Since about the ninth century B.C. the Greeks began to wander forth from Hellas and to plant colonies all round the Mediterranean. So they came to Sicily and the lower part of Italy. Cumæ (Κύμη) is said to be the earliest Greek colony on Italian soil; this seems to have existed already by the year 800 B.C. It was colonized by the people of Chalkis in Euboea.[1] In 735 B.C. Theokles of Chalkis founded the city of Naxos[2] in Sicily, and there set up an altar to Apollo the Guide. Then came the Dorians under Archias of Corinth and laid the first foundation of what was to become the great Greek city Syracuse, in 736. Messana was founded soon afterwards, and gradually all the sea-coast of Sicily was covered with Greek cities. Tarentum, Locri, and Rhegium followed on the main coast. Calabria and Apulia became so much a centre of Greek life that they were Greater Greece. The same process was taking place all round the Mediterranean. The Greeks never wandered very far from the coast; they planted their colonies in barbarian lands near the sea, and so made centres of Greek influence for the country behind them.
These Greek cities round the Mediterranean were not politically united to the Motherland. Each was an independent state; but they were always conscious of their union with all other Greeks in race, language, and religion. All looked upon themselves as one people. The Greek states in Sicily and Lower Italy took their part in the quarrels of the Greeks at home in Hellas. The famous story of the siege of Syracuse marks the end of the power of Athens. Syracuse had taken the Spartan side in the Peloponnesian war. Alcibiades made the fatal mistake of sending a fleet to subdue the distant city when Athens needed all her resources nearer home. They besieged Syracuse in 414-413 B.C., and the siege ended in the most disastrous defeat for them. The Syracusans put the Athenian generals, Nikias and Demosthenes, to death, and shut up the Athenian prisoners in the quarries still shown on the hillside of Epipolai, till they died of want and disease. All of which may be read in Thucydides.[3]
During the centuries that followed the establishment of these Greek colonies they hellenized the barbarians around
- ↑ So it is the "Euboean Cumæ," "Et tandem Euboicis Cumarum allabitur oris" (Æn. vi, 2).
- ↑ Just south of Taormina.
- ↑ "Hist.," Bk. vi-vii.
by W. P. Dickson, Macmillan, 1908, vol. i, pp. 11-13). For the few remnants of these peoples' languages see R. S. Conway, "The Italic Dialects," Cambridge, 2 vols., 1897.
