were so well protected from storms and from barbarians as the island
of Ischia, upon which the town was originally situated; and that
such were the prevailing considerations that led to this settlement,
is evident from the very position which was subsequently selected
for it on the mainland--the steep but well-protected cliff, which
still bears to the present day the venerable name of the Anatolian
mother-city. Nowhere in Italy, accordingly, were the scenes of
the legends of Asia Minor so vividly and tenaciously localized as
in the district of Cumae, where the earliest voyagers to the west,
full of those legends of western wonders, first stepped upon the
fabled land and left the traces of that world of story, which they
believed that they were treading, in the rocks of the Sirens and
the lake of Avernus leading to the lower world. On the supposition,
moreover, that it was in Cumae that the Greeks first became the
neighbours of the Italians, it is easy to explain why the name
of that Italian stock which was settled immediately around Cumae,
the name of Opicans, came to be employed by them for centuries
afterwards to designate the Italians collectively. There is a
further credible tradition, that a considerable interval elapsed
between the settlement at Cumae and the main Hellenic immigration
into Lower Italy and Sicily, and that in this immigration Ionians
from Chalcis and from Naxos took the lead. Naxos in Sicily is said
to have been the oldest of all the Greek towns founded by strict
colonization in Italy or Sicily; the Achaean and Dorian colonizations
followed, but not until a later period.

It appears, however, to be quite impossible to fix the dates of
this series of events with even approximate accuracy. The founding
of the Achaean city of Sybaris in 33, and that of the Dorian city
Tarentum in 46, are probably the most ancient dates in Italian
history, the correctness, or at least approximation to correctness,
of which may be looked upon as established. But how far beyond
that epoch the sending forth of the earlier Ionian colonies reached
back, is quite as uncertain as is the age which gave birth to the
poems of Hesiod or even of Homer. If Herodotus is correct in the
period which he assigns to Homer, the Greeks were still unacquainted
with Italy a century before the foundation of Rome. The date thus
assigned however, like all other statements respecting the Homeric
age, is matter not of testimony, but of