Now, as the whole of the south of Italy, as far as the country of the Marsians, again formed an almost compact Sabellian country (except that in the greater part of Apulia the Sabellians had not made any conquests, but the Opicans maintained their dominion over the ancient Italians), and as the inhabitants of this country called themselves Italicans, it became customary with the Greeks also to call them Italicans, and the southern country Ausonia or Italia—the latter in the language of ordinary life, the former only in poetry;—but the people were rarely or never called Ἰταλοί, nor did the earlier Greeks apply to them the name Ἰταλικοί, but called them Ὀπικοί. This leads me to make a philological observation. It is well known that Juvenal uses the expression _opici mures_, which is commonly rendered in the dictionaries by “old-fashioned,” “rude,” “stupid,” or “barbarous;” but no further explanation is given. The fact is this. The Greeks viewed the Opicans in a very unfortunate light, as the destroyers of the prosperity of southern Italy, and as men that served as hired mercenaries in the southern armies (e.g. the Mamertines in Sicily); but those who remained at home were by no means contemptible; they appear in a very different light, as the leading men among the Samnites, Lucanians, and others; traits are found among them which inspire great respect, and there are undoubted traces of their having devoted themselves, at an early period, to the study of Greek literature. But those of them with whom the Greeks came most frequently in contact, were people pretty much of the same character as the Thracians and Scythians in the comedies of Aristophanes. The name Opicans was extended by them in a contemptuous sense to all the Italicans, and even to the Romans, as we see from one of the fragments of Cato. The Greeks in general distinguished themselves from all non-Greeks in a harsh and coarse manner; but the designations which they applied to foreigners differ according to the different nations with which they came in contact. The term βάρβαροι was originally no doubt applied only to nations of the Carian race, Carians, Lydians, and Mysians; Ὀπικοί, in the same sense, to the inhabitants of Italy; and Κάρβανοι in the “Supplices” of Aeschylus apparently a Cyrenaic term, seems to have been applied to the Egyptians and Libyans. I do not understand Coptic, nor do I possess any books or dictionary of that language, from which I might derive any information; but I am almost certain that the word Κάρβανοι is Coptic, for Aeschylus uses it in speaking of the Egyptians. Its original meaning is unknown to me. We thus see, how the general contrast between Greeks and foreigners presents itself in different shades.