e, partly because they tended primarily
to form links of connection not between Rome and Greece, but between
Rome and Latium.

Hellenic Early History of Rome

It was Hellenic story and fiction that undertook the task of
connecting Rome and Greece. Hellenic legend exhibits throughout an
endeavour to keep pace with the gradual extension of geographical
knowledge, and to form a dramatized geography by the aid of its
numerous stories of voyagers and emigrants. In this, however, it
seldom follows a simple course. An account like that of the earliest
Greek historical work which mentions Rome, the "Sicilian History" of
Antiochus of Syracuse (which ended in 330)--that a man named Sikelos
had migrated from Rome to Italia, that is, to the Bruttian peninsula
--such an account, simply giving a historical form to the family
affinity between the Romans, Siculi, and Bruttians, and free from all
Hellenizing colouring, is a rare phenomenon. Greek legend as a whole
is pervaded--and the more so, the later its rise--by a tendency to
represent the whole barbarian world as having either issued from the
Greeks or having been subdued by them; and it early in this sense spun
its threads also around the west. For Italy the legends of Herakles
and of the Argonauts were of less importance--although Hecataeus
(after 257) is already acquainted with the Pillars of Herakles, and
carries the Argo from the Black Sea into the Atlantic Ocean, from the
latter into the Nile, and thus back to the Mediterranean--than were
the homeward voyages connected with the fall of Ilion. With the first
dawn of information as to Italy Diomedes begins to wander in the
Adriatic, and Odysseus in the Tyrrhene Sea;(18) as indeed the
latter localization at least was naturally suggested by the Homeric
conception of the legend. Down to the times of Alexander the countries
on the Tyrrhene Sea belonged in Hellenic fable to the domain of the
legend of Odysseus; Ephorus, who ended his history with the year 414,
and the so-called Scylax (about 418) still substantially follow it.
Of Trojan voyages the whole earlier poetry has no knowledge;
in Homer Aeneas after the fall of Ilion rules over the Trojans
that remained at home.

Stesichorus

It was the great remodeller of myths, Stesichorus (122-201) who first
in his "Destruction of Ilion" brought Aeneas to the land of the west,
that he might poetically enrich the world of fable in the country of
his birth and of his adoption,