Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/413

 H'HTILE LANDS OF SYi'.ARI*. 397 inexhaustible capacities may exist in vain. That luxury, which Grecian moralists denounced in the leading Sybarites, between 560 and 510 B. c., was the result of acquisitions vigorously and industriously pushed, and kept together by an orderly central force, during a century and a half that the colony had existed. Though the Trcezenian settlers who formed a portion of the orig- inal emigrants had been expelled when the Achteans became more numerous, yet we ar3 told that, on the whole, Sybaris was liberal in the reception of new emigrants to the citizenship, 1 and that this was one of the causes of its remarkable advance. Of these additional comers, we may presume that many went to form its colonies on the Mediterranean sea, and some to settle both among its four dependent inland nations, and its twenty-five sub- ject towns. Five thousand horsemen, we are told, clothed in showy attire, formed the processional march in certain Sybaritic festivals, a number which is best appreciated by comparison with the fact, that the knights or horsemen of Athens, in her best days, did not exceed twelve hundred. The Sybaritic horses, if we are to believe a story purporting to come from Aristotle, were taught to move at the sound of the flute ; and the garments of these wealthy citizens were composed of the finest wool from Miletus in Ionia, 2 the Tarentlne wool not having then acquired the distinguished renown which it possessed five centuries after- wards towards the close of the Roman republic. Next to the great abundance of home produce, corn, wine, oil, flax, cattle, fish, timber, etc., the fact next in importance which we hear respecting Sybaris is, the great traffic carried on with Miletus : these two cities were more intimately and affectionately connect- ed together than any two Hellenic cities within the knowledge of Herodotus. 3 The tie between Tarentum and Knidus was also of a very intimate character, 4 so that the great intercourse, per- sonal as well as commercial, between the Asiatic and the Italic
 * Diodor xii, 9. * Athenacus, xii, p. 519.

1 Ilerodot. vi, 21. Inspecting tie great abundance of ship-timber in the territory of the Italiots (Italian Greeks), see Thucyd. vi, 90 ; vii, 2">. The pitch from the pine forests in the Sila was also abundant and cele- brated (Strabo, vi, p. 261 ). 4 Ilerodot. iii, 138.