Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/390

 ,374 HISTORY OF GRIir.CE to one remarkable attempt, made by a native Sikel prince iu the 82d Olympiad (455 B. c.), the enterprising Duketius, to group /nany petty Sikel villages into one considerable town, and thus to raise his countrymen into the Grecian stage of polity and organ- ization. Had there been any Sikel prince endowed with these superior ideas at the time when the Greeks first settled in Sicily, the subsequent history of the island would probably have been very different ; but Duketius had derived his projects from the spectacle of the Grecian towns around him, and these latter had acquired much too great power to permit him to succeed. The description of his abortive attempt, however, which we find in Diodorus, 1 meagre as it is, forms an interesting point in the history of the island. Grecian colonization in Italy began nearly at the same time as in Sicily, and was marked by the same general circumstances. Placing ourselves at Rhegium (now Reggio) on the Sicilian strait, we trace Greek cities gradually planted on various points of the coast as far as Cumai on the one sea, and Tarentum (Taranto) on the other. Between the two seas runs the lofty chain of the Apennines, calcareous in the upper part of its course, through- out middle Italy, granitic and schistose in the lower part, where it traverses the territories now called the hither and the farther Calabria. The plains and valleys on each side of the Cal- abrian Apennines exhibit a luxuriance of vegetation extolled by all observers, and surpassing even that of Sicily ; 2 and great as 1 I>iodor. xi, 90-91 ; xii, 9. ITf'fl, in Pinkerton, Collection of Voyages and Travels, vol. v, p. 280. "It is impossible (he observes) to form an adequate idea of the fertility of Calabria Ultra, particularly of that part called the Plain (south-west of tho Apennines, below the gulf of St Eufemia). The fields, productive of olive-trees of larger growth than any seen elsewhere, are yet productive of grain. Vines load with their branches the trees on which they grow, yet leraen 7iot their crops. All things grow there, and nature seems to anticipate tbe wishes of the husbandman. There is never a sufficiency of hands to gather the whole of the olives, which finally fall and rot at the bottom of the trees that bore them, in the months of February and March. Crowds of foreigners, principally Sicilian}, come there to help to gather them, and share the produce with the grower. Oil is their chief article of exportation : io every quarter their wines arc good and precious." Compare pp 278-232.
 * See Dolomieu, Dissertation on the Earthquakes of Calabria Ultra, in