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During nearly thirty years the Gauls thus scoured not only Upper Italy, which they had almost to themselves, but all the eastern coast, and up to the head of the peninsula, encountering along the Adriatic, and in the rich and effeminate cities of Magna Graecia, Sybaris, Tarentum, Crotona, and Locri, no enemy capable of resisting them.
The connections which Hannibal maintained in the towns of Magna Graecia had led to no serious result; save that the hostages from Tarentum and Thurii, who were kept at Rome, were induced by his emissaries to make a foolhardy attempt at escape, in which they were speedily recaptured by the Roman posts.
The Achaean group embraced Sybaris and the greater part of the cities of Magna Graecia. On the whole the preponderance lay with the immigrants who belonged to the more ancient Hellenic influx, that of the lonians and the stocks settled in the Peloponnesus before the Doric immigration.
This Aramaeo-Hellenic alphabet was accordingly brought to the Italians through the medium, doubtless, of the Italian Hellenes; not, however, through the agricultural colonies of Magna Graecia, but through the merchants possibly of Cumae or Tarentum, by whom it would be brought in the first instance to the very ancient emporia of international traffic in Latium and Etruria to Rome and Caere.
He appears to have spent the latter half of his life in that part of Italy, called Magna Graecia, so denominated in some degree from the numerous colonies of Grecians by whom it was planted, and partly perhaps from the memory of the illustrious things which Pythagoras achieved there.
In Sicily, even more than in Magna Graecia, poetry and the arts had a splendid and enduring life. The long line of philosophers, dramatists, and historians was hardly yet extinct.
Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit. The sun still hung high over a neat little farm among the Sabine hills, although the midday heat had given way to the soft and comforting warmth of a September afternoon. Delicate shadows from dark-leaved ilexes, from tall pines and white poplars, fell waveringly across a secluded grass-plot which looked green and inviting even after the parching summer.
Lucian is the Voltaire of a credulous age. As for sacerdotal magic, Ovid explicitly ascribed the ex opere operato doctrine to the Greeks. Graecia principium moris fuit; illa nocentes impia lustratos ponere facta putat, a nimium faciles, qui tristia crimina caedis fluminea tolli posse putatis aqua. The Christian Church was the last great creative achievement of the classical culture.
The other lay to the south, the Greek colonies of Magna Graecia, separated from Rome for the present by many miles of forest and by hostile tribes.
What, in particular, with Smyrna, the second city of the Ottoman Empire and the first of 'Magna Graecia'? Its three and a half hundred thousand souls include the largest Greek urban population resident in any one city. Shall it be united to Greece? Greece herself might well hesitate. It would prove a very irksome possession, involving her in all sorts of continental difficulties and risks.
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