THE TARENTINES. from that time forward, the lictor, having on the Persian robe, went round with the chief magistrate to all the altars every seventh day; not for the sake of luxury or insolence, but doing it for the purpose of insulting the Persians. But after this the men of Crotona, as Timæus says, attempted to put an end to the Assembly at Olympia, by appointing a meeting for games, with enormously rich prizes, to be held at exactly the same time as the Olympian games; but some say that the Sybarites did this.
23. But Clearchus, in the fourth book of his Lives, says that the people of Tarentum, being a very valiant and powerful people, carried their luxury to such a height, that they used to make their whole body smooth, and that they were the first people who set other nations an example of this smoothness. They also, says he, all wore very beautiful fringes on their garments; such as those with which now the life of woman is refined. And afterwards, being led on by their luxury to insolence, they overthrew a city of the Iapyges, called Carbina, and collected all the boys and maidens, and women in the flower of their age, out of it into the temples of the Carbinians; and building tents there, they exposed them naked by day for all who chose to come and look at them, so that whoever pleased, leaping, as it were, on this unfortunate band, might satiate his appetites with the beauty of those who were there assembled, in the sight of every one, and above all of the Gods, whom they were thinking of but little. And this aroused the indignation of the Deity, so that he struck all the Tarentines who behaved so impiously in Carbina with his thunderbolts. And even to this day at Tarentum every one of the houses has the same number of pillars before its doors as that of the people whom it received back of those who were sent to Iapygia. And, when the day comes which is the anniversary of their death, they do not bewail those who perished at those pillars, nor do they offer the libations which are customary in other cases, but they offer sacrifices to Jupiter the Thunderer.
24. Now the race of the Iapygians came originally from Crete, being descended from those Cretans who came to seek for Glaucus, and settled in that part of Italy; but afterwards, they, forgetting the orderly life of the Cretans, came to such a pitch of luxury, and from thence to such a degree
