Page:History of Greece Vol III.djvu/414

398 HISTORY OF GCKECE. Greeks, appears as a marked fact in the history of the sixth century before the Christian era. In this respect, as well as in several others, the Hellenic world wears a very different aspect in 560 B. c. from that which it as- sumed a century afterwards, and in which it is best known to modern readers. At the former period, the Ionic and Italic Greeks are the great ornaments of the Hellenic name, and car- ried on a more lucrative trade with each other, than either of them maintained with Greece proper ; which both of them re cognized as their mother-country, though without admitting any- thing in the nature of established headship. The military power of Sparta is indeed at this time great and preponderant in Pelo- ponnesus, but she has no navy, and she is only just essaying her strength, not without reluctance, in ultramarine interference. After the lapse of a century, these circumstances change ma- terially. The independence of the Asiatic Greeks is destroyed, and the power of the Italic Greeks is greatly broken ; while Sparta and Athens not only become the prominent and leading Hellenic states, but constitute themselves centres of action for the lesser cities, to a degree previously unknown. It was during the height of their prosperity, seemingly, in the sixth century B. c., that the Italian Greeks either acquired for, or bestowed upon, their territory the appellation of Magna Grrccia, which at that time it well deserved ; for not only were Sybaris and Kroton then the greatest Grecian cities situated near togeth- er, but the whole peninsula of Calabria may be considered as at- tached to the Grecian cities on the coast. The native CEnotrians and Sikels occupying the interior had become Hellenized, or semi-Hellenized, with a mixture of Greeks among them, com- mon subjects of these great cities ; so that the whole extent of the Calabrian peninsula, within the line which joins Sybaris with Poseidonia, might then be fairly considered as Hellenic territory. Sybaris maintained much traffic with the Tuscan towns in thu Mediterranean, and the communication between Greece and Rome, across the Calabrian isthmus, 1 may perhaps have been easier during the time of the Roman kings whose expulsion was nearly contemporaneous with the ruin of Sybaris than it 1 Athenicus, xii, p. 519.