ook part in the administration. It is not from them, you
may be sure, that you get the anecdotes which ridicule the old city of
Sybaris!

You and I would probably be satisfied with such company as that of
Herodotus and Charondas and Lysias. So we hunt the history down to see
if there may be lodgings to let there this summer, but only to find that
it all pales out in the ignorance of our modern days. The name gets
changed into Lupiae; but there it turns out that Pausanias made "a
strange mistake," and should have written Copia,--which was perhaps
Cossa, or sometimes Cosa. Pyrrhus appears, and Hadrian rebuilds
something, and the "Oltramontani," whoever they may have been, ravage
it, and finally the Saracens fire and sack it; and so, in the latest
Italian itinerary you can find, there is no post-road goes near it, only
a _strada rotabile_ (wheel-track) upon the hills; and, alas! even the
_rotabile_ gives way at last, and all the map will own to is a _strada
pedonale_, or foot-path. But the map is of the less consequence, when
you find that the man who edited it had no later dates than the
beginning of the last century, when the family of Serra had transferred
the title to Sybaris to a Genoese family without a name, who received
from it forty thousand ducats yearly, and would have received more, if
their agents had been more faithful. There the place fades out of
history, and you find in your Swinburne, "that the locality has _never_
been thoroughly examined"; in your Smith's Dictionary, that "the whole
subject is very obscure, and a careful examination still much needed";
in the Cyclopaedia, that the site of Sybaris is lost. Craven saw the
rivers Crathis and Sybaris. He seems not to have seen the wall of
Sybaris, which he supposed to be under water. He does say of Cassano,
the nearest town he came to, that "no other spot can boast of such
advantages." In short, no man living who has written any book about it
dares say that anybody has looked upon the certain site of Sybaris for
more than a hundred years.[C] If a man wanted to write a mythical story,
where could he find a better scene?

Now is not this a very remarkable thing? Here was a city, which, under
its two names of Sybaris or of Thurium, was for centuries the regnant
city of all that part of the world. It could call into the field three
hundred thousand men,--an army enough larger than Athens ever furnished,
or Sparta. It was a far more populous and powerful state