quiet. This peaceful disposition could not be caused by shortsightedness. The Samnites saw the danger which threatened them from the north, but their strength was at this time required for a new enemy who came from the south and threw the whole of lower Italy into a state of excitement. Alexander, the prince of the Molossians, had landed in Italy, with a Greek army, and appeared to be going to found a great Greek empire on its shores, as his nephew, the great Alexander, did in the East. CHAP. VIII 337-326 B.C. Up to this period no direct political intercourse had Alexander of Epirus taken place between Rome and Greece. All the stories in Italy. of former relations of the Romans to the Greeks are open to doubt and suspicion. Now, however, the Romans had come into contact with the Greeks in Campania, and the appearance of Alexander in Italy was the first event by which the Greeks influenced Roman affairs. This seems, therefore, a proper place to cast a glance over that part of the peninsula where Greek colonies had been planted, and which becomes visible more and more as the horizon of Roman history widens. CHAPTER IX. THE GREEK SETTLEMENTS IN ITALY. ITALY and Sicily were for the poet of the Odyssey still the fabulous land of one-eyed giants and savages, of seanymphs and enchantresses, of unapproachable rocks and whirlpools. In those parts near the setting sun was the entrance to the realm of shadows, where the world of the living was in immediate contiguity with the dwelling-place of departed spirits. But by degrees the mist which had hidden the west from the eyes of the Greeks began to pass away. The time came when Hellenic mariners, seeking plunder and profit, explored the seas from east to west, in increasing rivalry with the first and boldest navigators of antiquity, the Phoenicians. The news reached Greece of a large and beautiful country on the other side of the Ionian sea, rich in luxuriant pastures and far-spreading plains, such as the poor mother country did not contain among her bare mountain chains. Numbers of bold adventurers now poured across the sea from every part of Greece to found new homes in the beautiful country of the west. The coast of sunny Sicily was soon covered on the east and west with Greek colonies; in Italy they stretched from the beautiful Gulf of Campania to the innermost parts of that of Tarentum. The highly gifted Hellenic races quickly reached a high degree of prosperity in their new settlements, and it seemed as if a new and a larger Greece was about to flourish on Italian soil. Sybaris, Croton, Rhegium, Metapontum, Tarentum, and a number of other settlements in the southern parts of Italy vied with the Sicilian towns IX. of Syracuse, Gela, Agrigentum, Leontini, Naxos, Messana CHAP. and others in the arts of peace and war, and in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. far outstripped the mother country in wealth, population, and magnificence. They subdued the country from the coast inwards, and ruled over the native races. The extraordinary prosperity which the Greek towns in Italy and Sicily had reached is evident even now from the splendid ruins of their edifices. We can form a faint conception of what must have been the grandeur of Agrigentum, Syracuse, Croton, Sybaris, and Tarentum from the imposing ruins which fill the traveller with awe, admiration, and mournful regret, on the site of Posidonia or Pæstum, one of the most insignificant of all the Greek cities.1 of Greek With all their energy and activity, the Greeks were Character wanting in the ability to work out a stable form of govern- polity. ment or a grand comprehensive national polity. They knew of no division or limitation in the exercise of sovereign power, no subjection of the individual will to law, no dominion over others but that of force. They pushed the rights of the individual to the extreme, and they never acknowledged in the just claims of others a barrier to their own desires. Sparta was considered in Greece, by the wisest and best men, as the most perfect realisation of an ideal state. And yet the law in Sparta sanctioned the continuance of inhuman violence. The Spartan institutions were a permanent outrage on the noblest instincts of humanity; they secured order at the cost of justice, culture, and the more refined and dignified enjoyments of life. Where the same iron despotism could not be inforced as in Sparta, public life was one constant struggle between the aristocratic and democratic parties, both of which with equal recklessness, with equal contempt of divine and human laws, expected peace, salvation, and prosperity for themselves only from the complete subjection or annihilation of their antagonists. The same feelings which 1 Compare Droysen, Gesch. des Hellenismus, ii. 91. BOOK III. Political isolation of the Greek colonies. animated the civil contests in each separate community inspired the international policy of the Greek states. Every conquest of land led to the enslavement of the conquered, not to the real extension of the mother town by the admission of new citizens. Thus Sparta incapacitated herself to unite the Greek races under her strong shield, for she degraded the conquered into Helots. Athens failed in her attempt to form a strong confederation, for she was only intent on making profit from her allies. Hence arose the desperate courage with which every Greek town defended itself, and that wonderful energy of the separate states, which rendered the formation of larger states impossible. With the virtues of their race, the Italian Greeks had also brought their vices to their new homes. Had they joined for common action either in Sicily or Italy—nay, had they only refrained from mutually lacerating one another -they might have hellenised the whole country, and have found in Italy the broad basis for a Greek empire. Perhaps Greek civilisation might have prevailed over Italian barbarism, and, instead of a Roman, a Greek empire have extended itself along all the coasts of the Mediterranean. But that was not to be; the prosperity to which the Greek settlers had attained in Italy in two centuries, suffered, after many partial interruptions, the first heavy blow by the war which, about 500 B.C., broke out between the two neighbouring towns of Sybaris and Croton, and ended in the total destruction of Sybaris. This war was succeeded by a bloody revolution in the victorious city of Croton, by which the aristocratic party, and with it the political sect of the Pythagoreans, were expelled. Thus weakened, Croton suffered, in a war with the neighbouring Greeks of Locri and Rhegium, a defeat at the river Sagra, from which it never again fully recovered. Through such struggles, the Greek nationality in Italy declined. The aboriginal population of the country, the Messapians and the Sabellian tribes, the Lucanians and the Bruttians, which were spread over the south of Italy, were encouraged to a more vigorous resistance against the Greek settlers. The Greeks in Sicily frequently made common cause with them against their own countrymen. Thus in the wars of rapine and plunder with which the elder Dionysius visited the Italian coast, Rhegium was destroyed and the inhabitants were sold as slaves. CHAP. IX. of Alex In these troubles the Italian Greeks turned for help to Schemes the mother country, but without renouncing even now the ander of jealousy, the ambition, and the hostilities amongst them- Epirus. selves which were destined here, as everywhere, to be so fatal to their freedom. Of all the Greek settlements on Italian ground Tarentum was perhaps the most favourably situated. By an active industry and an extensive trade it had raised itself to a condition of great wealth, and it enjoyed a comparative security from hostile attacks. But Tarentum also felt the effect of the calamities which visited all the Greek towns, and she found it more and more difficult to defend her independence from the Italian nations. In vain the Tarentines called the Spartan king Archidamus to their assistance. At the time when Rome came forth victorious from the war with the Latins, Archidamus fell in a battle against the Lucanians. The Tarentines now applied to Alexander, the prince of the Molossians in Epirus, brother of Olympias and uncle of Alexander the Great. The time had arrived when the genuine Hellenes began to languish, and when the rude vigorous half-castes in the north of Greece, the Macedonians and the Epirots, seemed to be called upon to propagate the civilisation of Greece over the world. While Philip of Macedon and his great son gathered together in their hands the forces of Greece, and were about to direct them towards the East, the spirited princes of Epirus conceived a plan equally bold and equally worthy of success in endeavouring to unite the Italian and Sicilian Greek towns into a powerful state, and to found a Greek empire of the West. But here, on Italian ground, they met with races who, unlike the enervated Asiatics, did not submit their neck to the yoke, but maintained their freedom with |