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Two centuries before, some Achaeans, mingled with Troezenians, had established, in the fertile garden of Magna Graecia, the state of Sybaris. Placed between two rivers, the Crathis and the Sybaris possessing extraordinary advantages of site and climate, this celebrated colony rose with unparalleled rapidity to eminence in war and luxury in peace.
Sybaris in its time the largest city in Italy exercised dominion over four barbarian tribes and five-and-twenty townships, and was able to found Laus and Posidonia on the other sea. The exceedingly fertile low grounds of the Crathis and Bradanus yielded a superabundant produce to the Sybarites and Metapontines it was there perhaps that grain was first cultivated for exportation.
Comatas. 'Twas the skin that Crocylus gave me, the dappled one, when he sacrificed the she-goat to the nymphs; but thou, wretch, even then wert wasting with envy, and now, at last, thou hast stripped me bare! Lacon. Nay verily, so help me Pan of the seashore, it was not Lacon the son of Calaethis that filched the coat of skin. If I lie, sirrah, may I leap frenzied down this rock into the Crathis!
But without a leader the others would speedily fall victims to the Romans, and as long as the Romans press us, I must remain with them." At the end of the fortnight a messenger arrived saying that a great fleet had arrived at the mouth of the Crathis River.
It was a valley broad enough to be called a plain, dotted with white villages, and backed by the mass of mountains which now, as in old time, bear the name of Great Sila. Through this landscape flowed the river Crati the ancient Crathis; northward it curved, and eastward, to fall at length into the Ionian Sea, far beyond my vision. The river Crathis, which flowed by the walls of Sybaris.
Be off now to the Hales stream, and dig cyclamen. Comatas. Let Himera flow with milk instead of water, and thou, Crathis, run red with wine, and all thy reeds bear apples. Lacon. Would that the fount of Sybaris may flow with honey, and may the maiden's pail, at dawning, be dipped, not in water, but in the honeycomb. Comatas.
I looked at the Crathis the Crati of Cosenza here beginning to spread into a sea-marsh; the waters which used to flow over golden sands, which made white the oxen, and sunny-haired the children, that bathed in them, are now lost amid a wilderness poisoned by their own vapours. The railway station, like all in this region, was set about with eucalyptus.
The "sister land" is the district of Sybaris in South Italy, where the river Crathis has, or had, a red-gold colour, which makes golden the hair of men and the fleeces of sheep; and the water never lost its freshness. Talthybius is a loyal soldier with every wish to be kind.
Francois Lenormant, whose delightful book, La Grande Grece, was my companion on this journey, believed that a discovery far more wonderful and important than that of Pompeii awaits the excavator on this site; he held it certain that here, beneath some fifteen feet of alluvial mud, lay the temples and the streets of Sybaris, as on the day when Crathis first flowed over them.
Crassus meanwhile had followed the robber-army nearly as far as the mouth, of the Crathis, and, like Scipio before Numantia, ordered his soldiers, seeing that they did not fight as they ought, to construct an entrenched wall of the length of thirty-five miles, which shut off the Bruttian peninsula from the rest of Italy, intercepted the insurgent army on the return from Rhegium, and cut off its supplies.
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