Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/372

 35G HISTORY OF GREECE. to the Opicians or Oscans, or to the lapygians may be ealiei Pelasgic, for want of a better name ; but, by whatever name it be called, the recognition of its existence connects and explains many isolated circumstances in the early history of Rome as well as in that of the Italian and Sicilian Greeks. The earliest Grecian colony in Italy or Sicily, of which we know the precise date, h placed about 735 B. c., eighteen years subsequent to the Varronian era of Rome ; so that the causes, tending to subject and Hellenize the Sikel population in the south- ern region, begin their operation nearly at the same time as those which tended gradually to exalt and aggrandize the modi- fied variety of it which existed in Latium. At that time, ac- cording to the information given to Thucydides, the Sikels had been established for three centuries in Sicily : Hellanikus and Philistus who both recognized a similar migration into that island out of Italy, though they give different names, both to the emigrants and to those who expelled them assign to the mi- gration a date three generations before the Trojan war. 1 Earlier than 735 B. c., however, though we do not know the precise era of its commencement, there existed one solitary Grecian estab- lishment in the Tyrrhenian sea, the Campanian Curnag, near cape Misenum ; which the more common opinion of chronologists supposed to have been founded in 1050 B. c., and which has even been carried back by some authors to 1139 B. c.' 2 Without re- posing any faith in this early chronology, we may at least fe^ certain that it is the most ancient Grecian establishment in an part of Italy, and that a considerable time elapsed before any other Greek colonists were bold enough to cut themselves ofl from the Hellenic world by occupying seats on the other side of 1 Thucyd. vi, 2 ; Philistus, Frag. 2, ed. Didot. Rochcttc, assuming a different computation of the date of the Trojan war, pushes the date of Cumae still farther back to 1139 u. c. (Histoire dcs Colonies Grecqucs, book iv, c. 12, p. 100 ) The mythes of Cumae extended to a period preceding the Chalkidic settlement. See the stories of Aristocus and Daedalus ap. Sallust. Fragment Incert. p. 204, ed. Delphin.; and Scrvius ad Virgil. JEneid. vi, 17. Tha fabulous Thespiadoe, or primitive Greek settlers in Sardinia, were supposed in early ages to have left that island and retired to Humte (Diodor. v, 15).
 * Strabo, v, p. 243 ; Vellcius Patercul. i, 5 ; Eusebius, p 121. M. Raonl