ABSTRACT
TAKEN together the two ancient districts of Calabria-the heel of Italy, south of a line drawn from Tarentum to Gnathia (Fasano) north of Brundisium-and of Apulia make up the modern Puglie and, roughly, the second r~gio of Augustus. It is a territory which we may conveniently consider altogether, with its three subdivisions-culturally speaking-of Daunia, Peucetia, and Messapia. On the north the Augustan boundary was the river Tifernus, north of the promontory of Monte Gargano. Hence the Augustan region included territory which belonged culturally to the southernmost Picenes and Sabellians, as we saw in the last chapter. So, too, under the Augustan organization, the second region included also the Hirpini, who likewise are to be assigned properly to the Sabellian tribes. At the beginning of the historical period, at least, there is no doubt so far as the Apuli are concerned; they were an Italic tribe, as is proved by their local and personal names, their coinlegends, and by the fact that they regularly allied themselves with the Samnites, and the same is true of the Hirpini. But the landward boundaries are at best rather shadowy, like the boundaries separating the several tribes reckoned in this long extent of territory as a whole. Thus it is doubtful whether Bantia, and therefore one of the longest Oscan inscriptions, belongs to Apulia (the district of the Peucetii) or to Lucania-we shall count it Apulian, following the best ancient and modern authorities, but doubts of this kind are, as it happens, not very serious for our purposes, and even Horace (Sat., 2, I, 34) could not place Venusia. Again where the Apuli shaded off into the Daunii and they into the
Peucetii is doubtful. The southern part of the regio .recunda, generally called Calabria 1 by the Romans, was usually called Messapia or Iapygia by the Greeks. The Messapii lived round about Taranto, and the Calabri proper further east, round about Brindisi, and the Sallentini in the lower part of the heel. Iapyges, a name which at once recalls the Illyrian Iapuzkum (cf. p. 258 above) and Iapodes, seems to be the most comprehensive name for all these tribes taken together, but they early lost their ethnic unity-a national unity probably they never had-and were split up into smaller units among which the Greeks of Tarentum were best acquainted with that of the Messapii, their nearest neighbours. Hence like them we know the dialect of the entire region as Messapic; a better name would be Iapygian. The outposts of the Iapyges seem to have pushed at one time even as far as Sybaris or Thurii and Croton. 2
The links which connect this south-eastern fraction of Italy with the Balkan regions on the one hand, and with Sicily on the other, during the neolithic and bronze ages, have been noted in a previous chapter.s There can be no question that there was a considerable migration from the eastern side of the Adriatic across to south-eastern Italy, and perhaps on into southwestern Italy and Sicily, before the beginning of the early iron age. We shall see presently that the Messapic or Iapygian dialect has the strongest affinities with the remnants of speech that we call Illyrian, and there is some question whether ancient Sicel, spoken in Sicily, ought not now to be considered as belonging to the same group rather than to Latin, as has been the
custom hitherto. Probably, then, the speakers of Messapic in historical times, are the descendants of much older invaders, though it is difficult to fix the date, even approximately, of their arrival in Italy. There may well have been several successive invasions, the Daunii and Peucetii being perhaps the last arrivals and entrenching themselves on the frontiers of the Messapii and Calabri. The Sicels of the mainland in the early iron age seem to have gone thither, as we shall see, from Sicily, not those of Sicily, as the tradition tells, from South Italy. But the movement across the Adriatic from the Balkan regions to the low-lying and exposed south-east coast of Italy was certainly completed by the tenth or ninth centuries B.C., and its beginnings may well go back some five hundred years or more before that date. Archreologically Apulia is still almost a complete blank in the four centuries between c. 1100 and 700 B.C. After the latter date and before and during the period of Greek colonization, there is now ample evidence to illustrate the development of a local civilization, which falls into three subdivisions made on the basis of three schools of pottery. They correspond roughly to the tribal divisions of the Messapii (with the Calabri and Sallentini), the Peucetii, and the Daunii. Taken together they also may be called "Iapygian". The Greeks played a much smaller part in this development than the histories of Greece, in their chapters on Greek colonization, would lead one to suppose; and, in fact, Greek colonization itself was not so important a factor in the early history of the region as is commonly believed. The well-known red-figured Apulian fabrics of the Hellenic period, like the coins of Apulian towns, based on Greek types, and other "finds" from sites around Bari, Ruvo, and Fasano, serve to illustrate the advance of Greek culture from the littoral into the inland regions by the fourth century B.C., and the alphabet of the Messapic inscriptions, the oldest of which may be dated from the fifth century, was a Greek (TarentineIonic) alphabet. There was, however, in the entire territory, but one thoroughly Greek city-state, namely, Tarentum. Except from this city, Calabria was exposed to Greek influences only from a few coastal settlements-Callipolis, Satyrion, and the "portus Tarentinus" (all of them founded by Tarentum itself), and Hydruntum. It is between the beginning of the
early iron age, then, and the Hellenizing period, that the three local civilizations of Daunia, Peucetia, and Messapia, were developed.
