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Updated: May 12, 2025
Some ships were driven off the Italian coast altogether, and forced into the Libyan and Sicilian seas, and some which could not weather the Iapygian Cape were overtaken by night, and being dashed by a violent and boisterous sea against that harborless coast were utterly lost, except only the King's ship.
The middle of the peninsula was inhabited, as far back as trustworthy tradition reaches, by two peoples or rather two branches of the same people, whose position in the Indo-Germanic family admits of being determined with greater precision than that of the Iapygian nation. We may with propriety call this people the Italian, since upon it rests the historical significance of the peninsula.
The supposition of an especially close affinity between the Iapygian nation and the Hellenes finds further support in the frequent occurrence of the names of Greek divinities in the inscriptions, and in the surprising facility with which that people became Hellenized, presenting a striking contrast to the shyness in this respect of the other Italian nations.
Other indications, such as the use of the aspirated consonants and the avoiding of the letters m and t as terminal sounds, show that this Iapygian dialect was essentially different from the Italian and corresponded in some respects to the Greek dialects.
In this way philological research teaches us to distinguish three primitive Italian stocks, the Iapygian, the Etruscan, and that which we shall call the Italian. The last is divided into two main branches, the Latin branch, and that to which the dialects of the Umbri, Marsi, Volsci, and Samnites belong. Iapygians As to the Iapygian stock, we have but little information.
Scylacium, on the bay which lies southward of the Iapygian promontory, was intended to revivify a decayed Greek settlement and to reawaken the industries of the desolated Bruttian coast; while Neptunia was seemingly the name of the new entrepot which he founded at the head of the Tarentine Gulf.
The supposition of an especially close affinity between the Iapygian nation and the Hellenes finds further support in the frequent occurrence of the names of Greek divinities in the inscriptions, and in the surprising facility with which that people became Hellenized, presenting a striking contrast to the shyness in this respect of the other Italian nations.
Some of the epitaphs may give us an idea of its sound; as -theotoras artahiaihi bennarrihino- and -dasiihonas platorrihi bollihi-. The hypothesis has been put forward of an affinity between the Iapygian language and the modern Albanian; based, however, on points of linguistic comparison that are but little satisfactory in any case, and least of all where a fact of such importance is involved.
At the dawn of the historic period, we find the Messapian and Iapygian races inhabiting the extreme south and south-west of Italy; and assuming, as we must, that their migrations had proceeded by land across the Apennines, we shall draw the inference that they had been gradually pushed by stronger immigrants into the furthest corner of the Peninsula.
It is best to regard it, like the Iapygian, as altogether outside the pale of genuine Italic ethnography. Again, the Italian u is nearer the original sound than the Greek. The Greeks sounded u like ii, and expressed the Latin u for the most part by ou. On the other hand the Italians lost the aspirated letters th, ph, ch, which remain in Greek, and frequently omitted the simple aspirate.
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