III. The Greeks
Greek colonization. As early as the eighth century the Greeks had begun their colonizing activity in the western Mediterranean, and, in the course of the next two centuries, they had settled the eastern and southern shores of Sicily, stretched a chain of settlements on the Italian coast from Tarentum to the Bay of Naples, and established themselves at the mouth of the Rhone and on the Riviera. The opposition of Carthage shut them out from the western end of Sicily, and from Spain; the Etruscans closed to them Italy north of the Tiber; while the joint action of these two peoples excluded them from Sardinia and Corsica.
In the fifth century these Greek cities in Sicily and Italy were at the height of their power and prosperity. In Sicily they had penetrated from the coast far into the interior where they had brought the Sicels under their domination. By the victory of Himera, in 480 B. C., Gelon of Syracuse secured the Sicilian Greeks in the possession of the greater part of the island and freed them from all danger of Carthaginian invasion for over seventy years. Six years later, his brother and successor, Hieron, in a naval battle off Cyme, struck a crushing blow at the Etruscan naval power and delivered the mainland Greeks from all fear of Etruscan aggression. The extreme southwestern projection of the Italian peninsula had passed com[pg 20]pletely under Greek control, but north as far as Posidonia and east to Tarentum their territory did not extend far from the seaboard. In these areas they had occupied the territory of the Itali and Oenotrians, while on the north of the Bay of Naples Cyme, Dicaearchia, and Neapolis (Naples) were established in the land of the Opici (Osci). The name Great Greece, given by the Hellenes to South Italy, shows how firmly they were established there.
Lack of political unity. However, the Greeks possessed even less political cohesion than did the Etruscans. Each colony was itself a city-state, a sovereign independent community, owning no political allegiance to its mother city. Thus New Greece reproduced all the political characteristics of the Old. Only occasionally, in times of extreme peril, did even a part of the Greek cities lay aside their mutual jealousies and unite their forces in the common cause. Such larger political structures as the tyrants of Syracuse built up by the subjugation of other cities were purely ephemeral, barely outliving their founders. The individual cities also were greatly weakened by incessant factional strife within their walls. The result of this disunion was to restrict the Greek expansion and, eventually, to pave the way for the conquest of the western Greeks by the Italian “barbarians.”
The decline of the Greek power in Italy and Sicily. Even before the close of the fifth century, the decline of the Western Greeks had begun. In Italy their cities were subjected to repeated assaults from the expanding Samnite peoples of the central Apennines. In 421, Cyme fell into the hands of a Samnite horde, and from that time onwards the Greek cities further south were engaged in a struggle for existence with the Lucanians and the Bruttians, peoples of Samnite stock. In Sicily the Carthaginians renewed their assault upon the Greeks in 408 B. C. For a time (404–367) the genius and energy of Dionysius I, tyrant of Syracuse, welded the cities of the island and the mainland into an empire which enabled them to make head against their foes. But his empire had only been created by breaking the power of the free cities, and after his death they were left more disunited and weaker than ever. After further warfare, by 339, Carthage remained in permanent occupation of the western half of the island of Sicily, while in Italy only a few Greek towns, such as Tarentum, Thurii, and Rhegium, were able to maintain themselves, and that with ever increasing difficulty, against the rising tide of the [pg 21]Italians. Even by the middle of the fourth century an observant Greek predicted the speedy disappearance of the Greek language in the west before that of the Carthaginians or Oscans. However, their final struggles must be postponed for later consideration.
The rôle of the Greeks in Italian history. It was the coming of the Greeks that brought Italy into the light of history, and into contact with the more advanced civilization of the eastern Mediterranean. From the Greek geographers and historians we derive our earliest information regarding the Italian peoples, and they, too, shaped the legends that long passed for early Italian history. The presence of the Greek towns in Italy gave a tremendous stimulus to the cultural development of the Italians, both by direct intercourse and indirectly through the agency of the Etruscans. In this spreading of Greek influences, Cyme, the most northerly of the Greek colonies and one of the earliest, played a very important part. It was from Cyme that the Romans as well as the Etruscans took their alphabet. The more highly developed Greek political institutions, Greek art, Greek literature, and Greek mythology found a ready reception among the Italian peoples and profoundly affected their political and intellectual progress. Traces of this Greek influence are nowhere more noticeable than in the case of Rome itself, and the cultural ascendancy which Greece thus early established over Rome was destined to last until the fall of the Roman Empire.