Italy from the Alps to Mount Etna . ter it passed to theCarthaginians, and thenceforward disappears from history. A swamp occupies the siteof it. Farther to the south the names of Sybaris and Croton sound like a faint echo fromold times. Sybaris to which in that dim antiquity five-and-twenty important cities weresubject even as far as Poseidonia, which could bring three hundred thousand men into thefield, and was inhabited by a hundred thousand luxurious Greeks,—Sybaris is now amiserable village ; Palinore, and its marble palaces are buried in the swamp. Croton too LUCANIA, APULIA, AND CALABRI
Italy from the Alps to Mount Etna . ter it passed to theCarthaginians, and thenceforward disappears from history. A swamp occupies the siteof it. Farther to the south the names of Sybaris and Croton sound like a faint echo fromold times. Sybaris to which in that dim antiquity five-and-twenty important cities weresubject even as far as Poseidonia, which could bring three hundred thousand men into thefield, and was inhabited by a hundred thousand luxurious Greeks,—Sybaris is now amiserable village ; Palinore, and its marble palaces are buried in the swamp. Croton too LUCANIA, APULIA, AND CALABRIA. 443 with its boasting proverb The last of the Crotonites is the first of the Greeks, of whichit was said : Alia: urbes, si ad Crotoncm conferuntur, vana? nihilquc sunt. Croton, too, (or Cotrone as it is now called) is but the shadow of a shade. It is builtclose to the waters of the Ionian sea, and seems to be slowly dying of dulness. The onlyremnants of bygone splendours are a solitary Doric column, and a bit of broken masonry. ON THE BUSENTO NEAR COSENZA. at Cape Nau, where around the lighthouse are grouped a few villas of the Crotonese whocome there for the summer. These are all abodes of melancholy. And what is the posterity of the Achaiens andSpartans like ? Who among them knows anything of the school of Pythagoras ? Whathas become of the wise and beautiful laws which Croton obeyed in purity of morals ?The sullen peasant, his pointed brigand hat on his head, a gun at his back, slinks throughthe fields of an alien master, and cowers with his fever-stricken family in a wretched mudhovel, leading an almost inhuman existence. The Calabrese of the present day,—thegreat mass of the uncultivated population,—displays no trace of Hellenism. He mightwell derive his rude manners and customs, his tendency to blood and murder, from thatrough and barbarous people the Brettii, the disloyal deserters, who were declared by theRomans to be slaves of the State. The Calabria of to-day
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Keywords: ., bookauthorcavagnasangiulianidig, bookcentury1800, bookdecade1870
