot. Mirab.
Ausc. 96; Athenæ. xii, 541). Whether the price be correctly
stated, we are not in a situation to determine.

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.

[753] Herodot. vii, 102. τῇ Ἑλλάδι πενίη μὲν αἰεί κοτε σύντροφός
ἐστι.

[754] Varro, De Re Rusticâ, i, 44. “In Sybaritano dicunt etiam
cum centesimo redire solitum.” The land of the Italian Greeks
stands first for wheaten bread and beef; that of Syracuse for
pork and cheese (Hermippus ap. Athenæ. i, p. 27): about the
excellent wheat of Italy, compare Sophoklês, Triptolem. Fragm.
529, ed. Dindorf.

Theophrastus dwells upon the excellence of the land near Mylæ, in
the territory of the Sicilian Messênê, which produced, according
to him, thirty-fold. (Hist. Plant. ix, 2, 8, p. 259, ed.
Schneid.) This affords some measure of comparison, both for the
real excellence of the ancient Sybaritan territory, and for the
estimation in which it was held; its estimated produce being more
than three times that of Mylæ.

See in Mr. Keppel Craven’s Tour in the Southern Provinces of
Naples (chapters xi, xii, pp. 212-218), the description of the
rich and productive plain of the Krathis (in the midst of which
stood the ancient Sybaris), extending about sixteen miles from
Cassano to Corigliano, and about twelve miles from the former
town to the sea. Compare, also, the picture of the same country,
in the work by a French officer, referred to in a previous note,
“Calabria during a Military Residence of three years,” London,
1832, Letter xxii, pp. 219-226.

Hekatæus (c. 39, ed. Klausen) calls Cosa,—Κόσσα, πόλις Οἰνωτρῶν
ἐν μεσογαίᾳ. Cosa is considered to be identical, seemingly
on good grounds, with the modern Cassano (Cæsar, Bell. Civ.
iii, 22): assuming this to be correct, there must have been an
Œnotrian dependent town within eight miles of the ancient city of
Sybaris.

[755] Diodor xii, 9.

[756] Athenæus, xii, p. 519.

[757] Herodot. vi, 21. Respecting the great abundance of
ship-timber in the territory of the Italiots (Italian Greeks),
see Thucyd. vi, 90; vii, 25.

The pitch from the pine forests in the Sila was also abundant and
celebrated (Strabo, vi, p. 261).

[758] Herodot. iii, 138.

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.

[759] Athenæus, xii, p. 519.

[760] Festus, v. bilingues Brutates.

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.

[761] Strabo, vi, p. 262.

[762] Jamblichus, Vit. Pythagor. c. 9, p. 33; c. 35, p. 210.

[763] Athenæus, xii, 541.

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]

[764] This date depends upon Timæus (as quoted by Skymnus Chius,
210) and Solinus; there seems no reason for distrusting it,
though Thucydidês (i, 13) and Isokratês (Archidamus, p. 316)
seem to conceive Massalia as founded by the Phokæans about 60
years later, when Ionia was conquered by Harpagus (see Bruckner,
Historia Reip. Massiliensium, sect. 2, p. 9, Raoul Rochette,
Histoire des Colonies Grecques, vol. iii, pp. 405-413, who,
however, puts the arrival of the Phokæans, in these regions and
at Tartêssus much too early).

[765] Aristotle, Μασσαλιώτων πολιτεῖα, ap. Athenæum, xiii, p.
576; Justin, xliii, 3. Plutarch (Solon, c. 2) seems to follow the
same story as Justin.

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.

[766] Strabo, iv, pp. 179-182: Justin, xliii, 4-5; Cicero, Pro
Flacco. 26. It rather appears from Aristotle (Polit. v, 5, 2; vi,
4-5), that the senate was originally a body completely close,
which gave rise to discontent on the part of wealthy men not
included in it: a mitigation took place by admitting into it,
occasionally, men selected from the latter.

Some authors seem to have accused the Massaliots of luxurious and
effeminate habits (see Athenæus, xii, p. 523).