Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/409

 ASCENDENCY OF ITALIAN GREEKS. 393 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. 1 It Avas not by arms alone, but by arms and arts combined, a mingled influ- ence, such as enabled imperial Rome to subdue the fierceness of the rude Germans and Britons, that the Sybarites and Kroton- iates 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 cloth- ing, 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 Here, or even at the Olympic games in Peloponnesus. 2 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 popu- lation 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 CEnotrians, while unable to combine in resisting Greek force, were at the same time less widely distin- guished 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 lapygians modified by the neighborhood of Tarentum, in the same degree as the tribes ad- joining to Sybaris and Krotun were by their contact with those cities. The dialect of Tarentum, 3 as well as of Herakleia, 1 See a description of the French military operations in these almost inac- cessible 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 earned on, proba- bly, in the mountains of the Sila. 3 Suidas, v, TnnJuv ; Stephan. Byz. v, Tupac : compare Bernhardy, Gnu* 17*
 * See Thcokritus, Idyll, iv. G-35. which illustrates the point here stated.