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Had she always confined the distinction of Romans to the ancient families within the walls of the city, that immortal name would have been deprived of some of its noblest ornaments. Virgil was a native of Mantua; Horace was inclined to doubt whether he should call himself an Apulian or a Lucanian; it was in Padua that an historian was found worthy to record the majestic series of Roman victories.
On the other hand the Romans succeeded, by means of a weak corps which advanced along the Lucanian frontier and of the garrison of Venusia, in preventing the Lucanians and Samnites from uniting with Pyrrhus; while the main force four legions as it would appear, and so, with a corresponding number of allied troops, at least 50,000 strong marched against Pyrrhus, under the consul Publius Laevinus.
So it came to pass that Pratinas had an interview with Phaon, Lucius's freedman, a sleek, well-oiled Sicilian Greek, who wore his hair very long to cover the holes bored in his ears the mark of old-time servitude. He was the darling of waiting-maids; the collector of all current scandal; the master spirit in arranging dinners, able to tell a Tuscan from a Lucanian boar by mere taste.
I believe these poor inhabitants of Maypures would now be as much astonished at the sight of an ox of the Spanish breed, as the Romans were at the sight of the Lucanian oxen, as they called the elephants of the army of Pyrrhus. We embarked at Puerto de Arriba, and passed the Raudal de Cameji with some difficulty.
Pythagoras the mystic has vouchsafed us no writings of his own; but we may infer from his disciples, Ocellus the Lucanian and Archytas, for instance, that he headed his letters neither with Joy nor Prosperity, but recommended beginning with Hail. They argued that Health included Joy and Prosperity, but that neither of those two was coextensive with Health. Philolaus might be quoted.
Only the local peasants and the inhabitants of the poverty-stricken towns in the Lucanian hills seem to have been aware of the presence of the gigantic temples standing in lonely majesty by the shore and as the superstitious nature of these ignorant people attributed these structures to the work of a magician—perhaps to the great wizard Vergil himself—they were shunned both by night and by day as the haunt of malignant spirits.
As a general rule, it may be taken for granted that not only the Latin and Hernican national confederations as to which the fact is expressly stated but all such confederations subsisting in Italy, and the Samnite and Lucanian leagues in particular, were legally dissolved or at any rate reduced to insignificance, and that in general no Italian community was allowed the right of acquiring property or of intermarriage, or even the right of joint consultation and resolution, with any other.
In the beginning of this year, ambassadors came from the Lucanians to the new consuls to complain, that "the Samnites, finding that they could not, by any offers, tempt them to take part in the war, had marched an army in a hostile manner into their country, and were now laying it waste, and forcing them into a war; that the Lucanian people had on former occasions erred enough and more than enough; that their minds were so firmly fixed that they thought it more endurable to bear and suffer every hardship, rather than ever again to outrage the Roman name: they besought the senate to take the people of Lucania into their protection, and defend them from the injustice and outrage of the Samnites; that although fidelity on their part to the Romans would now become necessary, a war being undertaken against the Samnites, still they were ready to give hostages."
His captains informed him that a certain soldier, a Lucanian by birth, was irregular and often absent from his duty. He made inquiries as to what his general conduct was. All agreed that it would be difficult to find a better soldier, and related some of his exploits.
But his grand projects found only feeble support among the degenerate and desponding Greeks, and the forced change of sides alienated from him his former Lucanian adherents: he fell at Pandosia by the hand of a Lucanian emigrant . On his death matters substantially reverted to their old position.
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