There is reason to believe that the light of civilisation first beamed on its shores from Sardinia—an island which some brief records, and, still more, its existing monuments, lead us to consider as civilised long before the period of authentic history.
The island of Sardinia, placed in the great highway from the East, was a convenient station for the people who, in the first ages, were driven thence by a providential impulse towards the shores of the West, and, with the torch of civilisation in their hands, passed successively by Asia Minor and the islands of Crete, Sicily, and Sardinia to Greece, to Italy, and the other countries of the West.
A smaller branch of the torrent of this great and primitive emigration poured from the mountain ranges in the north of Sardinia, and, crossing the straits, overspread the south of Corsica, bearing with it the civilisation of the East, of which records are found in the most ancient Corsican monuments. Some of these are identical with those in Sardinia, which will be mentioned hereafter. Such are the Dolmen, called in Corsica Stazzone; and the Menhir, to which they give the fanciful name of Stantare. When a child at play stands on its head with its heels self-balanced in the air, making itself a pyramid instead of cutting a pirouette, that is, in the language of mothers and nurses, far la Stantare.
However this may be, there are numerous testimonies that the island of Corsica was known and visited in the most remote times by navigators of the several races on the shores of the Mediterranean—Phœnicians, Pelasgians, Tyrrhenians, Ligurians, and Iberians. Herodotus, who calls the island Cyrnos, describes an attempt at colonisation by Phocæans, driven from Ionia, who founded the city of Alalia, afterwards called Aleria, 448 years before the Christian era. But the genuine history of Corsica commences with the period when the Roman republic, on the decay of the Carthaginian power, began to extend its conquests in the Mediterranean.
In the year 260 b.c., Lucius Cornelius Scipio led an expedition into the island, which was crowned with success. Every traveller who has visited Rome must have been interested in one of the few relics of the republican era, remarkable for its primitive simplicity—the tomb of the Scipios. It chanced that the writer, when there, procured a model of the sarcophagus which contained the ashes of this first of a race of heroes, L. C. Scipio. The monuments of Rome were not of marble in the times of the republic, and this sarcophagus being cut out of a block of the volcanic peperino, so common in the Campagna, the author had his model made of the same material, with the inscription cut in rude characters round the margin; that is to say, such part of it as had been preserved, so that it is a perfect fac-simile. He reads on it—
HEC CEPIT CORSICA ALERIAQUE URBE.
That fragment contains the earliest record of Roman conquest in Corsica. But the conquest was incomplete, and for upwards of a century the Corsicans maintained an unequal struggle against the Roman legions, strong in their mountain fastnesses, while the Roman armies appear to have seldom advanced beyond the plains. The natives held their ground with such obstinacy that, on one occasion, after a bloody battle, a consular army, under Caius Papirius, was so nearly defeated, when rashly entangled in the gorges of the mountains, that the Corsicans obtained honourable terms of peace. The Roman historians relate that this battle was fought on “The Field of Myrtles,” a name appropriate to a Corsican macchia; and they do not otherwise describe the locality.[4] It is easy to imagine the scenes and the issue of a deadly struggle between the mountaineers and the disciplined legions, on ground such as that described in the preceding chapter.
In these wars great numbers of the natives were carried off as slaves to Rome, and the annual tribute paid on submission consisted of wax, which was raised to 200,000 lbs. after one defeat.
A two hours' walk over the plains from the point at which we quitted the high-road would bring us to the ruins of Mariana, a colony founded by Marius on the banks of the Golo, and to which he gave his name. Not a vestige of Roman architecture can now be found on the spot.
During the civil wars, the rivals, Marius and Sylla, established each a colony in Corsica. That of Sylla (Aleria) stood forty miles further down the coast, at the mouth of the Tavignano, the seat of the ancient Greek colony of Alalia. Sylla restored it, sending over some of his veteran soldiers, among whom he distributed the conquered lands, and it became the capital of the island during the Roman period, and so continued during the earlier part of the middle ages. Sacked and laid in ruins by the Arabs, some iron rings on the Stagna di Diana, the ancient port, large blocks of stone on the site of a mole at the mouth of the Tavignano, some arches, a few steps of a circus, with coins and cameos occasionally turned up, are the sole vestiges of the Roman colonisation in Corsica. Their only road led from Mariana by Aleria to Palæ, a station near the modern Bonifaccio, from whence there was a trajectus to Portus Tibulus (Longo Sardo), in Sardinia; and the road was continued through that island to its southern extremity, near Cagliari.