The History of Greece from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Hellenistic Age. John Bagnell Bury
is to be found in some later passages of the Odyssey, which should perhaps be referred to the eighth century. There we meet with the Sicels, and with the sland of Sicania; while Temesa, where Greek traders could buy Tuscan copper, has the distinction of being the first Italian place mentioned by name in a literary record. By the end of the seventh century Greek states stood thick on the east coast of Sicily and round the sweep of the Tarentine Gulf. These colonies naturally fall into three groups:
(1) The Euboean, which were both in Sicily and in Italy.
(2) The Achaean, which were altogether on Italian soil.
(3) The Dorian, which were, with few exceptions, in Sicily.
The chronology is uncertain, and we cannot say whether the island or the mainland was first colonised.
The oldest stories of the adventures of Odysseus were laid, as we have seen, in the half-explored regions of the Black Sea. Nothing shows more impressively the life of this poetry, and the power it had won over the hearts of the Greek folks, than the fact that when the navigation of the Italian and Sicilian seas began, these adventures were transferred from the east to the west; and in the further growth of this cycle of poems a new mythical geography was adopted. At a time when the Greeks knew so little of Italy that the southern promontories could be designated as “sacred islands”, the straits of Messana were identified with Scylla and Charybdis, Lipara became the island of Aeolus, the home of the Cyclopes was found in the fiery mount of Aetna. Then Scheria, the isle of the Phaeacians, was fancied to be Corcyra; an entrance to the underworld was placed at Cumae; and the rocks of the Sirens were sought near Sorrento. And not only did the first glimpses of western geography affect the transmutation of the Odyssey into its final shape, but the Odyssey reacted on the geography of the west. That the promontory of Circei in Latin territory bears the name of the sorceress of Colchis, is an evidence of the spell of Homeric song. Odysseus was not the only hero who was borne westward with Greek ships in the eighth century. Cretan Minos and Daedalus, for example, had links with Sicily. Above all, the earliest navigation of the western seas was ascribed to Heracles, who reached the limits of the land of the setting sun, and stood on the ledge of the world looking out upon the stream of Oceanus. From him the opposite cliffs which form the gate of the Mediterranean were called the Pillars of Heracles.
The earliest colony founded by Greek sailors in the western seas was said to have been Cyme on the coast of Campania. Tradition assigned to it an origin before 1000 BC, a date which modern criticism has decidedly rejected. But though we place its origin in the eighth century, the tradition that it was the earliest Greek city founded in the middle peninsula of the Mediterranean may possibly be true. It was at all events one of the oldest, and it had an unique position. Chalcis, Eretria, and Cyme a town on the eastern coast of Euboea, which at that time had some eminence but afterwards sunk into the obscurity of a village, joined together, and enlisted for their expedition some Graeans who dwelled on the opposite mainland in the neighbourhood of Tanagra. The colonisers settled first on the island of Pithecusae, and soon succeeded in establishing themselves on a rocky height which rises above the sea just where the Italian coast is about to turn sharply eastward to encircle the bay of Naples. The site was happily chosen. It was a strong post, and though there was no harbour, the strangers could haul up their ships on a stretch of sand below. Subsequently they occupied the harbour which was just inside the promontory, and established there the town of Dicaearchia, which afterwards became Puteoli; farther east they founded Naples, “the new city”.
The people in whose midst this outpost of Greek civilisation was planted were the Opicans, one of the chief branches of the Italic race. The colonists were eminently successful in their intercourse with the natives; and the solitary position of Cyme in these regions—for no Greek settlement could be made northward on account of the great Etruscan power, and there was no rival southward until the later plantation of Posidonia—made her influence both wide and noiseless. Her external history is uneventful; there are no striking wars or struggles to record; but the work she did holds an important and definite place in the history of European civilisation. To the Euboeans of Cyme we may say that we owe the alphabet which we use to-day, for it was from them that the Latins learned to write. The Etruscans also got their alphabet independently from the same masters, and, having modified it in certain ways to suit themselves, passed it onto the Oscans and Umbrians. Again, the Cymaeans introduced the neighbouring Italian peoples to a knowledge of the Greek gods and Greek religion. Heracles, Apollo, Castor, and Polydeuces became such familiar names in Italy that they came to be regarded as original Italian deities. The oracles of the Cymaean Sibyl, prophetess of Apollo, were believed to contain the destinies of Rome.
To Cyme, too, western Europe probably owes the name by which she calls Hellas and the Hellenes. The Greeks, when they first came into contact with Latins, had no common name; Hellenes, the name which afterwards united them, was as yet merely associated with a particular tribe. It was only natural that strangers should extend the name of the first Greeks with whom they came in contact to others whom they fell in with later, and so to all Greeks whatsoever. But the curious circumstance is that the settlers of Cyme were known, not by the name of Chalcis or Eretria or Cyme itself, but by that of Graia. Graii was the term which the Latins and their fellows applied to the colonists, and the name Graeci is a derivative of a usual type from Graii. It was doubtless some trivial accident which ruled that we to-day call Hellas “Greece”, instead of knowing it by some name derived from Cyme, Eretria, or Chalcis. The west has got its “Greece” from an obscure district in Boeotia; Greece itself got its “Hellas “from a small territory in Thessaly. This was accidental. But it was no accident that western Europe calls Greece by a name connected with that city in which Greeks first came into touch with the people who were destined to civilise western Europe and rule it for centuries.
The next settlement of the Euboean Greeks was on Sicilian, not Italian, ground. The island of Sicily is geographically a continuation of Italy—just as the Peloponnesus is a continuation of the great eastern peninsula; but its historical importance depends much more on another geographical fact. It is the centre of the Mediterranean; it parts the eastern from the western waters. It has been thus marked out by nature as a meeting-place of nations; and the struggle between European and Asiatic peoples, which has been called the “Eternal Question”, has been partly fought out on Sicilian soil. There has been in historical times no native Sicilian power. The greatness of the island was due to colonisation—not migration—from other lands. Lying as a connecting link between Europe and Africa, it attracted settlers from both sides; while its close proximity to Italy always rendered it an object of acquisition to those who successively ruled in that peninsula.
The earliest inhabitants of the island were the Sicans. They believed themselves to be autochthonous, and we have no record at what time they entered the island or whence they came or to what race they belonged. The nature of things makes it probable that they entered from Italy. From them the island was called Sicania. The next comers were the Sicels, of whom we can speak with more certainty. As we find Sicels in the toe of Italy, we know that tradition correctly described them as settlers from the Italian peninsula, and there is some slight evidence to show that they spoke the same language as that group of Italic peoples, to which the Latins belonged. The likeness of the names Sicel and Sican has naturally led to the view that these two folks were akin in race and language. But likeness of names is deceptive; and it is a remarkable fact that the Greeks, who were only too prone to build up theories on resemblances of words, always carefully distinguished the Sican from the Sicel as ethnically different. Still a connexion is possible, if we suppose that the Sicels were Sicans who remaining behind in Italy had in the course of centuries become Italicised by intercourse with the Latin and kindred peoples, and then, emigrating in their turn to the island, met without recognition the brethren from whom they had parted in the remote past. But all this is uncertain. The Sicels, however, wrested from the Sicans the eastern half of the island, which was thus cut up into two countries, Sicania in the west, Sicelia in the east. In the Odyssey we read of Sicania; perhaps the Greeks of Cyme knew it by this name. At a very early time Sicania was invaded by a mysterious people named Elymians, variously said to have come from Italy and from the north of Asia Minor. The probability is that they were of Iberian race. They occupied a small territory in the north-west of the island.
These were the three peoples who inhabited this