Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/54

34 our regarding them as belonging to its Latin branch, although the Hellenizing of these districts that took place even before the commencement of the political development of Italy, and their subsequent inundation by Samnite hordes, have in this instance totally obliterated all traces of the older nationality. Very ancient legends also bring the similarly extinct stock of the Siculi into connection with Rome. For instance, the earliest historian of Italy, Antiochus of Syracuse, tells us that a man named Sikelos came a fugitive from Rome to Morges king of Italia (i. e., the Bruttian peninsula). Such stories appear to be founded on the identity of race recognized by the narrators as subsisting between the Siculi (of whom there were some still in Italy in the time of Thucydides) and the Latins. The striking affinity of certain dialectic peculiarities of Sicilian Greek with the Latin is probably to be explained rather by the old commercial connections subsisting between Rome and the Sicilian Greeks, than by the ancient identity of the languages of the Siculi and the Romans. According to all indications, however, not only Latium, but probably also the Campanian and Lucanian districts, Italia proper between the gulfs of Tarentum and Laos, and the eastern half of Sicily, were in primitive times inhabited by different branches of the Latin nation.

Destinies very dissimilar awaited these different branches. Those settled in Sicily, Magna Græcia, and Campania came into contact with the Greeks at a period when they were unable to offer resistance to a civilization so superior, and were either completely Hellenized, as in the case of Sicily, or at any rate so weakened that they succumbed without marked resistance to the fresh energy of the Sabine tribes. In this way the Siculi, the Itali and Morgetes, and the Ausonians, never came to play an active part in the history of the peninsula. It was otherwise with Latium. No Greek colonies were founded there, and its inhabitants, after hard struggles, were successful in maintaining their ground against the Sabines as well as against their northern neighbours. Let us cast a glance at this district which was destined more than any other to influence the fortunes of the ancient world.

The plain of Latium must have been in primeval times the scene of the grandest conflicts of nature, while the slowly formative agency of water deposited, and the eruptions of