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OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
445
precious cargo of political wisdom. The colonies of Great Greece had transported and improved the arts of their mother-country. Cumæ and Rhegium, Crotona and Tarentum, Agrigentum and Syracuse, were in the rank of the most flourishing cities. The disciples of Pythagoras applied philosophy to the use of government; the unwritten laws of Charondas accepted the aid of poetry and music;[1] and Zaleucus framed the republic of the Locrians, which stood without alteration above two hundred years.[2] From a similar motive of national pride, both Livy and Dionysius are willing to believe that the deputies of Rome visited Athens under the wise and splendid administration of Pericles; and the laws of Solon were transfused into the Twelve Tables. If such an embassy had indeed been received from the barbarians of Hesperia, the Roman name would have been familiar to the Greeks before the reign of Alexander;[3] and the faintest evidence would have been explored and celebrated by the curiosity of succeeding times. But the Athenian monuments are silent; nor will it seem credible that the patricians should undertake a long and perilous navigation to copy the purest model of a democracy. In the comparison of the tables of Solon with those of the Decemvirs, some casual resemblance may be found; some rules which nature and reason have revealed to every society; some
- ↑ This circumstance would alone prove the antiquity of Charondas, the legislator of Rhegium and Catana, who, by a strange error of Diodorus Siculus (tom. i. l. xii. p. 485-492 [c. 11]), is celebrated long afterwards as the author of the policy of Thurium.
- ↑ Zaleucus, whose existence has been rashly attacked, had the merit and glory of converting a band of outlaws (the Locrians) into the most virtuous and orderly of the Greek republics (see two Mémoires of the Baron de St. Croix, sur la Législation de la Grande Grèce; Mém. de l'Académie, tom. xlii. p. 276-333). But the laws of Zaleucus and Charondas, which imposed on Diodorus and Stobæus, are the spurious composition of a Pythagorean sophist, whose fraud has been detected by the critical sagacity of Bentley (p. 335-377).
- ↑ I seize the opportunity of tracing the progress of this national intercourse: 1. Herodotus and Thucydides (A.U.C. 300-350) appear ignorant of the name and existence of Rome (Joseph. contra Apion. tom. ii. l. i. c. 12, p 444, edit. Havercamp). 2. Theopompus (A.U.C. 400, Plin. iii. 9) mentions the invasion of the Gauls, which is noticed in looser terms by Heraclides Ponticus (Plutarch in Camillo, p. 292, edit. H. Stephan. [c. 16]). 3. The real or fabulous embassy of the Romans to Alexander (A.U.C. 430) is attested by Clitarchus (Plin. iii. 9), by Aristus and Asclepiades (Arrian, l. vii. p. 294, 295 [c. 15]), and by Memnon of Heraclea (apud Photium, cod. ccxxiv. p. 725); though tacitly denied by Livy. 4. Theophrastus (A.U.C. 440) primus externorum aliqua de Romanis diligentius scripsit (Plin. iii. 9). 5. Lycophron (A.U.C. 480-500) scattered the first seed of a Trojan colony and the fable of the Æneid (Cassandra, 1226-1280):
Γη̂ς καὶ θαλάσσης σκη̂πτρα καὶ μοναρχίαν
Λαβόντες.A bold prediction before the end of the first Punic war.
