ifferent effect upon Italy. They by no means
despised agriculture and the acquisition of territory; it was not
the wont of the Hellenes, at least when they had reached their full
vigour, to rest content after the manner of the Phoenicians with a
fortified factory in the midst of a barbarian land. But all their
cities were founded primarily and especially for the sake of trade,
and accordingly, altogether differing from those of the Achaeans,
they were uniformly established beside the best harbours and
lading-places. These cities were very various in their origin and
in the occasion and period of their respective foundations; but
there subsisted between them a certain fellowship, as in the common
use by all of these towns of certain modern forms of the alphabet,(2)
and in the very Dorism of their language, which made its way at an
early date even into those towns that, like Cumae for example,(3)
originally spoke the soft Ionic dialect. These settlements were
of very various degrees of importance in their bearing on the
development of Italy: it is sufficient at present to mention those
which exercised a decided influence over the destinies of the
Italian races, the Doric Tarentum and the Ionic Cumae.

Tarentum

Of all the Hellenic settlements in Italy, Tarentum was destined
to play the most brilliant part. The excellent harbour, the only
good one on the whole southern coast, rendered the city the natural
emporium for the traffic of the south of Italy, and for some portion
even of the commerce of the Adriatic. The rich fisheries of its
gulf, the production and manufacture of its excellent wool, and
the dyeing of it with the purple juice of the Tarentine -murex-,
which rivalled that of Tyre--both branches of industry introduced
there from Miletus in Asia Minor--employed thousands of hands, and
added to the carrying trade a traffic of export. The coins struck
at Tarentum in greater quantity than anywhere else in Grecian
Italy, and struck pretty numerously even in gold, furnish to us a
significant attestation of the lively and widely extended commerce
of the Tarentines. At this epoch, when Tarentum was still contending
with Sybaris for the first place among the Greek cities of Lower
Italy, its extensive commercial connections must have been already
forming; but the Tarentines seem never to have steadily and
successfully directed their efforts to a substantial extension of
their territory after the manner of the