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Updated: May 21, 2025
It was said that the meetings which were held by the Tarentines while these proceedings were in progress, were so boisterous and disorderly that, as often happens in democratic assemblies, the voices of those who were in the minority could not be heard; and that at last one of the public men, who was opposed to the plan of sending the invitation to Pyrrhus, resorted to a singular device in order to express his opinion.
At the time when he was invited into Italy by the Tarentines, a caution had been given him, "to beware of the Acherusian waters and the city Pandosia, for there were fixed the limits of his destiny."
This mode of defining boundaries, which is probably also Etruscan but is hardly of Etruscan origin, we find among the Romans, Umbrians, Samnites, and also in very ancient records of the Tarentine Heracleots, who are as little likely to have borrowed it from the Italians as the Italians from the Tarentines: it is an ancient possession common to all.
The consent of the Samnites to treat is explained by the energetic exertions made about this very period by the Tarentines to get quit of their Sabellian neighbours.
This people, by taking part with Rome during the Samnite wars, paralyzed the action of the Tarentines and essentially contributed to the decisive issue; and in consideration of their services, the Romans gave up to them the Greek cities in their territory. Accordingly after the conclusion of peace they had, in concert with the Bruttians, set themselves to subdue these cities in succession.
The Romans were at war with the Tarentines; and as that people were not sufficiently powerful to carry on the war, and yet were not allowed by the audacious folly of their mob orators to make peace, they proposed to make Pyrrhus their leader and to invite him to be their ally in the war, because he was more at leisure than any of the other kings, and also was the best general of them all.
He readily accepted the invitation, and coming to Italy with 28,000 men and twenty elephants, hoped to conquer the whole country; but he found the Tarentines not to be trusted, and soon weary of entertaining him, while they could not keep their promises of aid from the other Greeks of Italy.
Nevertheless on the whole the Sicilians must, both as subjects and as Hellenes, have been at least as averse to their Phoenician masters as the Samnites and Tarentines were to the Romans. In Finance In Their Military System The military resources of the Romans and Carthaginians were very different, yet in many respects not unequally balanced.
The Tarentines had thus been induced to submit to his assumption of power, convinced, perhaps, partly by his reasoning, and, at all events, silenced by the display of force by which it was accompanied; and they had consoled themselves under a condition of things which they could not prevent, by considering that it was better to yield to a temporary foreign domination, than to be wholly overwhelmed, as there was every probability, before Pyrrhus came to them, that they would be, by their domestic foes.
Maritime Supremacy of the Tarentines and Syracusans Dionysius of Syracuse
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