mariners of Epidamnus and Apollonia frequently discharged their cargoes at Tarentum. The Tarentines had also much intercourse with Apulia by land; all the Greek civilization to be met with in the south-east of Italy owed its existence to them. That civilization, however, was during the present period only in its infancy; it was not until a later epoch that the Hellenism of Apulia became developed.
Relations of the Western Italians to the Greeks. It cannot be doubted, on the other hand, that the west coast of Italy northward of Vesuvius was frequented in very early times by the Hellenes, and that there were Hellenic factories on its promontories and islands. Probably the earliest evidence of such voyages is the localizing of the legend of Odysseus on the coasts of the Tyrrhene Sea.[1] When men discovered the isle of Æolus in the Lipari ids, when they pointed out at the Lacinian Cape the Isle of Calypso, at the Cape of Misenum that of the Sirens, at the Cape of Circeii that of Circe, when they recognized in the steep promontory of Terracina the towering mound of Elpenor, when the Læstrygones were provided with haunts near Caieta and Formiæ, when the two sons of Ulysses and Circe Agrius, that is the "wild," and Latinus were made to rule over the Tyrrhenes in the "inmost recess of the holy islands," or according to a more recent conception Latinus called the son of Ulysses and Circe, and Auson the son of Ulysses and Calypso—we recognize in these legends ancient sailors' tales of the seafarers of Ionia, who thought of their native home as they traversed the Tyrrhene Sea. The same noble vividness of feeling which pervades the Ionic poem of the voyages of Odysseus is discernible in this fresh localization of its legend at Cumæ itself and throughout the regions frequented by the Cumæan mariners.
Other traces of such very ancient voyages are to be found in the Greek name of the island Æthalia (Ilva, Elba), which appears to have been (after Ænaria) one of the places earliest occupied by Greeks, perhaps also in that of the seaport Telamon in Etruria; and further in the two towns on
- ↑ Among Greek writers, this Tyrrhene legend of Odysseus makes its earliest appearance in the Theogony of Hesiod in one of its more recent sections, and then in authors of the period shortly before Alexander, Ephorus (from whom the so-called Scymnus drew his materials), and the writer known as Scylax. The first of these sources belongs to an age when Italy was still regarded by the Greeks as a group of islands, and is certainly therefore very ancient; so that the origin of these legends may, on the whole, be confidently placed in the regal period of Rome.
