Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/165

Rh rendered the city the natural emporium for the traffic of the south of Italy, and for some portion even of the commerce of the Adriatic. The rich fisheries of its gulf, the production and manufacture of its excellent wool, and the dyeing of it with the purple juice of the Tarentine  which rivalled that of Tyre—both branches of industry introduced there from Miletus in Asia Minor—employed thousands of hands, and added to their carrying trade a traffic of export. The coins struck at Tarentum in greater numbers than anywhere else in Grecian Italy, many of them even composed of gold, furnish to us expressive attestation of the lively and widely extended commerce of the Tarentines. At this epoch, when Tarentum was still contending with Sybaris for the first place among the cities of Lower Italy, its extensive commercial connections must have been already forming; but the Tarentines seem never to have steadily and successfully directed their efforts to the extension of their territory after the manner of the Achæan cities.

While the most easterly of the Greek settlements in Italy thus rapidly rose into splendour, those which lay furthest to the north, in the neighbourhood of Vesuvius, attained a more moderate prosperity. There the Cumæans had crossed from the fertile island of Ænaria (Ischia) to the mainland, and had built a second home on a hill close by the sea, from whence they founded the seaport of Dicæarchia (afterwards Puteoli), and the cities of Parthenope and Neapolis. They lived, like the Chalcidian cities generally in Italy and Sicily, in conformity with the laws which Charondas of Catana (about ) had established, under a constitution democratic but modified by a high qualification, which placed power in the hands of a council of members selected from the wealthiest men—a constitution which proved lasting, and kept these cities free, upon the whole, from the tyranny alike of usurpers and of the mob. We know little as to the external relations of these Campanian Greeks. They remained, whether from necessity or from choice, confined to a district of even narrower limits than the Tarentines; and issuing from it, not for purposes of conquest and oppression, but to hold peaceful commercial intercourse with the natives, they created the means of a prosperous existence for themselves, and at the same time occupied the foremost place among the missionaries of Greek civilization in Italy.