Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/166

146 While on the one side of the Straits of Rhegium the whole southern coast of the mainland and its western coast as far as Vesuvius, and on the other the larger eastern half of the island of Sicily, were Greek territory, the west coast of Italy to the north of Vesuvius, and the whole of the east coast were in a position essentially different. No Greek settlements arose on the Italian seaboard of the Adriatic; a fact which has an evident connection with the comparatively trifling number and subordinate importance of the Greek colonies planted on the opposite Illyrian shore and its numerous adjacent islands. There were indeed two considerable mercantile towns, Epidamnus (afterwards Dyrrachium, now Durazzo, ) and Apollonia (near Avlona, about ) founded upon the portion of this coast nearest to Greece during the regal period of Rome; but no old Greek colony can be pointed out further to the north, with the exception perhaps of the insignificant settlement at Black Corcyra (Curzola, about 174? ). No adequate explanation has yet been given why the Greek colonization developed itself in this direction to so meagre an extent. Nature herself appeared to direct the Hellenes thither, and in fact from the earliest times there existed a regular traffic to that region from Corinth, and still more from the settlement at Corcyra (Corfu) founded not long after Rome (about ); a traffic whose emporia on the Italian coast were the towns of Spina and Hatria, situated at the mouth of the Po. The storms of the Adriatic, the inhospitable character at least of the Illyrian coasts, and the barbarism of the natives are manifestly not in themselves sufficient to explain this fact. But it was a circumstance fraught with the most momentous consequences for Italy, that the elements of civilization which came from the east did not exert their influence on its eastern provinces directly, but reached them only through the medium of those that lay to the west. The Adriatic commerce carried on by Corinth and Corcyra was shared by the most easterly mercantile city of Magna Græcia, the Doric Tarentum, which by the possession of Hydrus (Otranto) had the command, on the Italian side, of the entrance of the Adriatic. Since, with the exception of the ports at the mouth of the Po, there were in those times no emporia worthy of mention along the whole east coast (the rise of Ancona belongs to a far later period, and later still the rise of Brundisium), it is very probable that the