The evidence that there was a foreign population in Calabria is satisfactory—the most definite fact being the statement that the Sallentines were partly Cretans, associated with Locrians and Illyrians. (See Calabria.)
Again, this district, wherein the legends concerning Diomed prevailed, was also the district of the Daunii, whom Festus (v. Daunia) connects with Illyria.
I suggest that, if the Calabri were Galabri, the Iapyges were Iapodes. Without enlarging upon the views that the definite recognition of Illyrian elements in Southern Italy suggests, we proceed to the next division of our subject.
2. Is there any connexion between the names Iapod-es and Iapet-us? The answer to this is to be found in the exposition of the criticism requisite for such problems. Special evidence there is none.
The first doctrine that presents itself to either the ethnologist or the historian of fiction, in connexion with the name Iapetus, is that it is the name of some eponymus—a name like Hellen, or Æolus, Ion, or Dorus. But this is opposed by the fact that no nation of any great historical prominence bears such a designation. Doubtless, if the Thracians, the Indians, the Ægyptians, &c. had been named Iapeti, the doctrine in question would have taken firm root, and that at once. But such is not the case.
May it not, however, have been borne by an obscure population? The name Greek was so born. So, at first, was the name Hellen. So, probably, the names to which we owe the wide and comprehensive terms Europe, Asia, Africa, and others. Admit then that it may have belonged to an obscure population;—next, admitting this, what name so like as that of the Iapodes? Of all known names (unless an exception be made in favour of the -gypt in Æ-gypt) it must be this or none. No other has any resemblance at all.
Who were on the confines of the non-Hellenic area? Iapyges on the west; Iapodes on the north-west. The suggested area was not beyond the limits of the Greek mythos. It was the area of the tales about Diomed. It was the area of the tales about Antenor. It was but a little to the north of the land of the Lapithæ, whose name, in its latter two-thirds, is I-apod. It ran in the direction of Orphic and Bacchic Thrace to the north. It ran in the direction of Cyclopæan and Lestrygonian Sicily to the west. It was on the borders of that terra incognita which so often supplies eponymi to unknown and mysterious generations.
Say that this suggestion prove true, and we have the first of the term Iapodes in Homer and Hesiod, the last in the German genealogies of the geography of Jornandes and in the Traveller's Song—unless, indeed, the modern name Schabacz be word for word, Gepid. In the Traveller's Song we get the word in a German form, Gifþe or Gifþas. The Gifþas are mentioned in conjunction with the Wends.
In Jornandes we get Gapt as the head of the Gothic genealogies:—Horum ergo (ut ipsi suis fabulis ferunt) primus fuit Gapt, qui genuit Halmal; Halmal vero genuit Augis, &c. Now Gapt here may stand for the eponymus of the Gepidæ, or it may stand for Japhet, the son of Noah. More than one of the old German pedigrees begins with what is called a Gothic legend, and ends with the book of Genesis.