ABSTRACT
W E saw in the last chapter that the" ager Bruttiorum," the territory south of a line drawn from Laus to Thurii, or thereabouts, an area that corresponds roughly to the modern Calabria,! belonged in pre-Roman days to tribes who traditionally were offshoots from the Lucanians, and therefore, Sabellians like them. That the tradition is in the main correct, or at least contains an element of truth, is clear from the discovery, chiefly in the neighbourhood of Monteleone near Bivona (the anCient Vibo or Vibo Valentia), of a few inscriptions written in Oscan, and in the Greek alphabet-reminding us of the statement recorded by Festus that the "Bruttaces" or "Bruttates " (that is presumably the Bruttii) were bilingual and spoke both Os can and Greek; and also from a study of the local and personal names of the district. The latter, indeed, as we might expect are very mixed; there is a large proportion of Greek names, such as Leucopctra or Zcp4Jrium, which can never have been anyt~ng but Greek. There are also names which have been made to wear a Greek dress. Thus Regium is the best attested spelling of what is commonly written Rhegium (·P~yI.OJI), now Reggio, and was not unnaturally interpreted as a Greek name. But if it was originally Regium, not Rhegium, then no doubt it is pure Italic or at least Sicel. 2
;;6 More striking is the metamorphosis which the name has
undergone that originally belonged to just this district and must have been something like * Vetelia-Italic in formation, but with a Greek loss of the initial consonant. Hence Italia is in part the form which the name took when borrowed into Greek, F having been lost in the Greek dialects of south Italy soon after about 400 B.C. But the name also shows another very interesting change which has long baffled explanation, namely, the shift of an accented e to i in the first syllable (which was the accented syllable at the date when the change took place). This change can be located in south Italy,! for it occurs also in the name Siculi (cf. sequor), and we shall presently find the clearest proof that the people also who have that name lived in this same region in preRoman, indeed in pre-Hellenic times. Such in fact was the ancient tradition, and the tradition has now become a certainty. But the shift of e to i may have been Illyrian rather than specifically south Italic. It is gradually becoming clearer, as has been hinted already more than once in these pages, that the true affiliation of the Sicel dialect may prove to be with Illyrian rather than with Latin, and also that the early civilizations of Sicily, of southern Italy, and of the Balkan regions, have something in common. Moreover, we have seen (cf. p. ;08) that the Illyrian Messapians at one time held for a short period several sites far to the west of the territory to which they had been restricted by the fifth century, for example, Thurii, Croton (where Ephorus mentions « three promontories of the Iapygians," and where coin legends with the inscription la, that is probably '!&:1TVY€S, have been found), and perhaps Pandosia, this last being an Epirote, as well as a Bruttian name. The name of the Bruttii or Bp'7'7'tot themselves sometimes appears in a form Bp'V7'tOt which suggests a Messapic rather than an Italic origin for it, -7'7'- in Bp'7'7'tOt being then due to an assimilation, though an unusual one, of -nt-to -tt-. The river-name Baletum in the country of the Bruttii is pure Messapic, l and Saga, also a river-name, is not to be separated from that of the Picentine S agrus.
