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Ah! that old land of Italy, ought one to leave it all as a dusty museum for the pleasure of artistic souls, leave it to crumble away, even as its little towns of Magna Graecia, Umbria, and Tuscany are already crumbling, like exquisite bibelots which one dares not repair for fear that one might spoil their character.
Thus the literary epoch dates from the conquest of Magna Graecia. After the fall of Tarentum the Romans were suddenly familiarised with the chief products of the Hellenic mind; and the first Punic war which followed, unlike all previous wars, was favourable to the effects of this introduction.
The Doric order possessed a peculiar harmony, but taste and skill were nevertheless necessary in order to determine the number of diameters a column should have, and also the height of the entablature. The Doric was the favorite order of European Greece for one thousand years, and also of her colonies in Sicily and Magna Graecia.
It had in fact sufficient reason to do so. It was no doubt a difficult and dangerous thing for Tarentum to be entangled in such a war; for the democratic development of the state had directed its energies entirely to the fleet, and while that fleet, resting upon the strong commercial marine of Tarentum, held the first rank among the maritime powers of Magna Graecia, the land force, on which they were in the present case dependent, consisted mainly of hired soldiers and was sadly disorganized.
It was a gateway of Magna Graecia; it lay straight in the track of conquering Rome when she moved towards Sicily; it offered points of strategic importance to every invader or defender of the peninsula throughout the mediaeval wars. Goth and Saracen, Norman, Teuton and Turk, seized, pillaged, and abandoned, each in turn, this stronghold overlooking the narrow sea.
CONTEMPTIOR: 'more despicable'. The passive participle of contemno has the sense of an adjective in -bilis, like invictus and many others. MILONIS: the most famous of the Greek athletes. He lived at the end of the sixth century B.C., and the praises of his victories were sung by Simonides. It was under his leadership that his native city Croton, in Magna Graecia, attacked and destroyed Sybaris.
An extensive Orphic literature first appeared at the time of the Persian war, when the remains of the Pythagorean order in Magna Graecia united themselves to the Orphic associations.
He has been compared to Alexander of Macedonia; and certainly the idea of founding a Hellenic empire of the west which would have had as its core Epirus, Magna Graecia, and Sicily, would have commanded both the Italian seas, and would have reduced Rome and Carthage to the rank of barbarian peoples bordering on the Hellenistic state-system, like the Celts and the Indians was analogous in greatness and boldness to the idea which led the Macedonian king over the Hellespont.
After that event Plato withdrew to Megara, and subsequently undertook some extensive travels, in the course of which he visited Cyrene, Egypt, Sicily, and Magna Graecia.
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